Connect the Stars Read Online Free PDF

was? Remember when you wore exactly what you wanted?”
    I thought about it. “I had these rain boots with strawberries on them. I wore them even when it wasn’t raining.”
    â€œAnd no one cared or probably even really noticed. Right now, everyone’s trying to figure out who they are, where they fit, what their roles are. They don’t always say what they mean. Sometimes they say things they don’t mean. Maybe they aren’t their best selves, but they’re trying.”
    â€œI wish it could have stayed the way it used to be. People lied a lot less.”
    â€œI promise it gets better.”
    I could tell she wasn’t just saying this; she honestly believed it. I felt a sob rise in my throat. “I really do want you to be right about that,” I said.
    â€œGood.” She smiled. “Keep the faith, Audrey.”
    I shrugged, mostly because acting casual was the only hope I had of not bursting into tears.
    â€œI’ll try.”
    I did try, sort of. But it was a lot easier to believe that people were good and doing their best when I wasn’t actually with them. In the three weeks before the end of the school year, I spent as much time as I could alone in the woods. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I’m sorry to say that my motives weren’t quite so lofty. MostlyI went to get away from life instead of confronting it, but after a few trips, since I was there anyway, I decided to pay attention and try to learn what the woods had to teach.
    I didn’t learn the meaning of life, but I did notice, for the first time, how the forest was a big world that contained smaller ones. A dead tree, the cool, damp ground under a rock, an anthill like a pile of brown sugar, a stand of blue flowers, a patch of emerald-green velvet moss: they were all tiny worlds alive with busy citizens, every creature moving around with purpose, like they knew just what to do and where to go. A bronzy centipede slinking through the dirt. Roly-poly bugs like miniature minivans. An army of black beetles, marching. A cloud of white moths rising spookily out of the grass.
    I’m not especially a bug person, but I loved seeing these things, and sometimes I didn’t even look at anything. I’d sit with my back against a tree and my eyes shut, and just the stalky, tree-barky, brown-dirt smell of the place would make me feel peaceful. I’d breathe it in and know that my world—Harriet Tubman Middle School—wasn’t even close to being the only world there was.
    Sometimes, though, I got lonely, especially for Janie. She’d been my best friend since she’d moved to Delaware from Oregon when we were five, but Janie and I hadn’t been spending as much time together as we used to. Asmuch as I hated to admit it, Lyza was right about that. But she was wrong about Janie being sick of me. Janie Franklin and I were friends the way moss is green, the way squirrels run up trees. We were a fact.
    But a few months ago, we had just stopped hanging out as much. I guess I was caught up in the whole I-am-surrounded-by-people-who-lie thing, which seemed to get worse and worse as seventh grade went on, and she’d gotten strep and other more minor illnesses and started missing school, and I guess we both just got busy. My mom said that every friendship has its ups and downs, its natural fluctuations. When she put it that way, my friendship with Janie sounded like any natural part of life, like the ocean tides or the seasons, which is how it had always felt to me.
    I’d called Janie a couple of times in those last few weeks of school, but she was bogged down with makeup work. Janie was as smart as anyone, but school wasn’t always easy for her, and like I said,