Alone at 90 Foot Read Online Free Page A

‘dark days.’ It could have been much worse.”
    â€œIt’s not healthy.”
    She taps the ashes onto the cement. “True. But there are many things more unhealthy. Say, playing in traffic, diving in a pool with no water, or standing in a field in the middle of a thunderstorm.”
    Mandeep laughs.
    Joanne continues to smoke. “There’s walking on thin ice and challenging a bull to a race. Eating pink hamburger and petting a rabid dog — “
    â€œGetting your teeth X-rayed without the lead apron,” pipes in Mandeep.
    We both look at her. She shrugs.
    â€œYeah, there’s that,” continues Joanne, “and don’t forget not buckling your seat belt, not wearing a life jacket, outrunning trains and jumping from a ten-storey building ...”
    Joanne goes silent. She stares at Mandeep. Mandeep stares back. Slowly, she begins to shake her head. Joanne turns to me, drops her cigarette to the step and squashes it with her toe. “I’m realsorry, Pam. It just came out. You know I didn’t mean anything by it.”
    â€œYeah, yeah, I know.” Which was true. But I hated dealing with this be-really-careful-of-what-you-say-around-Pam-or-she’ll-spaz attitude. That was one of the things about my mother jumping from the bridge that burned me. It instantly made me into some kind of freak. Some kind of fragile being that had to be tip-toed around so I wouldn’t shatter at the slightest word. It made me a special case. And as I think I’ve mentioned before, I have never liked to stand out.
    The day I returned to school after the funeral, it was, like, everyone was
so
nice. The teachers all gave me hugs. Joanne carried my backpack and stuck by me like a crutch. She interrogated anyone who came close to talk to me, demanding their motives before they could speak. Even Sarah McMurtry, who hadn’t talked to me since I cut her Barbie doll’s hair when we were four, scrambled to pick up my pen when I dropped it during French. I hated it. I hated being singled out and I hated the shifting eyes and the hush that fell over my friends when I approached.
    â€œIt’s just that, well, no one knows what to say,” Joanne told me. “I mean, like, well — you know — okay, it happened like this.”
    And she told me what happened the day theyfound out my mom had jumped off the suspension bridge.
    I’m going to have to interrupt for one minute here before I tell Joanne’s story. I’m going to tell you about crossing the suspension bridge. Then, what she had to say will make more sense. Okay, it’s like this:
    Crossing the Lynn Canyon suspension bridge is not just strutting onto this wooden structure that’s at the same level as the ground you’ve been walking on. It’s more like, sort of, this event. When you first stand high up on the platform leading onto the bridge you get this rush. You suck your breath in because you are not only standing where the bridge begins, but at the very spot where the gorge drops a hundred and sixty feet to the creek. And although you know in your head that swinging bunch of cable, wood and chicken wire has not fallen down yet, common sense tells you it’s not smart to walk off the edge of a cliff. So you stand there, looking across to the other side, then down at how you’re supposed to get there. Now, because the bridge has this major dip in it, you clamp your hands to the cables on each side and you don’t step so much, but more like dive onto it. At first, you try to control your speed, but the bridge drops steeply into the gorge and your feet get away from you. That’s why they’ve added these strips of wood that act likespeed bumps. It can be swinging pretty wildly, so you may or may not want to stop in the middle, depending on your strength of nerve. Then you begin to climb up the other side. You go slower because of how steeply it rises, but you’re also