Girl Saves Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

it wasn’t a teacher, maybe just someone he encountered at the supermarket on the way back. Almost vomit at the thought of your dad being with someone who isn’t your mum, so soon after her death.’
    By this point in my spiel, the attention of the rest of the class was all on me. I could feel their stares boring into my back. I was still facing Mr Carr. He was still staring at me, wordlessly.
    I laughed again. ‘Here’s the good bit. So, the following week you come home from your friend’s house a little earlier than expected—let’s call your friend “Little Al” because, well, that’s his name—and, guess what? Your dad has someone over. Not like it’s anything particularly compromising— that probably would have ended in second-degree murder. No, but it is kind of obvious that this is someone he cares about, someone who is important to him. Some smashing of objects by you ensues, a bit of screaming, a lot of swearing, some head-butting of a wall…’
    Mr Carr breathed unevenly and cast his eyes down. If I’d been nice, if I’d been tactful, I could have stopped then, I could have pleaded temporary insanity to the principal.
    ‘And instead of your father laughing and drinking wine with your middle-aged English teacher—you’d deduced she must be the culprit who stole your dad’s heart in a fifteen-minute meeting and you’d vowed to drive a stake through her heart—lo and behold, it’s your Art teacher, seventeen years younger than your dad and, the cherry on top of the cake, a man .’
    The clunky sliding door to the classroom opened, and everyone’s rapt attention on me was instantly diverted as Jewel Valentine stepped into the classroom.
    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she muttered. I got the feeling she’d heard the last bit of my speech from outside. Her eyes—those brilliant eyes—flicked over me for only a moment, and I didn’t make out recognition.
    The quiet in the classroom was unnatural.
    I didn’t wait for the fallout. I grabbed my bag, swept past Jewel Valentine and didn’t stop running until I reached the corner shop.
    I wasn’t always the cowardly lion. It was something that had grown in me, like a tumour. Running through my blood so thick that it had become a part of me.
    Signs in shop windows along High Street:
Only one schoolchild at a time
Psychic readings—see into your future today
Apprentice pastry chef wanted—enquire within
Free eyelash tint with every full leg wax today only
We cannot guarantee that female mice are not pregnant
    I walked along the streets with my hands in my pockets. There was a stillness in the air when the streetlights came on, as the last embers of the dying sun streaked through the autumn leaves, patterning raked driveways and lawns all shades of gold.
    On the weekends and on school afternoons, I loved to lie in our front yard, close my eyes and feel the day’s golden rays soak into me, like I was taking it all inside me, and I was filled with this brilliant gold light.
    But in the evenings, when the streetlights came on it was magical, all alone out there. I listened to the distant hum of radios, the ground reverberating with the bass of someone’s house music turned up too loud, and I could see the glow of LCD screens in people’s living rooms before the curtains were drawn for the night.
    I watched the sky turn blue, indigo, black. I watched the first stars wink to life. I waited for the moon to show its face. I wandered across driveways, and I breathed in all the life going on around me.
    Though mornings were painful and bitter, by evening some of my problems could be forgotten— never totally, but maybe for a few moments, like now.
    It was reassuring, the people coming home, the dull white noise, the sparkle of stars that may have already died, while their light was still on its way to Earth. Listening and breathing it all in, I thought how inconsequential I was in the design. When I stood on the dotted line in the middle of the street and