Walk Me Home Read Online Free PDF

into a five-star hotel. With room service. Something at the back of her brain registers the sadness of this. But if she focused on that, she’d lose this moment. So she pretends she doesn’t know it’s there.
    The first thing Carly does is unlace the new boots and ever so carefully ease them off. She has blisters on her heels. Bad ones. She can see that the heels of her black socks are soaked through, but she doesn’t know if it’s blood or clear fluid from the broken blisters or both.
    They’re good boots, as far as that goes. They give her feet a lot more support. Overall, her feet feel better than usual. But the boots are too big, so her heels don’t lock down right. They lift up and sink down with every step, rubbing against the stiff leather. Maybe they’ll break in. Maybe she’ll get protective calluses. Maybe tomorrow’s miles will be a nightmare, and she won’t be able to hide the pain anymore. Lots of things could happen from here.
    She peels off her thin socks.
    A big, ugly flap of skin drapes off one heel.
    She washes the worst foot first in one of the ancient pedestal sinks, yelping out loud when the liquid hand soap touches her heel.
    Jen sticks her head through the door. She’s been out in the main waiting room, kicking, and trying to bump and jiggle, the vending machine.
    “You say something, Carly?”
    “Nope,” Carly says.
    She washes her other heel, then wraps both feet in toilet paper and slides her clean pair of socks over that.
    Then she goes hunting.
    “Look what I found,” Carly says, holding the wire coat hanger behind her back.
    She walks to where Jen is sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring longingly into the only food-related vending machine. There’s also a soda machine, but Carly has no magic keys for that and no ideas. Both machines have been centered over a spot where the linoleum flooring is missing.
    “Money? You found money?”
    “Next best thing.”
    She shows Jen the wire hanger. It seems to take a minute to compute in Jen’s head. Carly thinks she can see raw data rattling around in there, waiting to fit. But Jen gets there eventually.
    “Get those corn chips,” she says.
    “I doubt it. They’re on the top row. I think we have to go with bottom-row stuff.”
    “OK, let’s see. Trail mix. Peanuts. Licorice. Potato chips. Peanut butter crackers. Which one should we get?”
    “
Which one?
Are you kidding me? We’re getting everything we can knock out of there.”
    In fact, Carly’s thinking maybe she can get multiple packages of each thing. But when she bends the hanger properly and pokes the peanuts down into the tray, she realizes that the one behind it will not mechanically push forward where she can get to it.
    Still, five items. That pretty much makes this Thanksgiving.
    She looks up through the high, dirty window. The station has outside lights on all four sides, making a nice glow for them to see by, while at the same time making it darker inside than out. So they can move around unobserved. Not that anything or anyone seems to be moving out on the street.
    She briefly wonders what day of the week it is.
    A huge tan moth beats his wings against the window from the inside. She can hear him. Tapping on the glass. She knows in her head it’s the light he’s after, but she can’t imagine wanting to get outside when you could sleep here. Even if she were a moth.
    “Where’d you find a hanger?” Jen asks, startling her.
    The peanut butter crackers finally fall, and Jen dives her hand into the tray to grab them.
    “In the office back there. There’s this pole where they can hang up their coats. And there was one wooden hanger and two wire ones. The money’s all locked up, I guess.”
    Jen eats peanuts in silence for a minute, then dives a hand into the tray when the trail mix drops.
    Then she says, “Hey. Carly. Just this once, can we…you know…just eat everything we’ve got? All at the same time?”
    “Sure,” Carly says. “Just this