The Lottery Read Online Free PDF Page B

fallen out of his wheelchair pocket. Then a quiet whimpering made her look up. Forgotten by them both, the girl who’d been attacked was sittingnearby, hunched in the wet grass, her arms around her knees, rocking. Odd cries came out of her.
    “Hey.” Tentatively, Sal touched her shoulder. “You all right?”
    With a harsh scream, the girl swung at Sal’s hand, knocking it from her shoulder. Sal jerked back in surprise and the girl began pounding her own head with both fists — whack, whack, whack — quick and frantic, directly on each temple.
    “Oh my god!” Sal tried to grab the girl’s hands.
    “Sal, don’t.” Brydan pulled at her arm. “Back off.” “What do we do then?” demanded Sal. “Watch her hit herself?”
    “I dunno.”
    They watched in silence as the girl continued to pound her temples, rocking and moaning. Sal couldn’t help glancing at her watch. Twenty to nine — they were going to be late. Uneasily, she picked up the rest of Brydan’s scattered books, drying them with her sleeve before sliding them into the pocket on the back of his chair. The girl kept rocking and hitting herself, Brydan watching her dully. Then, as Sal picked up his clarinet case, the girl’s voice changed into tiny sliding cries, as if she felt helpless in her own throat.
    Sal’s throat locked, she forced a swallow that went endlessly down. The way the girl was crying, that voice — she hadn’t heard it for so long she barely recognized it, but there it was, her own voice coming out of the other girl’s mouth. Suddenly she was deep in memory, her bedroom quilt twisted tight around herself, the same wild cries coming up her throat. There had been no one to help her then, her mother and brother locked into their own pain. Alone in her room, completely alone, she remembered burrowinginto the inner darkness, going down, way down — past the sound of her heartbeat, past thinking, down to where there was nothing but silence. At first she’d thought she was dead, but then she’d realized she was waiting — for what, she didn’t know, just that she’d reached the end of everything she had and something had to come to her, touch her, give her what she needed to go on.
    What had come to her, alone in that darkness, had been a voice, a deep blue voice that sang without words. It had come to her as if it knew her, as if it had always known her, as if it knew exactly the way her heart had once sung and the melodies it needed to hear again. For months after her father died, Sal had gone into her room, curled up alone, and waited for the blue voice to find her. Then, for some reason, she’d stopped — stopped so completely that for seven years she’d forgotten about the voice and its aching beauty until now.
    If she could somehow reach into herself, find the deep peace of that voice and share it with the whimpering girl in front of her . . . But how? The voice had come to her only in dreams and daydreams, inside her head — Sal knew her physical singing voice was nothing anyone would choose to listen to. Still, there was Brydan’s clarinet. As the hunched girl continued her wavering cries, Sal dropped to her knees and fumbled with the clarinet case, suddenly feverish to get the instrument unpacked.
    “Here.” She shoved the reed at Brydan. No way was she putting herself through a first-degree mastication of someone else’s germs. “Suck on this.”
    Quickly she joined the clarinet’s parts, then took the moistened reed from Brydan and slid it onto the mouthpiece. His eyebrows rose and she shrugged. Neither ofthem were virtuosos — that went without saying. How could she explain a phantom blue voice to him, except to say she probably felt it the way he felt his missing feet.
    The girl’s forehead was red with hit marks. Tentatively, Sal blew into the clarinet. It squeaked, no surprise. Then a low C caught and held. Not bad — no trembles or cracks. She thought of the blue singing voice, the way it had come to