The Good Sister Read Online Free PDF

shadows, “Don’t, Sandra.”
    It’s him .
    What is he doing here?
    “I have a gun, and I’ll use it.”
    A whimper escapes her as she shrinks back against the locked door like a cowering doe helplessly waiting for the hunter’s kill.

Entry from the marble notebook
    Wednesday, September 4, 1985
    He came to my room again last night.
    I wasn’t feeling good so I had gone to bed early, but he woke me up. As usual, after he left I was so upset that I got no sleep, and I was exhausted today for the first day of school.
    I’m a sophomore now. At Mass on Sunday, I prayed that this year will be better than last, and that I might find a friend. But so far, it’s the same as last year. The other girls either look right through me like I’m not even there, or they stare at me like they feel sorry for me, or worse, like they hate me.
    I don’t know how I’m going to get through another whole year of this, let alone two more after that. If I complain, Mother will threaten to homeschool me again—that’s what she’s going to do with Adrian, poor baby.
    I would never survive that. Never. School might be miserable, but it’s my only escape. But I don’t think she’d really go through with it for me. She doesn’t want me at home all day, every day, where he could get to me while she’s out working. It’s not that she’s trying to protect me from him, because God knows she doesn’t do that. When I was little and it first started happening, I used to go crying to her, begging her to make him stop. I would get beaten and locked in my room, and I learned to keep my mouth shut. So she doesn’t try to keep me from him for my own sake. It’s for hers. I think that in some weird, warped way, she’s jealous. She’d be thrilled if I walked out the door one day and never came back. I would, too, if it weren’t for Adrian. I would never leave him here alone with them, ever.
    If I stay in school I can get a good job someday and then I’ll take him to live with me. We’ll move away and make a fresh start someplace—in a big city where no one will know us, or on a peaceful ocean beach—someplace where we can be safe and sound and far away from the two of them, and we’ll never look back. That’s the only thing that keeps me going.

Chapter 3
    F ebruary might be the shortest month of the year, but it feels exactly the opposite, Carley Archer decides as she strips off her wet parka on a dark winter Monday morning.
    February seems to drag on endlessly here in Buffalo, where regardless of what the calendar and the groundhog say, there are still at least two more months of depressing weather ahead—usually more.
    Carley drapes the hood over a hook in her locker, crams the rest of the puffy nylon coat into the narrow space, and slams the door, knowing that when she opens it later, it’s going to smell like mildew again. That’s what happens, she’s discovered this winter, when you hang a wet coat in a closed-in, dark place all day, every day. There are no open cloakroom hooks here at Sacred Sisters High School like there were at the parochial school where Carley spent the first nine years of her education.
    She takes a deep breath, air that smells of pencil sharpener shavings, old books, and, still lingering faintly, the fish casserole the cafeteria served for lunch on Friday. Time to get through another week.
    Backpack over her shoulder, she heads down the hall toward homeroom, keeping an eye out for Johnny, the part-time janitor.
    The first time she saw him, not long after she started school here last fall, he was outside at the edge of the parking lot, leaning on the rusty bike rack no one ever uses, simultaneously reading a book and peeling an apple. He was using a pocket knife and peeling carefully so that the skin dangled in a continuous red coil.
    He wasn’t great-looking—tall and wiry with black hair cut stubbly short—but there was something appealing about him. Carley assumed he must be someone’s boyfriend