Savage Read Online Free PDF

of an equally large male tabby called Manx, biting down into his shoulder blades and sending him scurrying away with a shrieking wail, books and stacks of paper falling from where they’d been precariously perched in his wake.
    Maybe she could make it so difficult for them that they wouldn’t want anything to do with her or her house.
    Maybe she could fight them at every turn.
    Maybe.
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    The cats were fighting again.
    Isaac quickly reached up to both his ears, playing with the volume of his hearing aids so he would not hear them. He hated the sound of their fighting. The screeches, hisses, whines, and wails gave him scary thoughts and put horrible pictures inside his head.
    He did not like that, not one little bit.
    The young man played with the tiny controls. There was a sharp crackling followed by some low hums that tickled his throat, but it seemed to cancel out the noise of the battling felines.
    He wasn’t supposed to play with his hearing aids, but no matter how many times he promised his mother he wouldn’t, he would still find his sneaky hands reaching up to play with the tiny knobs of the plastic devices. Without them he could barely hear at all, one ear almost completely useless. He called that one Steve, after his father whom he barely knew, but his mother always told him that the man was no good and completely useless.
    Today Steve was ringing oddly, and it kind of hurt. Isaac’s hands again went up to the hearing devices, fiddling with the controls, hoping to stop the strange sound in his Steve ear. He was tempted to pluck them both out, to surrender to the silence, but he could never do that. What if his mother needed him?
    Isaac decided that he would rather deal with the cats, and was about to try and adjust the volume in his ears again, when Steve suddenly went quiet, the disquieting, unfamiliar sound now gone. The young man cocked his head to one side and then the other, listening for anything out of the ordinary, but things seemed to be back to relative normal. Even the cats had stopped, and he could just about hear the sound of the television from outside his room. The Price Is Right was on. That was his mother’s favorite show.
    He considered going to join her for the Showcase Showdown, but first he had to make sure that his room was in order. Turning very slowly where he stood, Isaac took in the details of his space. It was the exact opposite of the rooms outside his—very sparsely furnished with only his bed, a bedside table with a lamp on it, and a chest of drawers with a mirror. Everything that he owned was in a very specific place. He did not care for the messiness of the rest of the house and often tried to get his mother to clean it up, but he was finally getting to realize after all these years that it was just too hard for her.
    For a moment he wondered how other boys and girls dealt with their messy parents and felt a familiar frustration begin to arise over the fact that he seldom had the opportunity to interact with people his own age, his mother having decided to homeschool him due to his disabilities.
    Isaac’s anger flared. He hated that word—hated to be reminded of the fact that he was different. As far as he was concerned, everybody had something that set them apart. Even Sidney, his neighbor across the way who he thought was the most perfect person in the whole wide world, had something that set her apart from everybody else at close inspection.
    She never seemed to smile, Isaac mused, attempting to remember each and every time he and Sidney had seen each other. Sure, there had been attempts to smile, the corners of her pretty mouth going through the motions politely, but Isaac knew that it wasn’t real.
    She’s just too darn serious, is what his mother said. And he had to agree.
    He noticed that his hairbrush was askew ever so slightly and stepped over to the chest of drawers to align it perfectly. Happy that he had found the imperfection,