Runaways Read Online Free PDF

over again. He was much better at counting than reading, particularly money counting, but when he’d finished the results were just the same. Thirty-three dollars and seventeen cents.
    “Not enough,” Stormy said gloomily.
    Dani shrugged. “Nowhere near.” Then, slanting a sideways look at him, she started to say, “Well, too bad. I guess you’ll have to stay—”
    “No,” Stormy interrupted. “No I won’t. We’ll both have to wait till we get some more money.”
    Shaking her head fiercely, Dani said, “No. No, I can’t wait. I have to go. I have to get out of here.”
    “Why?”
    Dani glared. “Why?” She took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you why.” And then she began to do something she’d never done before. To tell Stormy something she’d never told anyone in the whole world. All about that day back in 1947 when she was only eight years old and she and Linda had arrived in Rattler Springs on a scorching summer day. How they had climbed out of their ancient truck into the ugly nothingness and lung-scorching heat of Rattler Springs. “And it was right then,” she told him, “that very first day, that I began to hear the desert telling me I’d have to stay forever. I could hear it plain as day. Not with my ears really, but sort of inside my head. And I still hear it. Not all the time. Not so much when I’m indoors, but almost any time when I’m outside. Whenever I look around at all the dry, dead …” She paused, waving her arms in a circle. “… or up at the sky. When I look up at the sky I can hear it almost every time. The sky is part of it, and the sun, and the wind too. It’s like a lot of voices but all of them put together are the desert talking to me. And they’re all saying the same thing.”
    Stormy had collapsed into the beanbag chair in his usual listening position, with his backside sunk into the deep dent he’d made in the middle of it and his arms and legs sprawling out in every direction. His usual twitchy movements had disappeared, and his eyes had gone wide and glittery. Now and then his head nodded slightly, the way it always did when …
    Suddenly Dani saw what was happening. Stormy thought he was listening to a story. He was just sitting there dreaming along with what she was telling him, exactly as if she were reading Tom Sawyer, or some book of fairy tales. As if the whole thing about the desert and the way she felt about it and why she had to get away were all part of some kind of fairy story she’d been telling herself. Like Linda’s daydream stories about princes or pirates or handsome cowboys who were going to come along someday and make everything wonderful. The thought made Dani very angry because … She didn’t really know why it made her so angry, but she knew she was going to find out.
    “Hey, you,” she whispered so sharply that Stormy jumped and blinked. “Wake up. This isn’t some dumb daydream. This is for real.”
    “For real?” Stormy’s eyes were back to normal now. “What kind of for real?”
    “Something that really happened. And real plans about what I have to do next.”
    “Plans?” Stormy asked. Then he scratched his head and let his eyes roll thoughtfully and very slowly from one side to the other. Which, as usual, made Dani want to shake him. “I don’t get it,” he said finally.
    Between clenched teeth Dani said, “What don’t you get?”
    “I don’t get the difference.”
    “What do you mean you don’t get the difference?”
    “The difference between plans and daydreams.”
    Dani shook her head in amazement. “You don’t? You don’t know the difference between plans and—”
    But suddenly Stormy was pushing himself up out of the beanbag. “Hey,” he said. “Listen. Somebody’s knocking. Real loud.”
    Dani heard it too. Someone was pounding on the back door.
    “Who is it?” Stormy asked, looking at Dani as if he thought she had X-ray vision or something.
    Dani made her shrug say she didn’t know and didn’t