Lost Girls Read Online Free PDF

“Hope, you stay and look after the juniors.” Mrs. Campbell waves her hand in Hope’s direction, but doesn’t meet her eye, ignoring Hope’s look of dismay. The rest of us set off, ourheads bent once again into the wind, sea spray, and sand.
    We find the cases of bottled water quite easily, buried beneath sand drifts but otherwise undamaged. There’s nothing to be seen of our tents, not even on the tops of the remaining upright coconut palms; our campfire has been blown away. The tide line is littered with branches, coconuts, dead birds, dead fish, and huge hunks of seaweed like giant rice noodles smeared with soy sauce. Jody, who has tagged along with us, sits crying quietly on the sand while we work our way through the debris, a dead seabird in her lap, its white neck broken. I crouch to push her hair from her eyes and plant a kiss on her head.
    Suddenly I see the tin barbecue, jammed between the branches of a casuarina tree. Like a metal nest. Nearby we find the bag of charcoal. The brown paper wrapping has been shredded, but the damp charcoal is intact. Jas and I are desperate to find the first-aid kit, but it seems to have vanished along with the tents. We search in the bushes and find two of the backpacks—mine (
Thank you, God
) and May’s, full of crap like makeup and face cream and hair curlers. She’s ridiculous.
    “Oh, May, face cream!” Arlene screeches, grabbing the jar. She takes off, dodging between fallen tree trunks, May screaming after her, “You pig, you pig, bring it back. It’s mine!”
    The other backpacks have disappeared, maybe buried or blown away. Mrs. Campbell still has her nylon bag. She’s never without it and managed to hold on to it last night. Her guitar is gone, though.
    “Enough, girls,” she says. “We can come back later.”
    We are blown by the fierce wind back to our rocky shelter.
    “If we’d pitched camp here—” I start, but Jas holds the palm of her hand up to stop me.
    “Nobody could have known,” she says. “All we wanted to do was sit around the fire and watch the sunset.”
    Thunder still rolls across the massive sea, and great flashes continue all around us.
    Once, Lan Kua told me a folktale about how thunder and lightning come about. There’s a beautiful woman who lives in the sky and has a huge glinting diamond. A giant (or is it an ogre?) covets the diamond and asks her for it, but she won’t give it to him. In a rage he throws his ax at her, but it misses and hits the ground, burying itself with a great crash. Lan Kua explained that the flashes of lightning are the shafts of light sparkling from the diamond and the thunder is the crash of the ax. I must tell the juniors this story once we’re all together again.
    “Look over there. Toward the mainland. What is it?” Mrs. Campbell points at a billowing of thick smoke like black roses in the sky. “Looks like an explo—”
    “A lightning strike? Maybe the storm is centered over Utapao?” I interrupt her, cold at the thought of war coming to Thailand. Of course they aren’t explosions. They can’t be. I glance at Jas. She’s looking calm, as usual. No, they can’t be explosions.

    Those of us who can have spent the rest of the day searching for firewood, which isn’t that easy, what with the heavy rain. Jas and I put our efforts into finding firewood and trying to dry out broken-off branches to put on the fire. It’s a full-time job. The others are useless. May is putting her recovered curlers in her hair, Arlene is asleep or pretending to be, and Hope is holding her stomach and moaning. Jody is cuddling her tattered toy bear and sucking her thumb.
    Carly hasn’t moved. Jas says she’s in shock. She wraps her in her WESTERN WILDCATS sweatshirt and gives her sips of water. The little girl shivers and shakes her head and won’t look at us, staring into space as if she’s sleepwalking.
    Mrs. Campbell sits in the dark of the cave, smoking, her head in her hands.
    “Are you all right, Mrs.