Chocolate Horse Read Online Free PDF Page B

it. She always thought of her brothers as a pain in the neck.
    She should have known.
    She’d taken health classes. She’d seen movies. Stiffness and pain in the neck could be serious. Could be meningitis. She should have worried last night. She should have told their mother. Maybe. Just maybe.
    Stevie shook her head. She peered at her brother. Then she remembered yesterday afternoon.
    Alex had been sick. He’d wanted something—her horse, her precious chocolate horse—and she hadn’t let him have it. She’d screamed at him. That was the last time she’d spoken to him.
    The last time. The thought spun in her head.
    “Stevie?” It was her father. He stood behind her and gave her a hug from behind. They both looked through the glass at Alex, who didn’t move. Plastic sacks of liquids hung upside down, dripping into tubes that went into a needle in his arm. They didn’t look like much—clear liquids, not much different from water. The tubes tangled, the bags dripped. Alex lay still.
    “They’re doing everything they can,” her father said.
    “We should have brought him sooner,” said Stevie.
    “We didn’t know sooner,” her father said.
    But Stevie thought she should have known, and she knew now that she never should have thought Alex had been faking. There had been so many signs. How could she have missed them?
    These thoughts filled her mind, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing while she watched her brother.
    “We’re going home now for a little while,” Mrs. Lake said. “We’ll have some dinner and then we’ll come back. The doctor said he’s okay for now. Nothing will happen for a while. He’s stable. That’s what the doctor said.”
    Stevie couldn’t leave Alex. He was her twin—her other half. She couldn’t eat anything, anyway, so what difference would it make if she went home or not?
    “I want to stay,” she said.
    Mrs. Lake didn’t protest. She understood. This brother and sister had shared everything since before they’d been born. Although they fought like a lot of brothers and sisters, there had always been a special bond. Everyone in the family knew it and respected it. Now that Alex was sick, Mrs. Lake wasn’t surprised Stevie wanted to stay near him. Stevie sometimes had funny ways of showing her love for Alex, but it was always there.
    “We’ll bring you back something to eat,” Mrs. Lake said. “Okay.”
    Chad and Michael stood by their mother. They understood, too.
    Mr. and Mrs. Lake and the boys left. Stevie was alone with her thoughts and her inert brother. Around her, visitors shuffled down the hall, nurses bustled around their station and in and out of the rooms, and doctors strode by, responding to the calls of the PA system that clicked on and off regularly. Stevie saw and heard none of this.
    She sank down onto the sofa and lay back, closing her eyes.
    Again and again she could see Alex in her room,standing by the window, holding the chocolate horse. She could almost touch the memory of her own anger, and she was deeply ashamed of it. Her brother was sick, very sick, and she’d missed the chance to do something for him.
    Alex had done so much for her. Stevie recalled a time when the two of them were about six and they’d decided to climb a tree their mother had told them to stay away from. Stevie had fallen out of the tree and scraped her knee. Alex took care of her. He’d washed the cut and bandaged it and even loaned her some of his jeans so she could keep wearing long pants until it healed. He’d never told anybody about it, either.
    Once their older cousin from Toronto had come for a visit and had teased Stevie about being a tomboy with a tomboy’s name. Alex had punched him—just for her. And then there was the time Alex had invited a boy in their class over to play Nintendo because Stevie thought he was cute, even though Alex didn’t like him at all. When Stevie had changed her mind about the boy because he’d cheated at cards, Alex hadn’t even