Read Online A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan - Free Book Online Page A

softened a bit. “Hey, Farrah, I’m sorry, but this is serious. We’re not on a sleepover here. The guys who are looking for us have hunted and killed a lot of people.”
    I sat back down in my chair, silent. Neither of us was sure if I was going to cry, but we both knew that he hadn’t needed to bring that up again.
    Who knew the threat of tears could terrify a guy? John got up and grabbed our sleeping bags in one hand and fresh Cokes in the other. “There must be a fire escape off the exterior room there. Let’s sneak out for a second, then we’ll come in and get some sleep.” We walked through the only door in our cell into a huge exterior space with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of another warehouse. I wondered how many people the FBI had holed up in these buildings; if we’d see another fugitive sneaking out for a little sanity.
    John pulled up the rusty window and climbed through first. He held his hand out to me to help me through. The sun was setting, and it was getting cooler as we leaned back against the metal bars, pulling our knees up to our chins. John wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and I half thought he might keep his arm around me. It was a weird moment of noisy internal panic:
Is he making a pass at me? Gross, he’s like an adult. Am I even safe here? Who does this guy think he is? Oh no!! He’s taking his arm away! Please put your arm around me, pleeeeeease.
    “Are you excited about MIT?” John was making casual conversation, but it took me off-guard to hear it said out loud.
    “I guess. It’s a long way from Santa Monica, in every possible way. So, I guess so.”
    “You’ll love it.” John was looking out into the alley below us, scanning for I don’t know what.
    “How’d you finish college so fast?”
    He took a long sip of his Coke and smiled at me. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not just a pretty face either.”
    I smiled, a little embarrassed, and started scanning the alley for nothing too, while I thought about my new favorite word:
either.
He could have just said, “I’m not just a pretty face.” But he added
either. Either
can be an adjective (
I could lean over and kiss either his neck or his lips
), a pronoun (
His neck or his lips? Either will do
), or, like here, an adverb following a negative subordinate clause (
I’m not just a pretty face either
). I wondered if it could be a name. We could have a daughter and call her Either.
    I could feel him watching me and hoped I’d kept my mouth shut during that last bit of craziness. I turned to him quickly to check. “What!?”
    “Nothing.” A cold wind blew between the buildings, and he pulled the sleeping bag tighter and shivered a little.
    “Are you picking up Steven’s shoulder shudder there?” I said, laughing.
    He was trying not to smile. “Ouch, that’s harsh. The guy’s been through a lot.”
    “Like what? Schoolyard bullying?” Is it possible to have a really attractive neck? I’d never noticed anyone’s neck in my life, and now I could not stop staring at this one.
    The head on top of the neck was talking. “No, seriously, that thing he does is some sort of a post-traumatic tic. It’s a really bad story. You sure you want to hear it?”
    I knew I was going to feel either really bad or really terrified. So, no. “Okay.”
    “His first job at the FBI was on a task force to build weapons testing centers in the Southwest. He found a desert location where he figured they could do a little weapons testing without bothering anyone, not realizing that the desert is its own ecosystem and that Jonas Furnis was watching. The story goes that after the first day of testing, he was kidnapped from his bed and was kept prisoner for eighteen months. He was tortured brutally. They voluntarily freed him in the end, but not before they’d put him through months of electroshock therapy and cut off all of his fingers on his left hand. When he came back, he was doing that shudder thing all the