My Own Miraculous Read Online Free PDF

had a look on her face that I had never seen before, her upper lip curled back to show her teeth, her eyes slitty and mean. I could feel the same look on my face now.
    I hadn’t known I had it in me.
    I went up the ladder, poking my top half back through the hole, legs braced on the ladder.
    Hilde still knelt where I had left her. She’d put the scissors away into her big purse, trading them for the same purple notebook that she’d had at the blood drive. She was writing in it as I reared up over her, my head almost touching the ceiling. I leaned in, putting my face close to her face.
    “What the hell is wrong with you?”
    She looked back at me, thin bands of sunlight striping her face, and the shine caught in her glossy eyes, yellowing them. Her head tilted slightly to the side, regarding me like I was an odd species of beetle that had come along to interrupt her business. I hadn’t ever been so close to her. She gave off a faint electric lemon smell, like ozone gone a little sour.
    Instead of answering, she turned her notebook toward me, showing me the page she was working on. It was filled with numbers, symbols, too random to be true math. There were curls of hand-drawn smoke filling every bit of blank space, the paper so overworked it was almost black with ink. She’d cut out tiny bits of magazine pictures, too, collaging them into the bad math, like they were part of the equation: a candle with a human eye glued where the flame should be. A long, legless dog body with a baby’s face. A manicured model’s hand with a nail drawn in, jutting through the palm.
    The numbers and symbols were written in a spiral, like a nautilus shell that had the only patch of clean white paper at the genesis. That patch was blank, but not empty. Sunlight gleamed there as the few strands of Natty’s hair she’d taped into the middle caught the light. “He solves it. Do you see?” Hilde whispered, so intense. “He’s the other half of me. You see?”
    I saw she needed medication. I saw that she was so, so not okay. I skipped reason and told her straight, “Stay away from my kid.”
    To my surprise, she nodded, solemn, and said, “We all will. After the miracle.”
    I blinked. She was so matter-of-fact, for a crazy person. “What miracle?” I asked, but that was the wrong question. “Wait—who is ‘we’?”
    “I couldn’t do it by myself. I’ve tried and tried. But I found him, and we’ll make the miracle happen together,” she said, like it was perfectly normal to creep up on a three-year-old in a play fort to make him change his juice box into wine. Then her lips tilted up in a prim, instructive smile and she added, “After we’re one, you must call us Emmanuel. The angels sing that it is so. I know you hear them, too.” Her voice was high-pitched and bright with conviction. My spine shuddered like a tuning fork that had just been struck. There was an odd compelling power in her stillness and the sheen of her round, wet eyes; last semester I’d had to read The Crucible , but until this second, I hadn’t understood how the Salem Witch Trials could have happened.
    I said, “You keep your crazy bitch scissors away from my kid.”
    As I spoke, her gaze twitched sideways, like she was looking at my ear tip or just past my shoulder. She said, almost sorrowfully, “You’re right. She’s not yet fit.” She wasn’t talking to me. Not at all. “We’ll have to help her see.” I was breathing hard, but it was like the air near her was dry of oxygen. Then she did speak to me again. “This is our secret, little Mary. You know what he is. I’m just like him.”
    “He’s nothing like you,” I spat back in a pure reaction that had no thought behind it.
    “Oh, no, we’re the same.” She leaned in closer to me. “I was born of a virgin, too,” she confided, and then added slyly, “My mother and father still don’t share a bedroom.”
    So she’d definitely heard me at the hospital. She’d already decided that