As Simple as Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

anything, like the bruise she had the morning after Bryce’s accident. They matter more now, looking back.
     
     
     
    There were some things I did question her about, however, things she couldn’t easily shrug off. She always wore long sleeves, no matter what the weather, and the first time I saw her bare arms I noticed a number of small cuts on her left forearm. There must have been twenty or thirty, some fading and healing, others scabbed over, and some fresh, still red and swollen. “I’m trying to quit smoking,” she said. “I started cutting my arm every time I wanted a cigarette, to associate the pain with smoking.” She looked down at her arm. “Unfortunately, I think it’s worked the wrong way. I’m starting to associate the pleasure of smoking with cutting. Now instead of thinking that smoking will hurt me, I think that cutting will feel good, you know, like a cigarette should.” She laughed. “I just have to be smarter than my own mind.”
    I also discovered that she had a tattoo. At least I think she did. It wasn’t always there. This was another game, perhaps. Whatever it was, the mark was on her hip. It was a wheel, and the spokes inside the wheel turned into sharp spikes as they came out of the wheel. There was writing on each of the spokes, but I could never tell what they said. “I don’t know what they are either,” Anna said. I didn’t believe her.
    “Why did you get the tattoo, then?”
    “It’s a family thing. My parents have the same one. In the same place. It’s a tradition.” I didn’t believe that either. Not entirely.
    “What does it mean?”
    “It has something to do with the fact that we’re all witches.” She looked at me, reading my face and eyes to see if I had believed her. She started laughing.
    “Is any of that true?” I said.
    “My parents have the tattoo. I don’t really know what it means. I think it’s kind of cool, though, don’t you?”
    I did.
    The next time I saw her bare hip, the tattoo was gone, and I began to doubt everything she had told me about it. To be fair, I saw it only a couple of times in good light, so maybe it was there all the time but I didn’t notice. You’d think you’d notice a thing like the impermanence of a tattoo, though. Maybe it was a fake, and she kept removing it and applying it, hoping I would say something. I never said anything. I just waited for that little spiked wheel with the strange writing to come and go.
     
     
     
    A week or so after the football game, and after a few days of walking around together after school, Anna invited me to her house. Her room was nothing like I had imagined. I guess I had in my mind that she lived in a crypt or a coffin, a dungeon or a cave, something spare and black and dark. It wasn’t that at all. It was more like a guy’s room. There was stuff everywhere. There were piles of books, biographies on Ambrose Bierce and Houdini, art books of the works of Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson, fiction by Kate Chopin, David Hartwell, Robert Bloch, and a ragged copy of Gray’s Anatomy set off by itself. There were books of poetry—Shelley, Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Frank Stanford, Federico García Lorca, and Sylvia Plath—and a stack of nonfiction I didn’t even comprehend, titles like The Psychology of a Rumor , Alan Turing: The Enigma , Secret Signals , and stuff by Albert Camus. I’d seen some of these books before, in my brother’s room after he’d started college. “What kind of grades do you get?” I blurted out. She laughed. “Straight D’s.” At least I had that on her. I’d been on the honor roll every semester so far.
    I also noticed that there was a paperback copy of the Lovecraft book she had grabbed when we first talked in the library. It was on her bed, open with the front and back of the book exposed. “Why did you bother to take that out of the library?” I said.
    She looked at the book and blushed slightly. “I can’t keep any of this stuff straight. I need