Read Online Nowhere Girl by Susan Strecker - Free Book Online Page A

tucked in my computer bag, and whenever I pulled them out for reference, I got a sort of wavy feeling thinking about him. Even though Gabby would never approve, I texted him. “Going to David’s for dinner at 7. You should come.” And then I wrote my brother’s address. He responded right away with “At Hope’s Place now. Will try to make it.”
    Sometimes on my way to David’s, I thought of driving with my mother down High Ridge Road while she frantically dialed her cell phone. It had been getting dark, and I could only vaguely make out the ghostly shapes of the oaks and maples along the side of the road. “Carol,” she’d said into the phone. “Tell David to wait outside. I am going to stop the car in front of the house, and he has five seconds to come out. No, everything’s not all right.” She’d thrown the phone down between us, but it slid off the console and landed on the floor by my clunky sneakers. Savannah wore cute canvas Tretorns on gym day, and she always made fun of my sensible shoes. When she twisted her ankle playing volleyball, she said it didn’t matter as long as she looked good doing it. I thought of that and tried not to know what I knew.
    My brother was waiting in Chandler’s yard when we drove up, jeans belted around the middle of his ass, hat on sideways, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Get in,” my mother said. Miraculously, David did. He smelled like pot. On the way to the hospital, he kept asking what happened. No matter how many times my mom told him Savannah had an accident, he kept saying, “But what happened?” until my mother finally said, “I don’t know, David. Jesus, don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?” And then he shut up, because she never talked to us like that.
    I’d been in the ER at County General one other time when I’d had an asthma attack in seventh grade after someone brought some kind of weird hamster to class. The school nurse dialed 911 while I lay wheezing on the small cot pushed up against the cinder blocks in her office. Three doors down in English class, Savannah was having a coughing fit.
    It seemed so different now, disorganized, frantic. The last time, they’d laid me down on a bed behind a blue curtain and given me an albuterol nebulizer. When the doctor came in to recheck my pulse ox, I was at 100 percent, back at school by fourth period. But now, the loudspeaker was paging doctors to oncology, to labor and delivery. In the waiting room, a man was holding a towel to his bleeding head, a girl was cradling a crying baby, and an old woman, oddly slumped in a chair, was completely still.
    Officer Tunney and the other cops were in the hall, standing around our pediatrician, Dr. Bassett, and when we got there, they made a break in their circle for us. Dr. Bassett touched my mother on the arm. “Come with me,” she’d said. My father had appeared, and the four of us, missing Savannah, left the cops behind and followed Dr. Bassett. I remember wishing Officer Tunney would come with us, but it was a vague thought, as though something buried deep in my subconscious knew I would be safer with him there. He was the only one who’d believed me that I knew where Savannah was. David, my parents, and I stood in a small room with suede furniture and southwestern art on the walls. None of us sat down.
    Dr. Bassett pushed up her rimless glasses. “Lyndie, Bob,” she said to my parents. “Savannah was hurt very badly.”
    My father had a spot of red sauce on his white oxford. It was Thursday, pasta night at the restaurant. He usually brought home leftover cavatappi, a chunky bolognese sauce, or vegetable lasagna layered with mushrooms and broccoli.
    â€œDid she fall and break something?” he was asking. “Did she have an accident?”
    My dad, the youngest of four and the only boy, had thought every little boy let his