Words of Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the first tattoo she gave herself. She was using her four-color pen and chose blue ink, pressing so hard that it hurt. Beneath it, she drew a rose in red ink and a leaf and thorns in green. It looked professional. She admired it. REENA .
    This was the second time she had written the word Reena that morning. She wanted to write something else with stones on the hillside in a day or two. She practiced on her thighs. In black ink she wrote FIRE! And then in red she wrote YOU’RE ON FIRE, encasing the letters with jagged flames.
    Just then Floy pounded on the door. “Joselle, are you upset in there again?” she asked.
    Joselle hopped off the hamper, made sure her tattoos were concealed, unlocked the door, and greeted her grandmother holding her pen as if it were a cigarette. “I’ve never felt better, Grammy,” Joselle said, grinning. She waltzed down the hallway blowing pretend smoke haughtily. “By the way,” Joselle said, stopping and turning toward Floy, “what do you think is the worst way to die?”

7 BLAZE
    T he air was dizzy with insects. And Blaze was dizzy under the black locust tree. He had been twirling himself about, his arms outstretched like a propeller, until he was too unsteady to stand. He fell to the ground, and everything continued to whirl.
    He had been talking to Simon in his head. About his mother. One piece of information for each full turn. Making a game of it.
    She died when I was five and a half. Turn around . The last thing we did together was to ride the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds. Around . She was already very sick. And around . It’s my last memory of her. Faster . She was wearing a pink scarf. Faster . And there were blue rings under her eyes. Faster, faster, faster . . . stop .
    Blaze looked straight up. Things were slowing down. He was shielded by a gigantic green canopy that shimmered as the wind blew, throwing shadows across his body. The pieces of sun that filtered through were so bright they hurt his eyes. For a couple of weeks in the spring, the canopy was white and fragrant. And on a clear moonlit night with a breeze, the canopy was silvery, as if made of stars rather than leaves or blossoms. He never thought you could love a tree, but he did. The black locust was perfect—except for the thorns that spun out from the branches like teeth, making it nearly impossible to climb. Blaze took a deep breath. Summer afternoons on the hill smelled of heat and dirt and grass and weeds and laziness. And—lately—of vigilance, caution, suspense. Blaze felt like an alarm clock just waiting to go off.
    It had been two days since Reena’s name appeared on the hill. Blaze had reconstructed his semicircle of stones around the tree, each marker in its proper place. The other stones he left dotting the hillside here and there. Everything looked exactly as it should, and yet there was a peculiar feeling in the air, as if someone or something strange were lurking nearby. Blaze circled the tree several times, then glided down the hill toward home in a zigzag fashion, his legs scissoring the sunlight.
    He waved to Nova, who was bending over in her garden. She stood tall and waved back, calling out his name from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat. Blaze turned and cut across the lawn, angling toward Glenn’s studio. Blaze often peeked in one of the huge windows to see what his father was working on. He tried to be invisible and quiet, careful not to disturb Glenn.
    Glenn painted large canvases crammed with a multitude of figures and objects that were out of proportion in reference to one another. A man might be holding a plum swollen to the size of a basketball, or a woman might be walking a dog that was as large as a horse. Dragonflies and airplanes with the same dimensions flew side by side. Everyone in Glenn’s paintings seemed detached, lost in a cool, claustrophobic dreamworld. There was often a red-haired woman in Glenn’s