Breaking Glass Read Online Free Page A

Bridge would envy. “Are you a nurse?”
    She shakes her head. “I’m Marisa. I work for Mrs. Durban.”
    Mrs. Durban. Susannah’s mother. I’d met her maybe three times, but we’d barely spoken. Something about her fierce eyes and harsh features put me off. I can’t imagine working for her, and feel pity for this slight girl.
    I detect a faint accent. Her eyes are large and luminous. She looks about eleven. She looks like she’s about to pee her pants.
    I check out her boobs. Definitely not eleven.
    I know this girl. She goes to my school. But she’s nearly invisible there, someone who slips from shadow to shadow, barely stirring the air as she moves.
    She hands me the package, messily wrapped in brown paper and covered in marker scribblings. I turn it over in my hands and spot my name in the jumble.
    Marisa is skittish, like a cat at the edge of a riverbank. “Mrs. Durban found this in Susannah’s room. She asked me to bring it to you.”
    “So no one’s heard anything from Susannah yet?” I ask, still turning the package over and over. My fingers tremble. I’ve lost track of time in the hospital. How many days have I been in here? Two? Four? A week?
    “No. Not that I know of.” Marisa says, and turns to leave.
    “Do you want me to open it now?” I ask, though I regret it instantly. The package is meant for me. Susannah wrote my name on it. Me.
    I glance at my phone on the bed table. My calls to Susannah have gone to voicemail, text messages unanswered. Where is she? Is anyone looking for her? Suddenly, I’m afraid to open the package.
    “I have to go now,” Marisa says. And she does.
    I’m alone with my trussed-up leg and a package from Susannah.
    The phone shuddering beside me nearly jolts me off the bed. It’s a text. A YouTube link from Susannah.
    I click the link and it directs me to another one of her animations. Leaves float through black space in the herky-jerky, stop-action way that is Susannah’s style.
    She wanted to study animation , I think. She’d just come back from visiting her way older half-brother, Dennis, in Rhode Island. One of her mother’s cast-offs, Susannah called him. She’d often wondered how many more there were. Going to RISD meant everything to her. Why on earth would she run away now, when she was almost free? Where would she go?
    I think of her face as she told me she skipped out on the college tour, and watch the small screen cluttered with Susannah’s personal iconography. Old gravestones. Torn lace. Faded cigar boxes.
    Before she’d left, I’d barraged her with interesting tidbits about Rhode Island and she’d scribbled them in the ratty little notebook she took wherever she went. The first circus pitched its tent in Newport in 1774. The world’s oldest operating carousel is in Watch Hill. Hence, the pen from Watch Hill.
    And, sure enough, a carousel horse flies past an eerie circus tent.
    I shudder.
    This is recent.
    And I wonder—has Susannah been keeping secrets of her own from me? From everyone?
    The scene closes in on a mound of dirt. A pair of disembodied hands unearth a peeling cigar box. The box opens. Inside is a word in old wood-type lettering. And I have my answer.
    SECRETS
    Shaking, I rest my phone upside-down on the bedside table.
    My eyes close, and all I can see is her face, watching me, asking me silently what I’m going to do, forcing me to relive the many ways I’ve failed her.
    I lie there, the package sitting on my lap. An hour. Two hours. Time here is, again, shapeless, measured by the beeps of the equipment I’m connected to. I step onto the cloud that has lowered itself like a magic carpet.
    Then
    As if she’d conjured him just by the mention of his name, Ryan ambled down the hall, headed straight for us, his eyes locked on Susannah. I guess I might have wished somewhere deep inside my animal brain that Susannah would have been as mesmerized with me as I was with her, but that tiny hope was quickly snuffed out when I saw the look