Sovereign Hope Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mitch. What’s up?” I said.
    His grin
widened. “My little sister’s been bugging me to bring her here all
week. My parents said they’d confiscate my car if I didn’t give in.
Hence the mud all over my insanely expensive jeans and the
crystallized sugar I can’t seem to get out of my teeth. What about
you?”
    “ I’m, um…I guess I’m meeting a friend.” Telling him I was
meeting a strange woman potentially involved in my mother’s
disappearance didn’t really feel right.
    Mitchell
shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back onto his
heels.  “And how are you feeling about going back to
school? Break’s over in three weeks.”
    “ Okay, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
    “ And your mom? Have they…y’know, have they
found…anything?”
    “ No. Not yet.”
    “ Oh. Well, you know what they say. No news is good news and
all that.”
    I gave him a
generous smile, but it felt tight around the corners of my mouth.
He was only trying to be nice. He wasn’t to know that the longer
someone was missing, the more likely they were to stay that
way.
    “ Yeah. No news is good news. So where’s your sister,
anyway?”
    Mitch gestured
over to a group of giggling young girls around the balloon darts
obviously whispering about the cute stall attendant behind their
hands. “They’ve been stalking this guy, I swear. He’s the only
reason they come here. It kinda makes me wanna throw up in my
mouth. Hey,” he paused,  “are you okay? You’ve gone a
weird color.”
    I wasn’t
listening. I was locked to the spot, straining to get a clear view
through the crowd. People slipstreamed past one another, blocking
the view I was searching for. The woman I had seen. The blue
dress.  The short, wavy black hair. The flash of familiar
blue eyes that had met mine for a split second before being
swallowed by the hustling jostle of bodies. 
    “ Farley?”
    “ Huh?”
    “ You okay?”
    “ Uh, no, actually. I think…I think I have to go.” I left
Mitch standing there. The woman had looked exactly like my mom.
That dress was one of her favorites. It couldn’t have been anyone
else.
    “ Mom!”
    People scowled
as I shoved passed them, pushing forward as best I could. It was
hopeless, though. No matter how hard I fought, I kept getting
pushed further back. The crowd closed in around the distant woman,
and the bobbing head of black hair vanished out of sight.
    “ Mom!” I screamed. Why wouldn’t she turn around? She’d looked
right at me. Why hadn’t she come to
me?  “ Mom!”
    “ It’s not her, Farley,” a voice behind me whispered. I
shouldn’t have been able to hear it over the thump of the bassy
music coming off the rides, and yet the voice filled my whole head.
A woman’s voice.
    “ Agatha?”
    I turned. No
one there. Just the smiling, oblivious faces of the other
fairgoers. I spun around, blurring the flashing lights into one
continuous stream of red and gold and green and blue. The colors
traced together, flooded my head, blinding me. The music distorted
so that the lyrics stretched out low, like a tape being chewed up
and pulled out of an old school cassette player.
    “ Don’t panic.”
    I did another
three-sixty. A group of guys loitering by an air rifle game stopped
to watch me, giving me bemused looks. One of them muttered
something and the others burst into fits of harsh laughter.
Fantastic. I was going mad.
    And yet…I
couldn’t be, because the voice came again. “Come with me, Farley.”
A hand slipped into mine. The next thing I knew, a small woman with
a chestnut braid was dragging me through the crowd. She wore a
long-sleeved dark grey shirt and black jeans tucked into her boots,
brown leather caked with red dirt. As the woman walked, her long
braid swung from side to side like a heavy pendulum. Her heart
shaped face was very pretty, dashed with a handful of freckles that
gave her a girlish appearance, although she was probably close to
thirty. 
    “ You’re