Girl Saves Boy Read Online Free PDF

looked along it, all the bins lined up, tapering away perfectly into the distance like a perspective drawing…
    Leaves crunched beneath my feet and I paused outside a house in a street of mown nature-strips, where the full recycle bins had already been pushed out to the curb.
    The house was like the others: a faux sandstone front, an extra bedroom added as an afterthought, the kitchen facing the street.
    It was my old house.
    Lights on inside, people moving around. People who lived there.
    I couldn’t imagine living in a house where someone had died. I don’t know whether the real estate agent ever told them, but they were better off not knowing.
    I stood there on the footpath outside my old house, with the low red-brick fence at the front and the wrought-iron gate. The garden was overgrown—something neither of my parents would ever have allowed to happen—and our lavender plant was unkempt.
    My mother used to pick sprigs of lavender every week—often I helped her and we’d put them in our drawers, hang them from the light fittings, put a bouquet of the sweet-smelling plant on the kitchen table.
    I doubted the people who lived there now did that. I wondered who slept in my old room, the room I moved into when I was eight. I wondered whether that person admired the ceiling: the swirls of colour and joy that my dad painted for me the year we moved in.
    Beside the lavender bush there was a gnome.
    He wasn’t anything special—just your average garden-variety gnome: yellow hat, red shirt, blue pants. Paint a little chipped, but looking smart. Could very well go to a job interview and audition for the role of Santa’s elf. He had a nose that hinted at a drinking problem. Ceramic. Made in China.
    I stared at the kitchen window. A man walked up, put something in the sink. He was looking at someone else and his eyes glittered with laughter. He turned away from the window and walked back out of sight.
    I didn’t bother unlatching the gate—even as a vertically challenged person I could easily step over the fence. I walked along the path, still focused on the window. Then I looked down at the gnome, who bore an expression of outrage, and snatched him up.
    As I looked back at the kitchen window, my eyes met those of the man who lived in the house where my mother died. On his face was a look of shock— or was it amusement?
    I clutched my new gnome to my chest and I bolted.

Jewel
    Tuesday afternoon, after Art, Mr Carr asked to see what I’d been working on.
    ‘This is fantastic,’ he murmured as he examined the sketch, running his finger along the lines, his head tilted. He looked pretty intense. It seemed like a normal sketch to me. A few lines in grey-lead pencil, nothing that special—it was a drawing of Geraldine, her face crinkled in a smile. I’d taken extra care etching the lines around her eyes and across her forehead. Her face was old, but her smile was young, and I hoped I’d captured her in my sketch. At least Mr Carr seemed to like it.
    ‘Are you sure you haven’t had any formal training?’ he asked.
    ‘Just school,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been drawing my whole life.’
    ‘Do you think…’ he murmured, ‘do you think we could put this on display? Not in the classroom…maybe out in the hall? Framed?’
    ‘I was actually planning on giving that to someone,’ I said. Maybe it could have been put on display? Maybe I was just being difficult, like always? But I really was planning on giving it to someone, that was no lie—I’d drawn it for Geraldine.
    ‘Oh,’ sighed Mr Carr. ‘I suppose that’s all right. What about your next work? Maybe that one?’
    ‘You think it’s all that good?’ I asked. I wasn’t fishing for compliments—no way, especially not from a teacher—I was just sceptical.
    Mr Carr nodded. ‘Definitely. You should consider doing a Fine Arts degree.’
    ‘I wasn’t planning on going to university. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.’
    Mr Carr handed me my sketch and