Picture Me Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

Catlin along once but she couldn’t keep quiet.
    When we first heard that Matthew had disappeared, Marieka and Gil had a long conversation about what to do.
    What if it’s
not
fairly straightforward? Marieka asked. And Gil answered in a murmuring voice that I couldn’t hear.
    I don’t want Mila mixed up with that mumblemumble family and you know what I buzzbuzz about Suzanne.
    Well, I do happen to know what she buzzbuzzes about Suzanne. She doesn’t much like her, though she also says it’s hard to be likable when you’re so unhappy. But Marieka knew Suzanne before Owen died, and says that even then she never seemed to be telling the truth. I wonder why I haven’t seen Suzanne since I was four. Gil says he and Matthew are like brothers, but when did they last meet? Are they like brothers who have grown apart?
    What do you think? asks Marieka. I can’t hear the answer, but I know my father well enough to imagine what he’d say. Matthew just gets like this sometimes. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. We’ll go over as planned. He’ll be home by the time we arrive. He
is
my oldest friend. And in any case, it’s been much too long since I’ve seen him. Perhaps I can mumble bumble fumble tumble humph.
    I have heard stories of the two of them as boys hanging out in the cemetery behind their school, talking about girls and drinking themselves unconscious on cider. I’ve seen pictures, long before Gil and Marieka met, of the two young men brown from the sun and grinning in Spain, Scotland, the Alps. In pictures they look handsome and young, their friendship tested only briefly by a girl they both loved. In one photo both of them have an arm round her but her head is turned and she’s smiling at Matthew, who looks straight into the camera. Gil’s face is in shadow.
    Once when his mother was ill, Matthew lived with Gil’s family for a whole year. He and Gil shared a room, staying up half the night reading comics Matthew stole from the local shop.
    Stole?
    Matthew, Gil says, not me.
    What happened to his mother?
    She died, Perguntador. The summer he was fifteen.
    I would like to have known them back then, though I suspect that Gil, young, wouldn’t be all that different from Gil not-young. I have heard how they sat next to each other during the eleven-plus and later their A-levels—Matthew clever at history, Gil at languages, both offered places at Cambridge.
    Two grammar school boys from the butt-end of Preston, Gil says. On the day the news came we felt like gods.
    Gil used summers to study and write. Matthew hitch-hiked round the Black Sea, climbed Annapurna, taught English in East Africa.
    Marieka phones back. She sounds the same as always on the phone.
    Hmm, is what she says now, when I tell her about cute baby Gabriel and Honey and the feeling in the beautiful glass house. And then she sighs, and says, Do be careful, my darling, families can be so complicated.
    I tell her I will be careful, and that I love her, and then I give the phone to Gil. His whole body uncurls when he speaks to her.
    For a minute I feel like crying because I miss Marieka, but then I see her in my head saying, Do you imagine I’m not with you, silly?
    We are three. Even when we are just two, we are three.

ten
    C atlin always talked about running away, but not in the usual way where you seek out your real parents who are rich and glamorous and gave you up for adoption by mistake and have regretted it ever since.
    She wanted to run away to Brussels or Washington, DC, and head up an international spy ring that would save the world from mass destruction, preferably at the very last second. This she would accomplish by writing an impossibly elaborate computer program involving twenty-eight prime numbers coded into one uniquely high-spec iPhone. I tend to drift off when she talks tech.
    All of our spy games involved threats to the free world and invasion by evil enemies while we plotted routes through underground tunnels known to no one but