The Blue Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

the door and walk away. Maybe you should bake some Nerf balls. He might even eat them , I add.
    She opens her eyes wide when I say that, and looks at me as if she’s about to reach over and slap me. Part of me wishes she would. Part of me wishes she’d hit me in theface, in the cheek, right here, right below my eye and next to my nose, right where the blue girl punched me.
    But of course she goes home to de-bone her chicken and do whatever it is she does during the day. Tonight we’ll sit at dinner, heads bent over her squash, listening to my father swallow. Maybe she’ll bake more of the pies with the chocolate and the sugar and the things she thinks we don’t see. They seem to make her feel better, those pies, and I don’t want her to feel bad, I really don’t. It’s not my fault that she’s the way she is, or that my father is afraid of the television, or that I was the only one who wasn’t afraid to save a girl that everyone thought was dead. Or maybe it is.
    In biology we’re studying the epidermis and the three layers of skin that coat our bodies. Caroline and Rebecca and I sit at a table together so we can both copy Caroline’s notes. I don’t really need Caroline’s notes, or at least I didn’t used to, back when I still slept at night, and Rebecca tries to be dumb, because she thinks being both smart and pretty are too much. The guys in our grade all lean against their lockers and make a big show of watching Rebecca walk when we pass by, and Caroline and me, too, but only because we’re with Rebecca. Most of the guys are still tan from the summer, but it’s not an improvement, and the teacher,Mr. Davis, makes Greg stand up and uses his freckles as an example of whatever it is he’s trying to teach us.
    We’re all laughing at Greg because Greg’s not even supposed to be in the class since he’s a year ahead of us and because Greg is making faces at Mr. Davis when he isn’t looking; Mr. Davis, who lives out of town and never gets any sun. I’m drawing circles in my notebook as big as Greg’s freckles and lean over to watch Caroline writing “epidermal pigmentation” in big letters across the top of the page. I write it down too, because if I know one thing, and I don’t really know all that much, I know that whatever Caroline writes has to be important.
    Sometimes I want to ask her about my father’s brain, because Caroline knows a lot about the brain. Once, at a sleepover at my house, she told me all kinds of things she knows about the brain, about the stem and the synapses, the things that make Ethan so slow because his are all broken. I wonder if my father’s synapses are broken now, too. I reach over to write a note in Caroline’s notebook when I feel my breath go cold in my throat. Cold. Like hers.
    Mr. Davis calls on Caroline because he knows she’s the only one worth calling on. I think he must feel sorry for Caroline having a brother in the same class, a brother who failed his class last year. He hardly ever calls on me or Rebecca, and if anyone has a brother they should feelsorry for, it’s Rebecca, but she doesn’t feel sorry for Ethan because to her, he’s just her brother, not someone to be pitied. I understand that. I think about my dad, and I remember how I feel at night when I’m alone in bed and I smell my mother baking those pies in the kitchen and the smell of the marshmallow seeps under my door. I think of those nights when I see blue in the insides of my eyelids, when Buck doesn’t come to tell me his dreams or ask me to tell my story one more time. And I admire Rebecca for not feeling sorry for her brother, but I can’t help feeling just a little bit sorry for all of us.
    What about the girl? Caroline asks Mr. Davis. The one who lives out by the lake. The one who’s supposed to be blue?
    Rebecca drops her pen on the floor, and I can hardly breathe.