Silent to the Bone Read Online Free

mention the good news about Nikki’s opening her eyes. But I’m sure that Branwell already knew, because I thought there was morespring and less shuffle in his step when the guard brought him out.
    I spread the flash cards out on the table between us. As I laid them out, I explained, “Remember the story of the paralyzed Frenchman who wrote a whole book with the blink of his left eye?” I no sooner had the sentence out of my mouth than Branwell blinked his eyes twice, very rapidly, and I knew he understood the rules of our communication.
    First, I let him look them all over. Even though he hardly shifted his head as he looked at them, I felt confident that I would get a signal. I didn’t know which card it would be, but I was sure it would be one. He lowered his head slightly, and I read that as a signal that he was ready. I pointed to the cards, one at a time.
    He blinked twice at one of the cards. His choice surprised me. I gathered them together, putting that one on top. It was MARGARET. I held the deck out with that one card facing him. He blinked twice again. I said, “Okay, we’ll start with Margaret.”
    I dropped the cards into my backpack and was out the door of the Behavioral Center when I realized that I didn’t quite know what to do with MARGARET. Just looking at the card sure didn’t make him speak. Was she possibly the person he wanted to speak to? Orwas she the one who would tell me why he could not? Why MARGARET?
    Margaret is my half sister. She is fourteen years older than me. She runs her own computer consulting business out of an old house on Schuyler Place that she inherited from her two great-uncles. Schuyler Place is in Old Town, the oldest residential section of Epiphany across the campus from Tower Hill Road. The main buildings of Old Town line up around a small square park. This is where the townspeople shopped before they started building malls. The old city hall faces the square, and so does the original Carnegie Library.
    Margaret’s house, like all the others in Old Town, has a front porch, and the street itself has sidewalks on both sides of the road. In a strip of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb there are trees that were planted a hundred years ago when the university was just a college and people walked to classes and to the grocery store. In the summer when the trees are in full leaf, they make a canopy over the road—which, these days, is only wide enough for one-way traffic.
    Like a lot of doctors and lawyers who have bought these old houses, Margaret converted the living room and dining room into offices, rewired the wholehouse, remodeled the kitchen, and added on a room and a terrace in the back. There are three bedrooms—two small, one medium—and a bathroom upstairs. You can do whatever you want to the inside of the house, but you are not allowed to change the front that faces the street, and you even have to have the city approve of the colors you want to paint it. Some of the doctors and lawyers who opened offices in Old Town don’t live there, but Margaret does.
    The backs of the houses in Old Town face an alley, and that is where the people park their cars and put out their garbage on garbage-collection days. Despite not having enough parking space, Margaret loves the house, the location, the alley behind it, and every brick in the sidewalk in front. She says that Tower Hill Road is a nice place to visit, but she doesn’t want to live there.
    Margaret and I had always liked each other but it wasn’t until the first Thursday of Knightsbridge Middle School that we became good friends. Old Town and Knightsbridge, where I attend eighth grade, are both on the side of campus that is opposite our house. They are walking distance from each other and from the Behavioral Center.
    It was raining that first Thursday, and I had missedthe school bus home. That was the first year my mother had gone back to the university to