The Waters & the Wild Read Online Free PDF

almost. Weren’t these plants supposed to be delicate orange flowers that looked as if they once grew in some kind of Eden? He pulled down the dusty venetian blinds so that he wouldn’t have to look at the violent birds. Maybe he would sleep now inthe dust-mote-strewn dimness. His eyes stung and his head hurt from the all-nighter they’d pulled, but he didn’t feel sleepy.
    He was sitting on his twin bed, the one he’d had since he was a little kid. He even still had the Star Wars quilt, but he planned on flipping it over to the plain blue side if he ever had anyone over. In his lap was a book by Yeats. The poetry made him feel better. It made him think of her.
    For he comes, the human child,
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
    There was so much weeping now, Haze thought. Even in his own brief thirteen years.The twin towers crumbling before him on the TV screen, and the war alone would have been enough to make him want to cry and never stop. He wasn’t like the boy in the poem (except for his solemn eyes). There were no warm hillsides with lowing calves, no kettles singing him lullabies or cute little brown mice. No, there were angry birds of paradise tapping their black beaks on his window. There was a screaming kettle and frozen dinners in the tiny kitchen with the stained linoleum and cracked tiles. The waters were the Pacific Ocean off Venice Beach, so polluted that some days you couldn’t even go in; the surfers got infections. The sea levels and shorelines changing from an overheated climate. Far away, the ice melting, and dying polar bears. And the wild was—what? The tangled beach garden he had glimpsed behind Bee’s gate, burning up as theozone thinned. But yes, there was weeping, just more of it. The weeping that spanned continents and generations. Sarah understood. She carried the weeping of a three-hundred-year-old practice like a scar on her back, as if it were happening today, and in some ways it was. Pain didn’t ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.
    And yet maybe there was a different “waters and the wild,” somewhere hidden, farther than the eye could see. There was a girl who had taken his hand.

10
The Imposter
    D eena was sitting at Bee’s bedside when she woke late the next afternoon. She’d gotten home around ten in the morning and thrown herself down on the bed, still dressed, teeth unbrushed.
    â€œBaby?” Deena said, stroking her tangled hair. “Bee?”
    The light in the room made Bee’s eyes hurt, and her stomach shook as if inhabited by some nasty goblin.
    â€œWhat’s wrong? Are you sick?”
    â€œMy stomach hurts,” Bee said. “I feel like I’m going to vomit, but then I don’t.”
    â€œWe’re going to the doctor.”
    â€œNo, I’m all right. I think I’m just over-stimulated or something.”
    â€œDo you want to explain that one to me? Do we need to take you to buy some condoms?”
    â€œMom! No.”
    Deena felt Bee’s forehead again.
    â€œI’m okay, really. There’s just a lot going on.”
    â€œLike what?”
    What was she supposed to say? I’ve been having visitations from my doppelganger. This boy I like thinks he’s an alien. We got invisible together. Who knew? We flew. Yeah, right.
    â€œLet me take your temperature.”
    But Bee jumped out of bed, ignoring the belly goblin. “I’m fine, okay? I just needed to rest. You worry too much.”
    â€œThat’s what mothers do,” Deena said. “You’ll see. But not any time soon.”
    â€œThat’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”
    Bee thought of Haze, his smile, how he looked at her. There were a lot of girls that were already having sex, but she knew she wasn’t nearly ready. Would she ever be? She hadn’t even gotten her period yet.