The Year of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

alone, getting more nauseated with every step.
    School wasn’t always so bad. It used to just be school, with homework and people messing around in the halls and passing notes in class. I always decorated my notes with elaborate drawings and folded them into origami shapes,like Mom had taught me. Once, when Mr. Fitch had caught me passing a note, he’d taken it up and asked to see me after class.
    “If I catch you doing this again, Olivia, I’ll have to give you detention,” he had said. “You need to pay attention. You need to take notes. Sixth grade is a big year, an important year. Do you understand?”
    Every year was an important year, according to every teacher I’d ever had. It got exhausting after a while. “Yeah. I get it. I’m sorry.”
    Then he had sighed and turned the origami swan over and over in his hands. It had swirls and stars and forests all over it, like a quilt of sketches. “But this is quite beautiful, Olivia.” He had handed the swan to me and smiled. “You should do something with that. You really should.”

    But now? Since Mom left? I think I became a shadow at school more than anywhere else.
    People just didn’t get me anymore. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’d made it happen, in fact. It was embarrassing to be the girl whose Mom left her without even a good-bye. So I’d done my best to turn invisible. Like a sketch of me with my mouth sewn shut and my face scribbled over. That’s what I had created. No hot, bubbly feelings spilling out. No humiliating family secrets blurted out by mistake. No random screaming fits. I felt like doing that a lot—just throwing my head up to the sky and letting a scream rip out.
    But people generally don’t approve of random screaming fits, even when they might be perfectly justified.
    I even looked like a shadow. Short, skinny half-Italian girl with long black hair. Wearing my favorite striped socks (which I wore with everything) and my boots (ditto), whatever faded clothes I had left (I’d thrown out all the bright colors, keeping only the darks and the blacks), or whatever I found at the charity store. Shabby old jacket. Hair covering my eyes. Head buried in a sketchpad.
    And now one of Nonnie’s scarves tied around my arm to hide my burn.
    I used to have friends. Not real friends, I guess, but the kind you sit with at lunch and sometimes have sleepovers with, the kind you pass notes to in class.
    But friends don’t stick around if you don’t talk to them. Not even halfway friends do that. Some of them tried for a while: “Hi, Olivia. How’d you do on the test?” “Olivia! Can you do one of those pen tattoos on my arm?” “Olivia? Are you okay? I heard about your mom.”
    At first, I gave them one- or two-word answers. Then I stopped giving them any answers at all.
    Before long, I sat by myself at lunch. I sat by myself in class, even though I was surrounded by twenty other kids. I was by myself everywhere. It was easier that way.
    My sketchpad was a better friend than anyone else could be, anyway. As I turned off Gable Street and passed through the concrete courtyard of James S. KilloughIntermediate School, I held my sketchpad tightly to my chest.
    Like a shield.

    For a few days, everything went just like it was supposed to. I went to school. Class. Lunch. I watched for Henry and went the other way whenever I saw that bright red hair. I kept my head down and scribbled notes as much as I needed to so my teachers wouldn’t get suspicious. I went to The Happy Place after school and wiped tables and washed dishes. And the rest of the time, I drew.
    Mostly, I drew ghosts.
    I looked everywhere for them, every night—in the restrooms, in the rooms backstage, underneath every row of seats.
    Nothing. Not one shadow finger, not one gray foot.
    The picture I had of them in my head was pretty fuzzy, so I kept drawing them over and over, trying to capture the memory of them on the page. It wasn’t working very well; it’s harder than you