Wonder When You’ll Miss Me Read Online Free Page B

always woke falling.
    Tony Giobambera’s hands were on his knees. His fingers were long and thin. On his right hand was a silver ring. I focused on it, on the pattern of it, but didn’t answer.
    I kept it all to myself, as though the power of words could make things come true. In the distance the fat girl spun and fell, spun and fell, a violent scratch of blue in the clear green day. She knew everything that mattered, everything there was.
    I inhaled and blew smoke up into the sky where it dissolved and disappeared. “Nothing dangerous,” I told him. “Nothing to be alarmed about.”
    There was a gentle breeze and the knife was warm in my fingers, warm against my leg. In the distance the fat girl fell. Tony finished his cigarette and ground it into the bleachers with the heel of a scuffed black boot. “I oughtta go,” he said, looking straight ahead. “You need a ride?”
    I felt the knife’s smooth shell and tried to think, but my answer came quickly. “Sure,” I said.
    I followed him up the hill and was careful not to look over my shoulder, though I felt the bleachers behind me like a living, breathing thing. I knew the fat girl was back there too. I knew she would catch up.

TWO
    A FTER I swallowed all those pills, I woke in Gleryton Hospital. Later I learned I’d been in a coma for almost two days and only barely survived. My room was a creepy pale green. Sometimes I blinked and it was dark outside, blinked again and the day nurse was taking blood. Sometimes I lay alert for what felt like hours but were only minutes dripping slowly by.
    My mother stood by my bed. She had her arms crossed, holding herself and swaying back and forth. It was dark outside and I tried to say something. She leaned towards me and became my dead father looking nervous and worried.
    Daddy —I managed before I fell asleep again. Sleep was dark and dense, a syrupy underwater place without dreams.
    I don’t know how long I was there but one night we left. My mom had help from an orderly loading me into her car and then we drove out of town. I drifted in and out. She talked the whole time, her voice like a black fly, buzzing, buzzing, trying to find the window that would set it free.
    I woke to another wheelchair and a big dark house. Everything was dim then. I was dim, the world was dim. And the next thing I knew it was morning in a pale room with a sour smell and a small, red-haired girl, dressed in blue, staring out the window.
    I was woozy and thick. I tried to sit up but my body was made of rubber and wouldn’t cooperate. I rolled over on my side, grabbed the metal bar rimming the bed, and tried to pull myself up, but my arm was an elastic band: it just stretched and stretched, growing as long as it wanted but doing nothing to hoist me.
    â€œMeds.”
    I couldn’t see her face—her back was to me—but I knew the voice hadn’t been mine. “What?” My voice came out as tissue paper, thin and light.
    â€œMeds,” she said again. “They have you doped out of your mind.” Her words were pinballs flying around my head, repeating and repeating before they made any sense, and then it was one at a time, as though they’d each struck a flipper to be flung back into the room. “Might as well enjoy them,” she said. “It just gets worse.”
    It. Just. Gets. Worse.
    She never turned around. I wondered if she had no face, if her bright ratty hair hung all around her head. In my addled state this made sense. My eyelids were heavy and I drifted back into blackness. The last thing I thought about was the sour smell. Urine. Then sleep.
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    When I woke, the room was empty. The other side of the room was a mess: the area around the girl’s bed and bookcase was plastered in ragged pages from magazines that looked as though they’d been ripped out and taped to the wall in haste. Her bed was unmade but partially covered by an enormous