These Gentle Wounds Read Online Free PDF

complication. At the same time, the thing that lives in the pit of my stomach is almost forcing me to push myself through that window. I feel like a little kid who thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t get a certain toy. It’s stupid. But my heart is pounding hard and I can’t resist the pull of all that air and free space.
    Kevin grabs the screwdriver and holds it up in front of my face, trying to look tough.
    â€œFifteen minutes,” he says, looking at his watch. “You can pay me back by helping me with this damned paper for English.” That really means he wants me to write it for him, but it’s a small price to pay.
    I snatch the key out of his hand and am halfway out the window before he finishes speaking.
    â€œ … and when he gets home, we’ll talk to Jim.”

    We sit on the roof side-by-side. One of Kevin’s hands is wrapped around the bottom of my sweatshirt, pinning me to the shingles. If I really wanted to, I could pull away, but I let him hold on to the illusion that he’s protecting me. He doesn’t say it anymore, but he thinks that if he’d stayed home, he could have stopped Mom. So I let him feel like he’s keeping me safe now, even though the things that can hurt me are mostly inside.
    From up here I can see the tops of all the bare winter trees in the neighborhood. I can see the whole parking lot over at the elementary school. Closer to us, there are birds in the heated birdbath of the house next door, and the stars are just starting to come out.
    â€œRemember our bird?” I ask.
    Kevin sighs and nods. He hates when I talk about stuff from before.
    When we were little, Mom bought us a bird. It was a parakeet, I think. Green and yellow. Every morning Kevin and I would make sure it had food and water. Sometimes we’d let it out of the cage and it would fly around my room, always landing on the highest spots: the curtain rods, the shelves. After a while it even learned to come back when I whistled for it.
    One day we came home from school and it was gone. The cage wasn’t even there, and when I asked Mom about it, she just looked at me and shook her head. “Sorry, sweetie. He thought it was making too much noise.”
    I never had the courage to ask what happened, whether my father killed it or let it go. But I like to think of it flying free, perched happily in a tall tree somewhere. Maybe it’s even one of the birds I can see, although you don’t see a lot of parakeets sitting in trees in Michigan.
    â€œWhy do you think he’s showing up now?” I ask, hoping Kevin will have some insight. In all the time I spent in the closet, I couldn’t come up with a reason that made sense. It isn’t like my father stuck around after Mom and the kids were gone.
    Kevin sighs and pulls his jacket tighter around him. He has more reason even than I do to hate my dad. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s got a girlfriend or something and thinks he can handle a kid? Maybe he just misses you?”
    Something about the thought of my father missing me makes me shiver. I catch myself bringing my sleeve up to my mouth and force it back down again. Before all this, things had been cool for a while. I’d been cool—maybe not totally normal, but good. Now I’m back to being a mess.
    â€œI wish I knew what Mom was thinking,” I say to the darkening sky. I try to pretend, even to myself, that The Night Before never happened, that I have no idea why she did what she did.
    Kevin doesn’t know about that, so he just knocks his shoulder into mine. “That’s a puzzle we’re never going to solve. You know that. Whatever crazy-ass idea she had in her head was her being screwed up. Don’t start blaming yourself again, okay?”
    I nod again, because that’s what he wants me to do. If I’m not careful he’s going to start getting angry and irritated with all my questions. So I ask the real one