Stealing Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

and began to draw the boy’s face. I wanted to get it all down, every detail. Whether it was all in my head or not, I didn’t want to forget him.
    As the line of his jaw emerged from beneath my fingers, I shuddered. He called me “Princess.” Whatever the reason why, I didn’t like it.
    I had been called worse, and I had earned every nickname with my words and my teeth. I looked down at the sketch again. Recording my dreams on paper was my own personal exorcism. Afterward, I always felt free of whatever it was that had haunted me the night before. But this time when I looked at the picture of the boy, I almost felt like his eyes were staring back at me.
    I must have fallen asleep like that, gazing at my own handiwork, because the next thing I knew I was waking again to the sound of the door opening. Daylight was streaming through thebarred windows. Vern was holding the pill tray. The boy from last night rushed to my mind, and I snapped the sketch pad shut. I had fallen asleep with the charcoal clutched in my hand. I didn’t know if he was a patient or an orderly, or if Sleepy concocted him out of my imagination and put him into my dreams. Either way, I wasn’t ready for Vern or anyone else to see the sketches of him.
    “You’re already up? That’s a first.”
    “It was Grand Central Station in here last night,” I said, thinking about the orderly again.
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “Dr. Harris stopped by. And a guy who dubbed me a princess.”
    “Princess, huh?” Vern snorted. “Yardley, you’re as much royalty as I am.” She said it almost affectionately, but then she held out the tray with the day’s pills, and I thought about what the boy had said. Even if he was just a figment of my imagination, maybe my subconscious was telling me that enough was enough.
    I knew each pill did something different. But eventually the effects wore off, and Dr. Harris would start something new. My medication changed more than most. We patients would compare sometimes. Chord and Wing were almost always on Sleepy. It kept them in place. For Wing, it kept her from flying. And for Chord, it kept him from blinking through time. Sometimes Dr. Harris added Happy, because there was a lot of depression involved with not getting to be exactly where he wanted to be.
    I assumed that Dr. Harris was trying really hard to get the right combination that would level me off. Make me normal. Stop all the anger. Put my monster to sleep.
    But what if what the boy said was true? What if the drugs were masking everything and not solving anything? The idea of giving up all the drugs terrified me. I hadn’t been completely clean—not for as long as I could remember.
    “Which of the seven dwarfs is it today?” I asked, assuming the answer had to be Dopey. Given my behavior yesterday, my mom’s visit, and my Sleepy dose last night, I was sure rest was the continuing prescription of the day.
    But this pill was new. It was black with little tiny dots. I wanted to recoil, to ask Vern what was in it, to refuse to take it. But if I did that, they would make me take it, or worse—they would give me a shot of it straight to my veins instead. So I hid my reaction and pretended everything was normal—well, at least normal for me. Instead of swallowing, I slipped the pill under my tongue and felt it threatening to melt. The plastic casing softened as I waited for Vern to check my mouth. She barely looked, either because she trusted me or because I had never skipped a pill before.
    When she glanced out the window to exclaim, “Look at that! We weren’t supposed to have snow today,” I spit the pill into my palm. She looked back at me, expecting a response about the weather.
    I just shrugged and felt a twinge of something—not guilt—but a shift in our dynamic. I had a secret. I hadn’t said a word, but it was the first lie between me and Vern in a long time—maybe ever.
    Hiding the pill in my pocket, I took my sketch pad, and we silently marched to