The She Read Online Free PDF Page A

would not want anybody from school knowing where I was. I can't believe that she would want some guy to—"
    "She asked for you."
    I sat there in stunned silence, all
What the hell?
    "Her family spends the summers in West Hook." She watched me, and I stared just as blankly. So I had lived in West Hook a long time ago. That didn't make me a psychotherapist.
    "
And?
"
    "She was out sailing, and there was an accident. She hasn't been able to get past it."
    She kept staring, and behind her eyes I could see only black, like a major disturbance in the Force. I kept shaking my head because I didn't get how this related to me, and then suddenly I did. But it still didn't make a whole lot of sense.
    I laughed a little, then quit to say, "Okay, so you think ... because I lost parents in a boating accident way back, half my lifetime ago ... that I could be of some help to a girl who had a boating accident last summer?"
    She nodded, watching me. I thought of my parents sometimes. When I did, I usually saw one thing in my head: the color gray. Like a gray door; like a hatch onto a roof that was gray, locked, nailed shut. I mean, I had nice little^ memories of playing Frisbee with Dad, and Mom making me laugh sometimes. I wasn't some total repressive. I just liked my life with Emmett and Aunt Mel and didn't feel the need to go into that memory bank very often.
    I got sort of edgy watching Mrs. Ashaad fill out something that said "Underage Visitor's Pass" at the top. I tried to stay calm but couldn't help remembering last year: I'd had some very bizarre memory surges after some poor excuse for a human being actually slipped me acid at a party. I was too drunk for it to register until I was home in bed. Some totally great memories from my childhood surprised me by showing up ... and then they changed.
    At that point I figured somebody must have messed with me because I'm not normally so mentally energetic. But I got up out of bed and wrote down every last thing about my parents' deaths like it was happening again before my eyes. I thought it had to be some bizarre truth serum, some memory drug that someone had slipped me. But Emmett hauled me down to Pennsylvania Hospital the next afternoon because I was remembering some shrieking so plainly that I was actually holding my ears. He didn't like to talk about West Hook any more than I did, and he was also scared shitless that I might be dead of some drug poisoning by nightfall.
    The hospital lab showed it was just a small dose of LSD-25, which usually wears off in three to four hours. It had worn off. The only problem was that I was left with these awful memories. They didn't wear off so easily.
    I spent the school week zombified, then took my first trip to West Hook in a long time. I had such a bizarre experience down there that whenever I thought about it, it still seemed like a dream. The only important thing is, I came back with my sanity again, with a sixteen-year-old head on my shoulders, no longer wondering if my parents could have been eaten by something I had at one time called The She.
    Emmett would not have approved of my methods for getting my sanity back. So I never told him about going to West Hook. I never told him about the writing I did under the influence, either.
    "I don't see how I could help some sick girl, Mrs. Ashaad. I was just a little kid who, you know, saw it through a little kid's eyes, and eventually forgot a lot of it."
    "She's getting professional help. No one expects you to be a shrink. She just seems to want to talk to someone who's been through something similar to what she's been through. That's a normal, human response. I'm assuming it wouldn't hurt you to talk to a person in need."
    "No ... no," I muttered, but my mental alarm bell was going off madly. Emmett explains away my intuition as just me having a really keen perception for small details. Maybe a lot of the time that's true. Like I noticed Mrs. Ashaad had been careful not to mention the person's