Double Read Online Free Page B

myself and pulled it out—a piece of old knitted blanket, just a scrap, gray with dirt and dotted with holes. I’d have guessed she used it to clean the windscreen, if the windscreen had ever been cleaned. I was about to drop it. It was the look on Edie’s face that stopped me. Instead I held it in my hand for a minute, pushed my fingers through its loops and swirls.
    Edie watched me.
    Was this how hard it was to be someone else? Did I have to be this vigilant? How long was I going to last, when even a scrap of filth might turn out to be something special?
    Edie straightened in her seat, took a deep breath, smiled at the road.
    “I thought you might have missed it,” she said. “I know you’re too old for it and everything. I just thought it would make you smile.”
    “Thanks,” I said. I smiled, on cue. It felt like my face was splitting open. I put the rag in my rucksack.
    It was good being in a place without lockers and filing cabinets and industrial cleaning fluid and a place for everything. I watched Edie’s hands on the steering wheel. She had a gold ring on the little finger of her right hand, a silver one on the middle of her left. The veins were raised and faintly blue beneath her skin, thin fine bones rippling with each small movement. It was hot in the car, hot and dry. The air blew in through the heaters and leeched the moisture from my eyes and mouth. While she drove, Edie looked straight ahead and in her mirrors and at her shoulder and over at me.
    “I’m going to drive slowly on the way home,” she said. “I’m not going to crash or turn the car over.”
    “Okay,” I said. And inside, I heard a part of me wishing that she would.
    For a long time we didn’t say anything. The quiet in the car was full of us not knowing what to say.
    I thought about where we were going and what it would be like and who was waiting there. I thought about how the hell I was ever going to get away with it. Every time I thought about it, my body opened out like it was hollow, like forgetting something vital, like knowing you’re in trouble, like waking up to nothing but regret.
    “We’re very quiet,” she said, “for people with two years of stories to tell.”
    I liked it, being quiet. I couldn’t make a mistake if I was quiet.
    “There’s no rush, is there?” I said.
    “I suppose not,” she said. “I suppose we never talked that much before.”
    She changed gear and it didn’t go in right, and the car grated and squealed until she got it.
    “I missed you, Cass,” she said.
    What was I supposed to say to that? I looked at my feet. I looked out the window. She was still missing him. She hadn’t stopped, poor thing. She just didn’t know it.
    “I dreamed about you,” she said.
    What would he have said to that? Thank you? Sorry?
    “In my head you were the same as when you left,” she said. “I expected you to look the same.” She almost smiled. “It’s been two years. It’s stupid.”
    We drove past a pub called The Homecoming. It looked warm inside, and noisy. I thought myself out of the car and into the pub, taking people’s drinks when their backs were turned. I saw myself through the windows.
    “I wonder if Mum and Frank have got my messages,” she said. “I couldn’t get hold of them.”
    I didn’t know who these people were. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to say.
    “They might not know yet,” she said. “How weird is that?”
    I could see her searching my eyes for something that wasn’t there. I blinked, and so did she.
    “God, Cassiel,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
    I knew exactly what she meant, even if she didn’t.

S E V E N
    T hink of the perfect cottage, right at the end of a lane that lifts and drops through woodland and runs high along the ridges of fields. A white picket fence, a covered porch grown thick with quince and scented roses, a garden alive with birdsong, and the quiet constant thrum of a stream.
    I am not making this up. I