Broken Soup Read Online Free PDF Page B

we’d come, looking behind me to see if he was chasing us, dragging my poor sister through nettles and dog shit. And he wasn’t, poor guy; he didn’t do anything.
    â€œHe was just fishing,” I said. “But I didn’t think so because I’m paranoid. That’s my point.”
    Bee listened and she said she got it, the whole stranger-danger thing. She said it was good to be careful. She also said there was a big difference between being careful and being shit-scared of everything. She said, “Being afraid all the time is no way to live. What’s it going to be? A bomb? A dark alley? Some boy who picked up a photo off the floor? Do you think you can stop badthings happening to you just by fearing them?”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    â€œThen why are you bothering?” she said. We were quiet for a minute, then she said, “He’s not some fifty-year-old bloke pretending to be a teenage girl on the internet, Rowan.”
    â€œI know that,” I said. “But he still might be an ax-wielding maniac.”
    â€œWhatever,” Bee said. “He might also be a cool person. If you insist on never trusting all the people you haven’t met before just because you’ve never met them, your world’s going to be a very lonely place.”
    â€œI’ve got enough friends,” I said. “I’ve got loads.”
    Bee laughed and said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. She changed the way she was sitting and turned to me. “How would you like to die?”
    I said I wouldn’t like to at all and she laughed and said I had to choose a way, I couldn’t say that.
    â€œHow would you like to die?” I asked her.
    She said, “I want to fall out of an airplane,” and I said, “What? You’re joking! Why?”
    She said that she’d want to really know her time was up and there was no possibility of hope, so she could kind of throw herself at it and dive straight in. “Plus,” she said, “I’d be flying.”
    I stared at her with my mouth open. To be that brave, I thought.
    Bee said, “So, what about you?”
    I didn’t want to say now. I felt like a fool.
    â€œIn my sleep, when I’m old. Nice and peaceful,” I said. “I thought everyone did.”
    â€œYou surprise me, Rowan,” Bee said. “The shit you deal with. I think you’re way braver than that.”
    We sat under the tree and I thought about it. Mum and Dad moved us to a school because they thought it was better. They moved house to keep us safer. They gave us swimming lessons and cycle helmets and self-defense classes and a balanced diet. They paid our phone bills so we’d never run out of credit in a crisis. They promised us five grand on our twenty-first birthdays if we never smoked.
    And still one of us died.
    What can I say? Death is just one of those things that you can work out a thousand different ways of avoiding but you’re going to meet head-on regardless.
    I looked at the side of Bee’s beautiful face under the shadow of the leaves. I thought about the things she knew. I thought about how much better I felt just for knowing her. I thought about her and Carl and Sonny and their front door with the flowers outside. I thought it couldn’t hurt to be a little more like her. What was the point of being afraid of things before they happened? Why not wait till they were on top of you and then deal with them?
    â€œYou’re right,” I said. “You’re always right.”
    â€œSo do it,” Bee said. “What have you got to lose?”
    Which is how I found myself at half past four on a gray afternoon, getting rained on and looked at, cycling not too slow and not too quick, counting down doorways on Market Road. Bee was looking after Stroma.

Seven
    Market Road was long and the buildings were fairly spaced out. There was a massive complex set well back from the