Lost Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

a sixteen-year-old girl want shitkickers?—​but he just made small talk with my dad, who became his old chatty self. My father loved strangers. It was much harder for him to talk to people he actually knew.
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    On Monday morning, my father did me the favor of getting my bike out of the shed and strapping the hardhat to the rear rack himself. “You can keep the bungee cord,” he said.
    â€œWow, Christmas.”
    He didn’t laugh, just patted the bike to send me on my way. Rosie was standing at the screen door, watching the whole thing.
    â€œWhat are
you
looking at?”
    â€œYou,” she said.
    I heard it again. The music. From the other side of the fence. One of my favorite Elvis Costello songs, “Alison”—​
I know this world is killing you
.
    I begrudgingly took the bike from my dad.
    â€œYou know where it is, right?”
    â€œYes, Dad, I know where it is. It’s in the park. Where I had birthday parties number one through twelve.” Where Ginny’s ashes had sifted into the wind.
    â€œYou have to be there in twenty minutes. You should go.”
    It was the most normal conversation I’d had with him in weeks, or maybe months. Maybe a year. The first day of junior high, I stood in this same yard with this same bike and had a similar conversation. Except Ginny was alive then and my mother was still around and my father wasn’t so mean and Rosie was a benign blur of a kid instead of the embodiment of perfection to which I would never live up. My mother had taken me to the mall to buy the bike, one of the rare moments of alone time with her—​that’s what happens when you’re the middle child. Really, the only thing that remained of that day was my bike, my dear old bike: a twelve-speed Fuji Espree, sparkly gray-blue. Its beauty was marred, I thought, by that hardhat.
    â€œAnd I expect you to be home right after.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œIf you’re not here by five twenty, you’ll be grounded for the rest of the summer.”
    I pushed the bike away from him, toward the street. “I know.”
    As I hopped on and pedaled away, I could just make out the outline of the long-haired boy, sitting on the steps with his guitar.
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    And that’s how I came to be pedaling down Avenue of the Pines, the long road lined with white pine trees that formed the entrance to the state park. It always made me feel like I was embarking on an adventure, the narrow road that would open to some magical vista, the arrival in Shangri-La as the vast green fields came into view. But I always had to pass the spot where the small white cross was still affixed to the tree. Or—​maybe it still was. I didn’t look.
    When I pulled up to the park’s offices, set in the wide flat parking lot where my mom had taught me to ride my bike, I stood for a minute by the bike rack, wondering how I could get out of this, first-day-of-school anxiety mixed with a muddy dread. But it was 9:07, and I was already late, and the only way to slink along to safety was to walk in. So I did. I followed the handwritten signs to a fluorescent-lit room with kids seated at too-small elementary-school-style desks.
    A tall fellow with thick, sculpted arms and a name tag that read
Lynn
stood in the front of the classroom, smiling beatifically.
    â€œHow ya doin’, ma’am?” I said to him, fake-tipping my hat, but he failed to appreciate my humor. He must have grown those muscles to make up for the feminine name.
    I slid into my seat and surveyed some of my companions, many of them from my grade, kids I hadn’t talked to for ages. I barely had classes with any of them, since I was a year ahead in math and English and science—​history was my shortcoming—​and at lunch and gym and any other intergrade activity, I was with my older friends. How had so many of them become ingrates and inmates and screwups and outcasts like