The Bargaining Read Online Free PDF Page B

now?”
    Outside, we kick the ball back and forth on the grass with the soundtrack of Dad scrubbing dishes vigorously and April nagging him to the brink of his demise.
    â€œYou know she’s gonna win, right?” Rob says.
    â€œShe’s never gone toe-to-toe with me before,” I say, already losing faith in my dad’s prospects. “I’m like this super hybrid between my mom and my dad. She doesn’t stand a chance.”
    Rob stops the ball under his foot. “When I was little, I hated chocolate.”
    â€œGod, you were one of those kids?”
    He holds his hand up. “Spare me. I came around­eventually, but that’s totally a product of my mom’s determination. She made me a chocolate cake for my fifth birthday, and I flat out refused to eat it. I sat there and stared at it until the candles burned down. She left it on the table the rest of the day. I didn’t know she threw it away that night, though, because for every day that summer, there was a chocolate cake sitting in the middle of the table, untouched. She baked a new cake every day and left it there for me, but I thought it was the same cake she just left sitting there, waiting for me to eat it. I couldn’t understand why she was so determined to make me like chocolate until I started going to all kinds of birthday parties the next fall.”
    â€œAnd they all had chocolate cake,” I say.
    Rob kicks me the ball. “She didn’t want me to be the kid who wouldn’t eat the chocolate cake. I don’t know. Maybe she thought that was the harbinger of death or unpopularity.”
    â€œMaybe she didn’t want you to be an ungrateful little snot,” I say.
    â€œSame thing,” he says. “Either way, you’re going to Point Finney in June, so be ready to get your hermit on. I heard it’s got a population of, like, five.”
    â€œThat’s comforting. Thanks, Rob.”
    â€œShe’s also going to make you take up an extracurricular at school between now and then. She’s big on extracurriculars. They build character or something. She’s already started talking about it to Dad, so it’ll seem like it was his idea. But that’s all her.”
    This I can’t bear. I’m already being hijacked to the Pacific Northwest backcountry for the summer. By my dad’s—excuse me, our dad’s—teenager of a second wife. She’s in there with him right now, talking about me like I’m hers to talk about. And she’s choosing my hobbies, too?
    â€œShe can try,” I tell Rob. “She can sure try.”
    NEWS TRIBUNE | TACOMA, Feb. 22, 2004—Efforts have slowed in the search for four youths who went missing January 19 in Point Finney.
    In a mystery that’s shaken this sleepy town northwest of Tacoma, residents are beginning to lose hope that the children will be found.
    â€œIt’s just so tragic,” says Claire Schuman, a lifelong resident of the former lumber town. “Nobody feels safe right now.”
    Mike Marlboro agrees. “My wife and I won’t even let our daughter walk to the store up the road anymore.” Marlboro, whose family has lived in Point Finney for four generations, owns a house less than five miles from where the minors were last spotted.“The things they say about those woods, I just won’t risk it.”
    Anna Riley (12), Jack Dodson (14), and brothers Russ (11) and Blake (12) Torrey of Point Finney have been missing for 34 days. The youths were last seen together around 3:00 p.m. on January 19 behind Keller-Finney Middle School in Point Finney. First reported missing by Joy Riley, Anna Riley’s grandmother, authorities issued a missing children alert the same day. Using a shoe determined to belong to Russ Torrey, police canines tracked the boy’s scent to the southern tip of the Kitsap Woodlands Reserve before the trail went cold.
    â€œI’ve been working for this