The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Read Online Free PDF Page B

was just in the van a little while ago, she thought over and over. Just in the van, the back seat of the van, listening to them snipe at each other. And then she thought of her brother’s angry voice drifting through the trees: —don’t know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong! It occurred to her that those might be the last words she would ever hear Pete say, and she actually shuddered at the idea, as at the sight of some monstrous shape in the shadows.
    Her tears dried up more quickly this time and the weeping wasn’t so intense. When she got to her feet again (waving her cap around her head almost without realizing it) she felt halfway to being calm. By now they’d surely know she was gone. Mom’s first thought would be that Trisha had gotten pissed at them for arguing and gone back to the Caravan. They’d call out for her, then retrace theirsteps, asking people they met on the trail if they’d seen a girl in a Red Sox cap ( she’s nine but tall for her age and looks older, Trisha could hear her Mom saying), and when they got back to the parking area and found she wasn’t in the van, they’d start getting seriously worried. Mom would be frightened. The thought of her fright made Trisha feel guilty as well as afraid. There was going to be a fuss, maybe a big one involving the game wardens and the Forest Service, and it was all her fault. She had left the path.
    This added a new layer of anxiety to her already disturbed mind and Trisha began to walk fast, hoping to get back to the main trail before all those calls could be made, before she could turn into what her mother called A Public Spectacle. She walked without taking her previous, meticulous care in moving from point to point in a straight line, turning more and more to the west without realizing it, turning away from the Appalachian Trail and most of its subsidiary paths and trails, turning in a direction where there was little but deep second-growth woods choked with underbrush, tangled ravines, and ever more difficult terrain. She alternately called and listened, listened and called. She would have been stunned to learn that her mother and brother were still locked in their argument and did not know, even yet, that Trisha was missing.
    She walked faster and faster, waving at the swirling clouds of minges, no longer bothering to skirt clumps of bushes but simply plowing straight through them. She listened and called, called and listened, except she wasn’t listening, not really, not anymore. She didn’t feel the mosquitoes that were clustered on the back of her neck, lined up just below her hairline like drinkers at happy hour, guzzling their fill; she didn’t feel the noseeums caught and wriggling in the faint sticky lines where her tears were still drying.
    Her giving way to panic wasn’t sudden, as it had been at the feel of the snake, but weirdly gradual, a drawing in from the world, a shutting down of outer awareness. She walked faster without minding her way; called for help without hearing her own voice; listened with ears that might not have heard a returning shout from behind the nearest tree. And when she began to run she did it without realizing. I have to be calm, she thought as her sneakered feet sped past the point of jogging. I was just in the van, she thought as the run became a sprint. I don’t know why we should pay for what you guys did wrong, she thought, ducking—barely—a jutting branch that seemed to thrust itself at one of her eyes. It scraped the side of her face instead, drawing a thin scrawl of blood from her left cheek.
    The breeze in her face as she ran, tearing through a thicket with a crackling sound that seemed verydistant (she was unaware of the thorns which ripped at her jeans and tore shallow gouges on her arms), was cool and strangely exhilarating. She pelted up a slope, now running full-out with her hat on crooked and her hair flying behind