The Lost Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

hairs on her back.
    Sean reappears. “Apparently, she’s—”
    “Difficult,” I guess.
    “Yeah. When they’re all together, she is generally disruptive. So they put her on her own whenever she’s particularly difficult.”
    “It won’t make her behave,” I say with certainty. “Look at her. She’s stubborn. They’ll just have to accept her for what she is.”
    There’s a smile in Sean’s voice. “You like her.”
    I nod absently.
    After another half hour, I regretfully leave the elephants behind and follow Sean back in the direction of the reptiles. For a while there, with the smell of elephant and wet grass around us, I forgot about the Weavers. Now they’re back. I push them into the furthest corner I can find, but their murky, half-remembered faces keep coming back like a persistent jack-in-the-box.
    Sean and I buy a box of popcorn and a Coke to share and wander around while we finish them. I sip the Coke noisily through my straw.
    “Which way?” Sean asks me when we reach a fork. “Reptiles or birds?”
    “Is a turtle a reptile?”
    “More reptile than bird, I reckon,” says Sean, grinning, “so we’d better go that way.”
    There’s a girl on the path ahead of us. She has dark hair and eyes like me. She falls and starts to howl. Her father leans down and kisses her knee and wheedles a laugh out of her. And for no reason at all it makes me think of the Weaver who made me. Of how he will never pick me up when I fall.
    I want to be human so badly it hurts.
    “Look at me,” says Sean, and the tone of his voice makes it clear he knows how I feel. “You’re different. We’ve always known that. But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Being different doesn’t make you something less than the rest of us.” I open my mouth, but he cuts me off. “And it does mean that you are not Amarra. You’re someone else. And you’re important. As a girl , not an echo. No matter what the Weavers take from you, you matter. To all of us.”
    I stare at him. “I’ve always wanted to be a girl. Only a girl. To not be ‘the echo.’”
    “You’re not ‘the echo’ to me.”
    “But it doesn’t make me any less of one.”
    “So?” he demands. “There’s nothing wrong with being an echo. You step in when someone else dies. That’s pretty glorious, don’t you think? You’re an angel among mortals. Echoes are asked to sacrifice everything to make another family, other people, happy. To give them hope. You are hope.”
    He gestures at the little girl and her father on the path ahead. “Think of how he would feel if something happened to his daughter. But if that girl has an echo somewhere, he might find her again. He might get her back.”
    I’ve never looked at it quite that way before.
    “Dad used to say that if he could have an echo made for every person he loves, he’d do it.” He looks me in the eye. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of what you are. Or of not being like us. You should wear it like a badge of honor.”
    I stare at him for a long time, and he stares back, until I can no longer see anything beyond him but a blur, and he’s the only clear thing in the world.
    Then his phone vibrates and the spell is broken. He checks his text. “It’s Lucy,” he says.
    Lucy. It takes a second to pierce my thoughts. For a moment there, I had completely forgotten he had a girlfriend.
    But I still can’t help smiling. Because no one has ever said those things to me before. I look at the father and his daughter, but not with envy or longing this time. I imagine the man losing the little girl, like one of the five little ducks vanishing over the hill, and I think of the echo who could be good and perfect and replace her. I am not perfect, but I could be the thing that gives somebody hope. The thing that makes the loss of each little duck a bit less painful.
    It doesn’t make everything okay, it doesn’t fix much, but it does fix something . It does force me to look at things differently. For the