Read Online The Girls of Tonsil Lake by Liz Flaherty - Free Book Online Page A

kill yourself? How could you forget for one forny frigging minute how precious life is?”
    “Okay.” Done with the underwear, I counted out shorts and shirts. “Number one, it was an accident. Number two, it was an accident. And number three, it was an accident.”
    She wasn’t listening. Sometimes I thought she never listened.
    “What did you expect us to tell Sarah and Tom? ‘Well, hey, kids, she’s dead, but she looked real nice lying there.’ That would have been a great comfort to them.”
    I laid socks up against the tops that matched the shorts, coordinating their colors, and thought about my kids. Sarah, the beautiful veterinarian at the clinic on the edge of town, who seldom gave me the time of day. And Tom, who twelve years ago had moved in with his father as a troubled thirteen-year-old. My son had been in and out of detox so many times I could hardly keep track of his address. The only time I was sure of it was when he called and asked me to send money.
    “Somehow,” I murmured, “I don’t think they’d have needed a lot of comfort. Are you taking anything to dress up in?”
    “No! Why are you worried about clothes when you damned near died less than a week ago? I swear, Suzanne, sometimes I think—”
    “Shut up, Andie.” I got into the bottom drawer, searching for sweatshirts. When I straightened and looked at her, she was staring at me.
    “What?”
    I almost grinned, but not quite. “I said shut up. And listen. I did not try to kill myself. The end.”
    “But all that booze and those pills,” she said. “Suzanne, you don’t do that kind of thing. None of us do. Remember the pact?”
    Of course I remembered it. We’d made the pact the day Vin’s stepfather’s old Mercury had found its way to the bottom of Tonsil Lake. We’d sat on the bank and watched the men fish the car out of the lake with a winch attached to a wrecker. The men had looked up at where Vin’s mother stood and shaken their heads.
    Mrs. Hardesty hadn’t even looked over at where her daughter waited with Andie, Jean, and me. She’d just turned and gone back to her trailer, supported by Jean’s mother and mine—which was like the blind leading the blind.
    We’d moved closer to each other so that all our shoulders touched, and we’d watched as they loaded Mr. Hardesty into a black bag and zipped it closed before carrying him up the bank to where an ambulance sat.
    I looked at Vin and saw that Andie and Jean were looking at her, too. I wondered if I looked as sick as they did. Although there was no emotion showing on Vin’s face, I understood the relief in her eyes. We’d all done our share of eluding Mr. Hardesty’s advances when he had a snootful; we also knew Vin had been unable to escape.
    Actually, we knew a lot of things; it had been a very long day that had started in those darkest hours before dawn. A day that had started bad and gotten worse, ending on sins and secrets.
    Jean finally spoke. “I think we should make a pact,” she said quietly.
    Andie snorted. “We’re thirteen, Jean, not little third-graders or something. And what good’s a pact going to do anyone?”
    “It could do us some good,” said Jean. “I think we should agree we’ll never let ourselves get out of control because of alcohol or drugs, and if we find ourselves heading that way, we should call the others.”
    I liked this, even though I couldn’t say things as well as Jean did. “And the others can’t get mad or refuse to come.” I scowled at Andie when I said that. She was always mad.
    Including now. “It’s dumb,” she had said angrily, starting to get up. “This whole thing isn’t because of drugs or booze. It’s because—”
    Jean’s next words stopped her. “And there are things we’ll never tell another living soul unless we all agree.”
    “I’ll agree to it,” said Vin quietly. “I’ll swear.”
    Jean put out her hand and Vin laid hers on top of it. I put mine on, resplendent with Passionate Plum