The American Girl Read Online Free PDF

moving and even though he strained, even though he tried to understand he was not at all sure that he heard what she was saying
.
    It was very windy, and it was difficult to understand in the wind. Eddie, she spoke so quickly and excitedly. She mixed in foreign words in her sentences, words that maybe he knew what they meant, but in some other time, in some other situation
.
    But he wanted to scream STOP WAIT
.
    STOP NOW!
    “Sometimes I think . . . that it’s so serious
. . .
I don’t know if I can.”
    And then her voice died out again. Drowned in waves, foam, water, wind that had splashed and washed washed over them
.
    “One shouldn’t eavesdrop,” the cousin’s mama said to Doris Flinkenberg who at this time was not living in the cousin’s housein her own right yet. She was just the marsh kid from the distant marsh, she just was.
    It was Doris who had made her way to the barn where Eddie and Björn had been. It was Doris who had huddled in the darkness and heard some things without being discovered.
    “But I KNOW that they didn’t notice me!” Doris Flinkenberg insisted.
    “But you SHOULDN’T eavesdrop,” the cousin’s mama said decidedly and pulled Doris into the kitchen.
    “Come and let’s think about other things,” she said in a considerably kinder tone of voice. “Come. We’re behind closed doors now and we can do something fun together. Just the two of us. Should we do a crossword? Or put on the radio and listen to music?”
    And Doris immediately started thinking about other things.
    “Yes,” she said attentively. “Yes. To all of it. First we’ll do all of it once, then we’ll do everything again. And then again.”
    And Doris was so happy that the cousin’s mama’s heart almost burst. Doris had such a hard time.
    “Come now, Doris. Time to go home. I’ll walk you.”
    “Don’t want to!” Little Doris started crying.
    “It doesn’t help!” the cousin’s mama had said and taken Doris Flinkenberg in her arms partly by force. “WE HAVE TO.” She half carried, half dragged the hysterical Doris Flinkenberg up to the main country road on which you have to walk quite a few miles away from honor and integrity in order to get to the marsh hovel where Doris and her marsh mama and her marsh papa lived.
    “My heart breaks,” the cousin’s mama would lament when Doris was not there. “It’s so terrible.”
    The conversations with Eddie. They walked in silence. Along the path down to the boathouse. The last bit she took his hand in hers. Her hand was warm, almost hot and damp with sweat. Bencku cast a sideways glance at her. She was pale
.
    Then the end came very quickly. It was the morning when everything happened—or, when everything had already happened. For Bengt, this is the moment when reason and logic split, and once it started, it lasted several weeks.
    It was early in the morning. Bencku had not slept at all. He was walking on the main road, the one that led up to the main country road or down to the Second Cape, depending on where you were headed. Bencku was on his way to the Second Cape, but he might as well have been heading in the opposite direction, toward the town center and the bus stop.
    The sound of a car engine suddenly could be heard in the middle of that early morning. It was a Jaguar, one of those antique models, very nice, and it was white. It came driving fast and everything happened in a moment, he became so surprised that he stepped down into the ditch.
    She was sitting in the backseat, her face pressed up against the window. He saw her, she saw him, it was going so quickly, but still. A moment. And presto it was gone. Presto the car had driven away and he was standing there alone. Alone in the District, alone in the ditch. Hand in the air—had he thought of it as a wave?
    But this he was sure of, he remembered it for real. She had looked crazy. She had not been herself, not at all. He could not explain in what way. But that expression she had, one she had