inDIVISIBLE Read Online Free

comforted and disturbed me so much so that by noon on the second day I returned to town to sit by the fountains at the shopping center, mothers pushing babies in their carts and staring at me as they wondered why I wasn’t in school. I spoke to no one, avoided eye contact. I just stared at the gurgling water and wondered what had happened to my mother.
    She told me to hike, to get out of her way so she could sort my father’s belongings. She hardly looked at me, didn’t touch me … she never even said my father’s name anymore.
    The shopping center filled at seven and I left, avoiding more anxious stares to return to the isolation of my bedroom.
    The third day I endured the condolences offered by strangers as we stood over a small box of ashes that used to be my father’s body in a bland room above Section Seven’s crematorium.
    I’d only been to one mourning before—my grandmother’s—but she’d died while I’d been a child and all I remembered was the navy dress my mother had bought me to wear and the stares of the strangers when I fingered the delicate lace on the hem.
    I wore no lace to my father’s mourning. I left my hair down for the occasion and put in gentle curls, the way my father preferred it. My mother had pulled hers back into a tight bun, the gray streaks more pronounced than they’d seemed three days ago. I thought it made her look harsh and angry, feelings she’d freely emitted since learning of her husband’s death. I glanced into her tear-streaked face, hoping to see life but earned an immediate reprimand for not greeting the next mourner.
    Ice clenched my heart , and I excused myself again, squeezing past the dark clad businessmen who’d worked with my father, their wives clutching their hands in silent gratitude that they were not the ones in the little box, burned to a fine ash. Worse were the whispers about their colleagues who’d turned out to be terrorists.
    “Can you imagine working right beside a terrorist and not knowing for five years?” a spindly woman whispered to her bulging companion.
    The second smothered her reply when I passed the two, her body still but her eyes following me until she had to physically turn to watch me walk from the room. Neither of those women had any remorse for my father. They simply attended out of duty, like half the others in the room that mingled amid the scent of flowers and sweat.
    My head spun as I burst into the hallway, found the exit and darted outside. I leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the building and closed my eyes, my lids colored red from the sunlight. I had to count to twenty before the whispers faded from my mind. Summer noises—birds, insects and the occasional whirring of a city bus passing by—replaced the whispers. I pressed my fingertips to my temples and tried to stop the spinning too.
    Another twenty and I took my first deep breath.
    More videos had been released along with pictures of the weapons the terrorists had used to kill my father and the other men—compact black rifles that looked like those the officers carried. In the early hours before the mourning, those weapons had seemed surreal.
    I reached for my PCA, remembered I’d left my backpack in the mourning room near my mother and decided it didn’t matter anyway. All I wanted was a message from T and I knew it wouldn’t be there.
    The door opened and a couple walked down the steps, hands tightly clasped. The woman tilted her blonde hair and whispered something to the man that made his cheeks color. He chuckled and I balled my fists, wondering how to make them understand the pain when I was jerked from my thoughts by a boy about my age slipping through the doors behind them and sliding up next to the wall beside me.
    He had dark brown hair and eyes like chocolate. Black lashes framed his eyes and for a second I felt envy. “Hello,” he said.
    He had a shadow of hair above his upper lip as though he’d forgotten to shave and it drew my gaze to those lips,