Emma and the Minotaur Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Emma left the house and she was greeted by birds that were singing their morning songs. It was a sunny day. She walked to the end of the street and then to the bus stop on the other side of Glendale Avenue. There was a girl standing inside the bus shelter. She looked older than Emma and she was wearing pink headphones on her head.
    Emma went inside the shelter and sat down on the bench. The older girl watched her from the moment she arrived until she sat down. Emma waved.
    The girl lowered the headphones to her neck. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Are you sure? My name is Lucy. What’s yours?”
    “Emma,” Emma said.
    “Emma,” the girl said. “You really do seem familiar, Emma. Emma what?”
    “Emma who,” said Emma.
    “What?”
    “Never mind. My name is Emma Wilkins.”
    “You’re Professor Wilkins’s daughter. That’s where I’ve seen you. Must’ve been at his office.”
    “Yeah, that’s my dad.”
    “I’m in his physics class,” Lucy said. “Nice to meet you, Emma.”
    Emma stood up and walked over to the girl. “Nice to meet you, Lucy,” she said and stuck her hand out toward her. Lucy shook it and Emma winced. When she took her hand back, the older girl noticed her scrapes.
    “What happened to your hand?” she said.
    “I was attacked by a deer.”
    Emma’s bus arrived then and she got on it. Lucy followed and they sat down together. They continued to talk and Emma found out that Lucy was seventeen years old and that she was in her first year studying biology. It turned out that she was also going to the mall.
    “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
    “Nope,” Emma said. “Are you?”
    “No,” Lucy said. “I don’t have class until later. Physics class, actually, with your dad.”
    “What a coincidence,” Emma said.
    When they arrived at the Penhurst Mall, Emma walked with Lucy from store to store. There weren’t many people there and the girls wandered around without any real purpose at first. Emma was surprised to find that for Lucy the fun of going to the mall was all in walking around and looking.
    “Well,” Lucy explained. “I like the mall. Gets me out of my house and away from school.”
    “You don’t like your house?”
    “Not all the time,” she said. “Why are you here?”
    “I’m looking for bait,” Emma said. She paused to have a look around. There was a store directory nearby. She went to it and read through the listings to find the store that she was looking for.
    “Here,” she said, pointing at it on the map.
    “Luggage?”
    Emma nodded. She led the way to the store and they went inside. When she had completed her purchase, they left the mall and walked to the bus stop out in front of it. Lucy had to take a bus to the university but Emma had somewhere else to go. They waited together on a bench until Lucy’s bus pulled up.
    When the older girl had gone, Emma sat alone and swung her feet back and forth in the air, enjoying the sun on her face. She clutched the bait to her chest and smiled as she waited for her own bus to arrive.
     
    Wizard Falls was bright with sunshine. The light glinted off the slick, wet rocks that were scattered about inside the creek. There were faint rainbows floating in the air where a trickle of water hit a protruding rock on its way down and became a spray.
    Now that she’d had more time to look around, Emma saw that the “falls” were in reality no more than a few trickles of water that came out of the rocks above. She decided that she liked the name “Wizard Falls” much better than “Wizard Trickles,” despite its inaccuracy.
    Emma was hiding behind a tree. She was on the bank across the water from the rock that Jake had been sitting on the day before. She had placed the bait on the rock and was lying in wait, ready to spring her trap.
    It wasn’t long before she spied Jake coming over the hill. She slunk down and made herself even smaller so that he wouldn’t see