Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d’ve expected Jill to want to watch the light show a while longer. When they turned the zapper on, the air would tighten up like your skin when you get goose bumps and then there were great jagged anti-flashes—I don’t know what else to call them, if you’ve never seen it, and lots of people in Newworld have never seen a silverbug mob—as the bugs popped or squished or whatever it was they did in great sweeping swathes. (We’d been there when they turned it on at Hyderabad in June. But our moms didn’t know that one of Jill’s brothers had also taken us to the last big outbreak in Birdhill four years ago.) They were moving the zapper into position now. I wanted to be back in the car when they flipped the switch. The silverbugs that didn’t get zapped would dart out through the crowd of onlookers, almost like they were deliberately fleeing annihilation. Almost like they were alive.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I feel more like the way you describe it. Up and down are all . . . peculiar. And I don’t think I want to step on any bugs.”
    So after all I got back to our house sooner than I wanted. We were mostly silent on the drive, although not wanting to shout over the car helped. But I didn’t like Jill looking all low amp and shut down like this. She’s not the low amp and shut down type. It might just have been seeing Eddie acting loopy and even more of a bakayaro than usual, but I didn’t think so. Finally I said, or shouted, “What’s wrong?”
    She hitched up a shoulder and let it drop, still staring at the road. “You know, or you wouldn’t be asking,” she said (unreasonably but accurately). “F-word.”
    “It’s bad?” I felt slightly sick.
    She looked at me quickly and away again. “Nothing like your dad. But . . . yeah. Something big and ugly and dramatic. And—public.”
    My stomach unclenched a little. Really not like my dad then. She might have just said that to make me feel better though. “A cobey, say.”
    “I don’t know. But yeah. It might be.” She was silent a moment and then added: “I don’t mind knowing who Laura is going to fall for next. Or what Peta’s Café is going to have on special next week. But big stuff—no. It feels wrong and bad. Maybe the wrong is making it feel bad.”
    “Yeah.” But we both knew we didn’t think so.
    • • •
    I heard Mom and Val laughing as I put my key in the lock and then as I opened the door it stopped like . . . like what happens when Mrs. Andover walks into a classroom. Doesn’t matter how great you were feeling a second before. Mrs. Andover is the human version of dropping your ice cream on the ground, a big ugly tick on your dog that you’re going to have to pull out, or getting a D on your algebra homework for the second time and seeing the akuma of summer school looming at you.
    Bugsuck. Iya. Iya na creepo.
    “I’m just taking Mongo out,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes on the floor—they were in the living room, and I had the feeling Mom had been sitting in Val’s lap—“And then we’ll go on to the shelter.” I put the lead on my overexcited dog and pretty much ran out the door. We didn’t get back till it was dark, and even Mongo was (relatively) tired. But we’d been practicing herding both with and without sheep (or alpacas, which are majorly evil from a herding point of view) and he had been absolutely dropping in his tracks when I yelled stop or held my hand up. My brilliant dog. So I had something to be happy about.
    It was a good thing I had Mongo and the shelter. Because it was pretty much keeping my eyes on the floor and running away for the next six weeks. It was too easy to hate Val once he and his horrible shadows were around all the time, even with how unhappy the way I was behaving made Mom. But it didn’t make her as unhappy as being married to Val made her happy, so I hated him for that too. At the time I didn’t think Val gave a bucket of battery acid whether his new