Girl Saves Boy Read Online Free

but never do).
    Their second biggest fear was that I was going to kill myself. They asked me a few times whether I was having ‘urges’ (clearly they weren’t talking about the sexual kind, because that would have been freaky and they don’t tend to continue Sex Education past Year 10—though before then they deliver it liberally: for five years they brought the same nurse in, and she gave the same speech, and we watched the same bad ’80s video, and we had the same awkward Q & A), which, literally translated, means: ‘Been writing emo poetry, Jewel?
    Tried to slit your wrists, Jewel? Thinking about trying to OD on your grandfather’s arthritis medicine, Jewel?’ I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was an attention-seeker, I don’t know. I wasn’t going to kill myself— that would have destroyed my grandparents and pushed my mother over the edge (perhaps into a killing spree of her own) and, besides, I still held hope for my future as a bum in London or New York.
    I love last words. I wonder what mine would be, as I lay in a gutter, grey-haired and derelict in London or New York. I wonder what the last words of that boy that I saved would have been if I hadn’t been walking past the lake that night, if I hadn’t saved his life.

S ACHA
    From the moment I woke up the following Monday morning, the stolen garden gnomes on my shelf accosted me with their mocking cheery smiles and flamboyant red hats.
    That girl Jewel hadn’t let me be, and now not even inanimate objects would give me a break.
    Every noise seemed magnified. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and the sound of my eyelashes rustling was almost deafening. Slivers of light poured through the slats in the blinds, patterning the beige carpet of my room. The sun was especially bright, and the surround sound was fifty decibels higher than it should have been. The world was in high definition, but I just wanted to turn the TV show off.
    There was a clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen (the cupboard beneath the stove was a mess of aluminium frying pans and oven dishes that we rarely used, and that Dad was always accidentally knocking everywhere). I slumped out of bed.
    Across the hall in the bathroom, I splashed my face with water, avoiding my own reflection, instead admiring the mould growing around the drain. Cleaning was my job—not that Dad had ever assigned me chores, but if I didn’t clean the bathroom semi-regularly a whole army of bacteria would grow in there and eat us when we attempted to shower.
    Even a year after my mother had died, I still expected to see her in the kitchen. I still got that sickening crunch in my stomach when it was just Dad there. And don’t get me wrong, I love my father. But she was gone. Even in the house she never lived in I expected to see her when I woke up in the morning, chirping ‘Rise and shine’.
    But there was only Dad, with too tight a smile, knocking the pots everywhere, turning a dipping egg into a hardboiled one, the way my mother never did.
    ‘Hey.’ I hovered in the doorway, massaging my neck. I always slept at bad angles.
    Dad looked up. ‘Good morning, Sacha.’ He found the toaster and slammed it on the bench. ‘It’s gonna have to be Vegemite on toast today, buddy.’ His T-shirt was splattered with paint. There was a work in progress, as always.
    ‘You haven’t called me that for years,’ I said, sitting down on a stool at the bench.
    He brought the tub of butter over, and I pushed the bread down.
    Dad inhaled sharply. ‘I think you should stay home from school today. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. Especially about the lake on Saturday.’
    ‘I have to go. This is an important year. You wouldn’t believe the pressure the teachers are putting on us,’ I said, then jumped to another train of thought. ‘Do you think many people die from sticking a knife in a toaster?’
    ‘Are you trying to change the subject?’
    I stepped away from the toaster and poured myself a glass of water.