As Simple as Snow Read Online Free PDF

then anyway.
    Anna was having a hard time maintaining her usual calm, almost trembling when I saw her.
    “What was he doing?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Somebody said he’d been drinking, but I don’t know what he was doing over here. He hardly ever comes over here at night.”
    “He’s going to be all right. That’s what they say, that he’s going to be all right.”
    “That’s what they say.”
    I noticed that a bruise was visible underneath the makeup on her left cheek. “What happened there?”
    Her hand sprang up to hide the spot. “I got punched,” she said.
    “Who did that?”
    “Never mind. I took care of it. I told you I would take care of it.”
    “You said it would take care of itself. Was it Bryce?”
    “Why would you say that?”
    “I saw you with him after school yesterday.”
    “It wasn’t Bryce,” she said. “He gave me a ride home after. He was helping me. You won’t be getting any more of those notes.”
    “Who was it?”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “Do they have a bruise they’re hiding this morning?”
    “I didn’t punch anyone,” she said. “But they got the message. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself.” She gave me a hug and hurried off to class.

the house of cayne
    It’s funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice the specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.
    It was that way with me and Anna. I had once thought of her only as a generic figure, one of a set of identical ghouls, but now I began to notice the smallest changes about her, the things that made her unique. I used to think that she wore the same black dress and same black pullover sweater every day. I thought that she wore the same black boots, but she really had three different pairs of Doc Martens, the six-eyelet, eight-eyelet, and ten-eyelet versions (“What’s wrong with fourteen?” I had to ask her later). She also had a pair of the three-eyelet Gibson shoe, but you almost never saw her in shoes.
    I noticed how her hair would curl just under her chin on some days, and how other times it would curl away from her face. I wondered if it did this naturally or if she woke up each morning and had to decide which way she would curl it.
    Even her eyes were constantly changing. They could be clear, bright blue and then suddenly darken and become almost gray. At times they would flicker with light, and I would swear that I could see them changing, with white clouds passing across her pupils, and the next second they would look like ice. She would stare at me or at some point far beyond me, or at nothing, with her eyes locked and still, not tick-tocking back and forth but dead calm, and the blues would darken and become as vacant and useless as empty swimming pools. I began to take note of her mood and the color and texture of her eyes to see whether there was some sort of correlation, some sort of code that I could use to better understand her. If there was a code, I didn’t have enough time to break it.
    As time went by, I began to notice things that were strange and unsettling. The first was harmless; they all might have been. She had a cut on the left side of her lower lip, and when I asked her about it she responded that she couldn’t remember how she had gotten it. “Maybe I bit myself in my sleep,” she said. A few days later I noticed bruises on the back of her neck, on both sides, as though someone had choked her. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten those either. “Maybe from a necklace I was wearing,” she said. She always shrugged them off and acted as if they weren’t