Girl Runner Read Online Free PDF

George tells me instead that he knows a boy who got into the army at fifteen.
    “What’d he want to do that for?”
    George says, “It’s better’n snapping beans.”
    “You want black toes?”
    “I’ll keep my feet dry.”
    “I’ll tell Mother.”
    “You won’t.”
    “You wouldn’t do it,” I say.
    George says nothing for a while. Then he coughs. His cough is ever present, a patient wheeze that worsens when there is chaff or dust around, or grass, or buds, or trees, or weeds, or hay, or animals, or smoke. He looks at me and says, “Why wouldn’t I, Aggie? Why’d you think I wouldn’t?”
    It will hurt him to say it. I hesitate.
    “Why, Aggie?”
    Because you’re snapping beans with me. Because of that cough. Because you’re skinny as a scarecrow. Because you like napping in the shade in the middle of the afternoon. Because they won’t have you.
    “Because you’re not allowed to be killed,” I growl with an angry force that hurts my throat.
    Mother says little when she returns, without Fannie, late in the afternoon. Mother is only stopping to gather fresh linens, and to prepare a tea from the dried herbs she stores, hanging, in the cellar. If she’s noticed the absence of the tincture she sent with us yesterday, she doesn’t mention it. In Edith’s house items might be lost or misplaced quite easily; a person would not expect to find anything where it ought to be found.
    But my hands start shaking at the thought.
    Mother sends me to the cellar with a candle to fetch up some herbs. I close my eyes and select them by scent: calendula, blue and black cohosh, anise, chamomile, red raspberry leaf. When I bring the herbs to Mother, she reads the fear on my face, if not the guilt, and she thanks me, her hand gentle along my cheek.
    “Your sister will recover.”
    I can’t ask about the baby that might have been.
    I burst into tears.

3
Conspirators
    WE ’ VE REACHED the elevator doors.
    Keep the nurse talking, distract her, there’s a girl. This is the slowest damn elevator you’re likely to encounter. I ride up and down on occasion. They push us outside to “catch the breeze,” as they call it, arranging us all in a row like sale items outside a discount store. Who would want us? The young and healthy march past, determined not to be depressed by the sight of us, warning them of things to come— if they’re lucky , I say, trying to pass the joke along to the crumpled crone in the chair beside mine, but as we’ve lost the ability to toss words through the air, I aim for psychic means, wondering whether she might hear me. Stranger things have happened. When she chuckles, I am certain she has. And then we are wheeled back inside to ride the slowest damn elevator in existence back upstairs again.
    This happens daily in fine weather, and never for the rest of the year.
    It hasn’t happened in recent memory, if recent memory is to be trusted, which I am not so certain it is. If you were to ask me to name the month, I couldn’t tell you. I could tell you the colour of the sky outside the window under which I was planted before the nurse woke me to say you were here: it was white. That could mean anything.
    The elevator doors open.
    “Keep her blanket tucked, and if she seems chilled, bring her home right away.” Is she really going to let me go? “Have fun, Mrs. Smart!” The nurse presses in to kiss my head, or more precisely, the woollen hat that is itching my nearly naked scalp.
    I hear what she’s said, what she’s called this place: home. I’m enraged, though I can’t think why. I’ve called worse places home.
    The girl has taken over the pushing and we bump too quickly into the sighing elevator, my knees squashed against the back wall.
    She doesn’t think to turn me.
    I can hear her hitting the buttons rather wildly, but now is not the time to panic. What’s her hurry? A certainty sits happily with me as we descend in slow motion, that the pair of them are attempting a breakout. A