For Your Heart (Hill Dweller Retellings) Read Online Free Page A

be.  Lovely hates my forest.  She glares at it with such deep, haunted eyes.  She will never come, I am as certain of that as I am my own immortality.
         Lovely is sitting on the back step, petting White Cat and talking to him.  I can’t hear what she is saying.  There is a long distance between me and the back of her house.  I hate that long, green lawn because it makes it so I can never get near enough to see Lovely up close.  But even at a distance, I’d have to be blind not to see she deserves my nickname for her.  She is graceful and pale skinned and her hair is like music, complicated and beckoning.
         Finally, Lovely stands, wiping fur off her hands and retreats into her little white house. 
         Enmire shifts beside me.  “Where’s she off to?”
         She is dressed in the green outfit today, which means she must be going to the big stone building on the other side of the park – not the one that no one lives in, but the one other human girls wearing that outfit go.  “School, I think.”
         A moment later, White Cat comes bounding across the green lawn and slips through the ferns.  He greets me with a rumbling belly and a back arch to my shin.  I reach down and scratch his shoulder.  Then he’s off running and rolling about with Enmire.  I stand and move on to the next house, leaving the two of them to play.
     

Chapter 5
     
    Jeanette
     
         I'm running so fast my lungs are on fire and no matter how many gulps of icy air I take, they don’t calm the burn.  The jangling bells and creaking harnesses are so close, I can’t hear my own whimpering breaths.  I feel like I'm going to collapse, but there’s a hand, hard and familiar, pressed between my shoulder-blades, shoving me onward. 
         I step on an upturned root, my ankle rolls and I stumble off of the path.  I tumble down through the underbrush and smack into a tree.  Everything goes black.  When I wake, I scramble to my feet and look around.  There’s no trace of anyone.  Only the haunting sound of jangling bells in my ears and the phantom warmth of a hand I can no longer hold.
         I open my eyes and wipe a mascara-stained tear out of my lashes.  I’m back in my room, back in the present.  But even now, I feel the handprint, warm and perfect on my back, like a brand left behind by Timmy.  A brand still burning hot after seven years.
         Rolling over, I hug my pillow.  Yeah, something is definitely wrong with me.   Maybe I didn't grieve correctly when it first happened?  Was I in too much shock?  Sometimes I wonder if the police only exacerbated the problem.  They questioned me – as if a ten year old little girl could lure her friend into the woods, murder him, and hide the body.  Everyone thought the worst: he’d been kidnapped, he’d been murdered, he fell and twisted his neck.  His mom blamed me.  She refused to believe it was his idea to wander through the woods on Halloween night. 
         Deep down I know these dreams, the haunting daylight flashes, and my inability to let him go are a result of not knowing what happened.  He just disappeared.  I hate myself for falling.  I hate myself for hitting my head.  I hate myself because I’m the one that broke contact.  I’m the one who let go.  And I’m terrified of doing it again.
         “Oh, TimTam,” I breathe.  Saying my nickname for him after so long, feels strange, like I’m talking to his ghost.  “I miss you.”
         My door opens and Dad pops his head in.  “Good morning, sunshine.”
         I don't lift my head. I don't want him to see I've been crying again.  It’s kinda pathetic and embarrassing at my age to wake up crying from a bad dream.
         “Nett, what's wrong?”  Dad asks in that 'hand in the cookie jar' sort of way.
         Man, I hate when he uses that tone of voice.  How does he know?   I sigh.
         “You're not still mad at me for not