Read Online The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque - Free Book Online Page A

registered or gathered up by the authorities. Maybe there were places that were giving out vaccinations. Maybe someone would be interested in examining a girl who seemed to be immune. At any rate, hanging out in your best friend’s backyard, lazing around her pool and waiting for more people to die…that probably wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. I wondered what my teachers would say, if any of them were still alive. And I couldn’t imagine a single thing that would come out of any of their mouths.
    And still I stayed, practically frozen to the spot, scared to move, scared to leave, scared to stay. Eating another energy bar dipped in peanut butter and drinking a bottle of water and trying to stay off the Internet. Trying harder not to check my phone, wondering if a text had come in that I’d somehow not noticed.
    But of course every time I looked at it, always telling myself I shouldn’t, there was nothing there.
    Finally, I gave up and called Jen’s cell.
    Straight to voicemail.
    Her phone was off.
    I called the home number.
    Mrs. Waverly’s pleasant voice asking me to leave a message after four long, agonizing, empty rings, a muffled bit of which I could hear from outside by the pool.
    “Hi, it’s…” I hesitated.
    They’re all dead , I thought and pictured my voice playing inside that house, calling out like a lost little child hoping someone would come and save her. And no one would hear. The dead didn’t listen.
    But I talked anyway, probably out of a sense of hope that I didn’t think I still had, but it must have been there anyway, under the surface all the time like an instinct rather than something I could really have identified.
    “It’s Scarlett,” I said. “I…I wanted to see if you were all okay still.” My voice cracked and a tear ran down my cheek. “I wanted…”
    There was nothing else I could say. There were all sorts of things I wanted, but none of them came into my mind; none of the thoughts were strong enough to push past the idea that the house I sat here and looked at, the house I’d spent so much time in, laughing and just being …that it was now a house full of dead people.
    I clicked off.
    “Jen?” I called out, trying to aim my voice up toward her covered window. As loud as I could, “Jen? Are you still in there?”
    Of course she was still in there. What a stupid thing to ask. It didn’t occur to me then.
    “I’m still out here. Can you just let me know you’re okay?”
    The tears that had started when I was on the phone kept coming now, and it was hard to choke out the words and get them loud enough to be audible to anyone still alive inside the house.
    “Please?” I begged.
    And then I dropped back into the chair.
    And I cried, and I cried, and I cried, my head in my hands as though I was ashamed of my tears and trying to hide myself from anyone who might see or hear me.
    I think I cried for it all then…for my parents and sister and brothers, for all my friends, for Jen and her family, for the people who’d died in front of me and died on the news, and died, and died, and died. And I cried for myself, for all the things I’d hoped life would bring, for graduation and college and falling in love and getting married and having babies, for all the things I’d ever thought I’d see or do, none of which I could have articulated that afternoon, none of which was specific. It all just came pouring out of me in a deep gray wash of agony and loss and emptiness that I knew I’d never fill no matter what the people who survived were going to do with orphans like me, no matter what sort of life I could piece together out of what was left around me. And I cried because I was scared, really scared of being alone with nothing and no one to count on.
    I cried because I didn’t want to die. By that point, I think I’d come to accept the possibility that I really might be immune to the disease, but that wasn’t the kind of death I feared. Instead, I think I was