Read Online Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis - Free Book Online

to hum beside me.
    Leaving on a jet plane
    Don’t know when I’ll be back again…
    â€œAll right, already,” I said as quietly as I could. “I get it.”
    She stopped humming and looked at me. “Do you, Faith? Because I hate to think I’ve been wasting my time.”
    I didn’t answer. Ahead of me an old lady whose hair was so thin her pink scalp shone through sat next to a guy in an army jacket leaning forward, reading something in his lap. The bus smelled like exhaust. I was tired, so tired.
    It was three forty-five. I had fifteen minutes before my appointment with Fern and I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to talk about how I felt or what I thought or my father or my mother or any of it at all. I didn’t want to say anything.
    We got off at our stop and the bus lurched away, leaving a small cloud of gray smoke and a quiet space where its noise had been. I whipped around. Behind me ugly apartment buildings punched the wide sky. Even the trees lining the sidewalk seemed sharp and hostile. I stepped off the curb and onto mulch and made my way to a weathered wooden bench, where I sat.
    I put my head in my hands and looked at my feet, tucked in their dirty suede sneakers. It was all so outrageously boring, all this talking. Where was the part of me that was angry? The part that made me want to claw the sky?
    â€œI’m right here,” the fat girl said. “Faith, I’m here.”
    She put her arm around me and pulled me to her, whispering all sorts of things. “We’re going to leave,” she was saying. “Honey, I believe in you. We’re going to survive and we’re going to have fun. You just watch. You just sit back and watch.”
    Â 
    I skipped my appointment. I was surprised that the fat girl didn’t try to talk me out of it, just looked over her shoulder at the Annex building for a minute, then nodded quietly and rubbed my arm.
    â€œMaybe it is time for a break,” she said. “Let’s walk around. Let’s go look at the pawnshops. Or…what do you want to do?”
    â€œThat’s fine,” I said. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do. The roads were mostly empty of people. Cars whizzed by, one after the other, but except for the occasional drooping old man on a bench, there weren’t many people on this stretch of Gleryton Road Extension. Then we came to regular Gleryton Road. Here was a band of old shops, many of which were now vacant. They had once been the center of everything, before the strip malls and shopping malls began to cluster outside the Yander section of Gleryton. I liked this part of town, its old-fashioned architecture and empty streets. The shops here were small and dusty or boarded up. They all had family names in faded letters: WALKER’S SHOE REPAIR , THOMPSON’S DRY CLEANING , J . LIPSKY FURNITURE . All the chain stores had opened in the malls. My favorite thing for a while had been to wander down South Cherry Road and stop in the three pawnshops there, just looking at the things people traded away.
    â€œWe’re near South Cherry and the pawns,” I said. We’d stopped at the intersection and the fat girl nodded from the curb.
    I took a deep breath. “But I want to go to the hospital.”
    She jerked her head like I’d spit and stared at me with narrowed eyes. “You want to skip Fern to go to the fucking hospital? Why?”
    I wanted to see Andrea Dutton. I didn’t know why. It had something to do with the way I thought everyone missed her. With the enormous get well card that the cheerleaders had posted in the lobby so that the whole school could sign it. With the way that no one had noticed I’d been gone. She was who Tony Giobambera loved. I couldn’t explain it, didn’t want to explain it, but I needed to see her.
    I started walking again. The fat girl called after me, but I just put my hands over my ears and walked faster,