Read Online Looking for X by Deborah Ellis - Free Book Online Page A

Maybe not since the last time we’d seen each other.
    Tammy would understand. If she didn’t, I’d be doing chores and extra arithmetic again, but I’d deal with that when the time came.
    I took some deep breaths to calm down, to help X feel comfortable, the way I do with the boys sometimes. I’m never in a hurry when I see her. She probably thought at first that I was someone from the secret police, just pretending to be Khyber.
    I relaxed, then she relaxed, and once I started talking, she started eating.
    â€œMom’s got this idea in her head to send my brothers away. How can she do that? Parents don’t send their kids away!”
    I changed the subject then, and rattled on about the best places to find snakes in India, which I’d been reading about lately. By the time I ran out of things to say about snakes, X was almost finished her sandwich.
    â€œHave you ever heard the soup song?” X didn’t answer, of course, so I started singing it. As I was taking a deep breath before the final line, X spoke, so softly that I didn’t hear her at first.
    â€œI used to be a folk singer.”
    The deep breath I’d taken drained quietly out of my body.
    â€œI used to sing folk songs in Yorkville.” Yorkville is the part of Toronto where the hippies used to hang out in the sixties. I tried to imagine X as a hippie, with love beads around her neck and a guitar over her shoulder. I couldn’t picture it.
    â€œIs that when the secret police started following you?”
    X didn’t answer me. As I waited for her to say something more, I realized how late it had gotten. The afternoon had gone. Night time had come. By now, Mom and the boys would be back. I wished I’d left a note.
    X started singing. Her voice was raspy and tuneless, as though her brain could remember singing, but the memory hadn’t gotten down as far as her voice yet.
    â€œWhere have all the flowers gone?” she sang. I knew the song. I sang it with her. We sat on that park bench in the growing darkness, with bits of rain dripping down on us, and we softly sang to the park. We went from one song to another. I forgot the rest of the world existed.
    â€œHey, what is this? A bloody Girl Guide meeting?”
    The rude voice jolted me back to reality.
    A pack of skinheads had crept up behind us, and we were now surrounded.
    Tammy hadn’t needed to warn me to stay awayfrom skinheads. Everything about these folks smelled of trouble. (In fact, everything about them smelled.) They wore heavy black boots and military coats with Nazi symbols and skulls on them. They had shaved heads. They didn’t even have hair to cover up part of their ugly faces.
    At one time, they must have all been little pink babies, cute and gurgly, but that was as hard for me to imagine as X being a hippie.
    â€œNever judge people as a group,” Tammy was always saying to me. “Judge them as individuals.” But it’s hard to judge people as individuals when they travel in packs and all act the same.
    â€œX, let’s get going,” I said quietly, slowly standing up. These people are wild animals, I thought. I’ll keep calm, and move slowly, and they won’t attack.
    X had disappeared into her trench coat, like a turtle into its shell. She wasn’t moving.
    â€œThey shouldn’t allow trash like this in the park,” one of them said, kicking at X’s leg.
    â€œX, come on, let’s go,” I pleaded, but X acted as if she didn’t hear me.
    â€œX? What kind of a name is that? X? Short for Extra-defective?” The guy who said that was fat, bald and ugly. He looked like he swallowed beer cans whole. He thought he had made a joke, and he laughed. The other skinheads laughed with him.
    â€œWhat’s in the bag, Defect?” One of them grabbed for X’s suitcase. X was frozen.
    â€œLeave her alone!” I yelled, giving him a push. He laughed and pushed me back. I