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

terrified of being just fifteen and not really knowing a thing about how to take care of myself. I knew I was going to have to figure everything out on my own, and with every decision I made about what to eat or where to sleep, I would run the risk of messing up, of poisoning myself or putting myself into a situation that wouldn’t have been dangerous in the old world, but in the new one, this one where I was on my own…who could say? There’d be a thousand ways to die every day, and as I sat there and cried, I worried that there was so much unknown.
    After a while, I stopped. I’d cried myself out and just sat there with my head on my folded arms, completely drained. My face ached from sobbing, and tears and snot had run past my lips once I’d given up on wiping them away. Jen’s dad could have burst out of the house, yelling at me to leave, and I don’t think I would have lifted my head—not for him, not for Jen, not for anyone. I was done, spent.
    Exhausted, I actually fell asleep then.
    When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I wiped at my eyes and re-did my pony tail. Then I checked my phone for messages—nothing. The same with email on the computer. None of my friends were active on Facebook, nor had they been for hours.
    I pushed the chair back and took a deep breath.
    I was hungry, and I didn’t want more peanut butter.
    The Waverlys’ back door was just across the yard with its plastic-covered window and shiny brass doorknob. I let out a sigh and said, “Brave new world.” Then I walked around the pool and began looking for something to break the window with.
    I decided on a ceramic snail in one of the planters, hefting it for a moment before approaching the door. The snail was about ten inches long and weighed maybe a pound. I wondered if it would break before the window did, but decided to give it a try.
    I knocked first, loudly. “Hello?” I called out, my mouth as close to the window as I could get it. “Jen? Mrs. Waverly?”
    I put my ear to the glass. No signs of life came from inside the house.
    I called out, knocked, and listened again, and then a third time. Then I looked up once more to Jen’s window, half expecting to see her waving down at me with the plastic pulled away from the glass.
    “All gone,” I said. “Sorry, Jen.”
    I drew back the snail and swung it at the window, remembering to close my eyes at the last second. There was a crash, and I felt my hand passing through the window, opening my eyes a second later to see that both the snail and the pane had been smashed. Carefully, I pulled my hand back, checking for cuts and relieved to find none.
    Angry with myself, I realized I’d just run up against my first chance at serious injury, all my own fault. There had to have been a dozen different ways to break into the house, none of which would have had me running the risk of slicing open a vein in my arm. Fortunately for me, I’d been lucky, but I resolved not to make hasty decisions from now on.
    I dug the Swiss Army knife out of my backpack and went back to the window, slicing away at the plastic on the other side of the broken glass. It already had little cuts in it from the glass and the shattered snail, but not enough for me to reach inside. Carefully, I cut at the plastic and moments later had cut a hole that would give me access to the locks on the other side.
    There had been no reaction from inside the house when I’d broken the window, so I knew there was no point in calling out again. Instead, I reached inside, watching the edges of broken glass to make sure I didn’t cut my upper arm. Seconds later, I had the door unlocked.
    Jen’s cat, Cisco, bolted past me as soon as I had the door opened a few inches. I turned to watch him run around the edge of the pool and then jump to the top of the block wall with no effort at all. He walked a few feet along the top of the wall and then jumped down the other side, not looking back once. “Good luck, Cisco,” I said, hoping