The Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

National Park. We’d been driving all day before we spotted our first sequoia tree through the car window. My dad pulled over to the side of the road, and everyone piled out to go take a closer look. I didn’t really want to, because even from that distance the tree’s size gave me the willies. So I stalled, helping my mom get the twerps out of their car seats while my dad and my bother ran ahead.
    Eventually I made myself walk toward that gigantic tree as it got bigger and horrifyingly bigger. I always make myself do stuff that scares me, always. But by the time I was standing at the base of its mammoth trunk, I could barely breathe.
    I looked around at my family. There was my dad, fiddling with his stupid camera. My bother was stalking imaginary bears with his toy gun. Even my mom was fussing with the twerps as if the tree towering over us was just any tree. Why did no one see what I saw, or feel as I did? Didn’t they get it?
    Then a woman park ranger in uniform came up and calmly told us that the giant sequoia was two or three thousand years old. Two or three thousand ! And it had grown from a seed the size of an oatmeal flake.
    She pointed to the black marks on its trunk and said they were from forest fires. Ancient and modern fires, many fires over the tree’s long life, each burning a little deeper into its flesh.
    That’s when I got really dizzy. The black marks reached high up the trunk of the tree. Forty, fifty feet up. That meant the flames were way over our heads. There’d be no running from a fire that size. In a fire like that I’d be burnt to a cinder in an instant, as if I were nothing.
    Everything about that forest was so many times bigger than anything in my imagination that suddenly, looming dinosaurs seemed possible. The whole scale of the world was off, shrinking me to the size of an ant. If that tree fell on me . . . if one of those fires kicked up . . . panic made my mouth go dry.
    I wanted to go home, escape from that place where a speck of seed, a tiny spark, could grow so huge. Where things lived so much longer than I possibly could. The thought of my short life, compared with the life of the sequoia, gave me a hollow, aching fear. But no one else was upset. My dad told us to smile and he took a picture of all of us with the park ranger.
    I couldn’t eat or sleep that night. I thought I’d throw up just thinking about those trees towering over our cabin, growing taller and taller. My mom thought I was weirded out from altitude sickness.
    Now I looked at the baby fire in Darcy’s fireplace, but I wasn’t fooled. It was pretending to be tame and innocent, but I knew that given a chance, it could become a huge wildfire, raging higher than Darcy’s house, devouring the whole neighborhood in an instant.
    â€œThe fire’s so pretty,” I heard Renée say. And Brianna sleepily agreed. I closed my eyes and dug deep into my sleeping bag.
    Of course, if I’d said anything about the power or destructiveness of fire, the girls would all be quick to agree with me. They’d scurry to tell horrid fire stories, trying to outdo one another. They’d interrupt one another, falling over themselves to show how well they understood me—trying to prove that they felt just as I did. But left to their own meager imaginations, they all thought fire was pretty.
    I pretended to sleep.

Maya
    M Y ROOM WAS HAUNTED. Even in the dark I could see the rhinoceros I’d won at the carnival at Candace’s church. I closed my eyes, but they popped back open.
    My head ached from crying and from trying not to cry. My cheeks were chapped. I crawled out of bed, turned the light back on, and squinted against the glare.
    I had to exorcise my room, purge it of ghosts, chant cleansing incantations, burn incense, light candles—do something to get those girls out of there. I needed to reclaim my room. Make it mine and only mine.
    I started a pile on the floor: