The Drowning Girl Read Online Free PDF

hair that kept me talking. The hair and the eyes together.
    “Fuck all if I know. He’s not answering, and I’ve texted him like ten times already. Probably lost his phone again. He loses phones a lot, or they get stolen.”
    “If it rains,” I said again, thinking maybe I’d spoken too softly the first time and she hadn’t heard, but she ignored me. So I asked what all her stuff was doing piled out by the curb on a cloudy day, if she still wanted it. She pointed across the street at one of the more run-down houses, one of the ones no one’s yet bothered to fix up and gentrify and rent to people who wouldn’t have wanted to live in the Armory just ten years ago. The paint job made me think of cottage cheese, except the trim, which made me think of boiled cabbage.
    “You used to live there?” I asked. “Did you get evicted?”
    “Yeah, in a manner of speaking,” she said (again, I would say she growled, but…) and sighed and stared down at her books and CDs and everything else. “Bitch whore of a girlfriend kicked me out, which I guess amounts to pretty much the same thing as an eviction. The lease is in her name, since my credit’s lousy, because I defaulted on my student loans.”
    “I didn’t go to college,” I said. “My apartment’s only a couple of blocks over,” and I pointed off towards Willow Street.
    “Yeah, and?”
    “Well, it’s not very big, my apartment. But it
is
mostly empty, because I don’t have much furniture, and I don’t have a roommate. I have a car, though. It’s a tiny little Honda, so it might take us two or three trips, but we could get your stuff off the street. Well, the chairs might not fit.”
    “Screw the chairs,” she said, smiling for the first time. “They’re junk. The nightstand and the lamp, that’s junk, too. You’re serious?I mean, if I wait here another few hours, he might actually show up. I don’t want to impose on you or be a bother.”
    “It wouldn’t be an imposition,” I told her, trying to sound like I didn’t care one way or another whether she took me up on the offer. I wanted her to say yes so badly I probably had my fingers crossed. “I didn’t have any plans for the evening, anyway, and it would suck if it rained and all your things got wet.”
    “This isn’t even all of it,” she said. “The TV and computer and my gaming stuff, it’s still sitting in the downstairs hallway,” and she pointed at the cottage-cheese-and-cabbage-colored house again. “I wasn’t about to drag it out on the street, I don’t care how loud she screams.”
    “I’ll go get my car,” I said. “You wait here, in case anyone else comes along and assumes it’s just junk.” And I handed her my umbrella. She stared at it a moment, as if she’d never seen an umbrella before and had no idea what it was for.
    “Just in case it does start to rain,” I said. “Might at least help keep the books dry.”
    She nodded, though she still looked kind of confused. “You’re absolutely sure about this?” she asked. “I don’t even know your name.”
    “I’m India,” I told her. “Like the country, or India ink, but mostly people call me Imp. So you can call me Imp, or India. Either’s fine.”
    “Okay, Imp. Well, this is wicked nice of you. And I promise, I’ll get everything out of your way by tomorrow night at the latest. And my name’s Abalyn, which is what everybody calls me. Just don’t call me Abby. I hate that.”
    “Okay, Abalyn. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
    She looked worriedly at that low, worrisome sky and opened the umbrella. I hurried home and got my car. It wound up taking us four trips, because of the computer and the television and all her gamingstuff, but I didn’t care. She said she liked my galoshes, which were blue with yellow ducklings, and if black hair and green eyes hadn’t already gotten me, that would’ve done the trick.
    And that’s the day I met Abalyn Armitage.
    “I think I’ve been telling lies,” Imp