Read Online Summer of the Gypsy Moths by Sara Pennypacker - Free Book Online

parking lot. George was already dragging the barrels out of the truck bed. I slid out and joined him.
    He pulled a rake out. “Only got the one. You girls take a walk. I’ll just be a few minutes here.” He snapped a leashonto Treb’s collar and handed it to me. “Watch him, now. He finds a dead fish, a dead gull, out here, he’s gonna roll in it. Once he found a seal. Oh, boy, what a smell—took me a week to wash it out.”
    I took off toward the water and was surprised when Angel followed. She never went anywhere near the water—didn’t even want to look at the ocean from a distance, which was kind of hard to avoid if you lived on Cape Cod. Angel managed: She kept her bedroom shades down, ate her meals at the chair facing the refrigerator, and generally pretended we were living in Kansas.
    Angel parked herself on a flat boulder at the base of the first jetty, shoulders hunched as if it were cold, facing away from the sea with her long black hair hanging like drawn drapes. I walked along the edge of the water, Treb trotting beside me, stopping every few feet to nose up some seaweed or sniff at a crab. But then I turned around, feeling guilty. Here I might have just had a memory of my father, while Angel couldn’t even look at the ocean.
    Angel never once mentioned her father. Louise had told me how he’d died, though: When Angel was seven, he’d gone down with his scalloper in a freak squall. The boat took on water, went down fast. They had an extra hand on board that day, someone’s cousin. One more than the boat was fitted out for. As the captain, Angel’s father hadhanded out the survival suits, and because of the extra guy, there hadn’t been one for him. He drowned fifteen minutes before the coast guard got there.
    â€œPuh. Cutting corners” was Louise’s take. “And with that motherless little girl needing him.” She’d scowled into the dishwater as though she would have had extra lifesaving gear on board any boat of hers .
    I walked back and sat down beside Angel. She ignored me as if I were another rock on the jetty, but Treb worked his way between us and sat panting and wet with a satisfied dog smile. I practiced in my head what I might say about her father, about how heroic I thought he was. Before I could find the right words, though, Angel got up and walked away, down the beach. I stroked Treb’s ear and watched her.
    Angel walked the shoreline, not looking at the water, but not looking inland, either. She was focused on something ahead of her. She drew up behind a huge flock of gulls—maybe a hundred of them—resting on the line of seaweed left by the tide. The gulls were all facing offshore, into the breeze, away from us. They shifted, as if they were a little uneasy with a human so close behind them, then settled down again.
    Very deliberately, as though she were a conductor opening a symphony, Angel raised her arms. And all those gulls,all of them, at the very same instant, took flight! Those birds—they were Angel’s orchestra. Even from where I sat, a hundred yards behind, I could feel the powerful beating of their wings lifting my heart in my chest like hope.
    And through it, Angel just stood there, arms still swept up to the flock wheeling above her. I wished I could see her face.

CHAPTER 8
    G eorge dropped us off and went to start the lawn. The first thing I did was waft a fresh coating of Febreze over Louise, spraying extra long, since I didn’t think the manufacturers were considering decomposing bodies when they came up with the instructions. I pulled the door shut, hard.
    Angel was in the kitchen, staring into the open refrigerator. She took a sleeve of American cheese out and peeled off a couple of slices, then passed it to me. “We missed breakfast. And lunch.”
    I ate a piece, peering into the fridge next to Angel, andstarted calculating. “She shopped on Wednesdays. She cut her