Stranger Read Online Free Page A

“Sheriff Crow wouldn’t bring back a corpse.”
    Brisa added, “She wouldn’t bring back a bandit, either.”
    All three peered around guiltily, but Ms. Lowenstein was talking to the watch captain. Mia headed down the steps.
    â€œMia!” She jumped. Meredith was leaning down, her red curls glittering in the sun. “Brisa and I want all the details on the stranger.”
    The ribbons in Brisa’s pigtails lifted in a gust of hot wind. “
You
want all the details, Meredith. Now, if it was a girl . . .”
    â€œCome on, Brisa, you know you’re curious. We haven’t had a stranger in town since those traders in April.”
    â€œBecky can tell you about him,” Mia called up.
    Meredith made a dismissive gesture. “Becky isn’t into boys.”
    â€œAnd she’s very focused,” Brisa added. “She won’t notice anything but gross medical stuff.”
    â€œAll right,” Mia said. “I’ll take a look at him for you.”
    Meredith gave her a playful salute, then hastened back to her post.
    So Mia wasn’t invisible all the time. They saw her when they wanted something fixed, or some news. But she didn’t mind, especially if it was people like Meredith and Brisa. Neither was a close friend, like Jennie Riley, but they were . . . friendish.
    As she hurried past the armory, she thought about how excited Meredith was about the prospect of a new boy in town. Shouldn’t she be excited too? She tried imagining a girl instead, but that didn’t make any difference.
    Practically everyone her age had already had at least one serious romantic relationship. Mia had been on one date in her entire life, and she hadn’t even kissed the guy. Worse, she hadn’t wanted to kiss him. What was wrong with her?
    Blood rushed to her face when she remembered her dad’s talk after her depressing night out with Carlos. She’d confessed that she’d only gone out with him because she didn’t want to turn eighteen without having ever had a date, and her dad had tried to make her feel better about being such a freak by telling her that some people never had any interest in romance, and that was “perfectly normal.”
    She kicked at a tumbleweed.
Normal for freaks like me.
    She stomped onto the porch outside her father’s house, kicked off her shoes, and padded past the empty infirmary, toward the surgery. She nudged aside Spanner, Phillips, and Fluffy as she opened the door. The cats were banned from the surgery, but they were still convinced that if they waited by the door, someday someone would let them in.
    She stepped into clean surgery slippers as she closed the door behind her. Her father, his shy apprentice Becky Callahan, and Sheriff Crow bent over the unconscious boy on the examination table. They had taken off his leather jacket, exposing a tattered, blood-soaked shirt and a clumsily bandaged gash in his left arm that ran from elbow to wrist. Becky was nervously avoiding eye contact with the sheriff as she cut off the boy’s shirt with a pair of shears.
    Mia’s dad glanced up. “He’s lost a lot of blood. Mia, give me a hand with the ropethorn?”
    â€œSure.”
    She followed him to the shelf of potted surgical plants. The ropethorn’s green tendrils lashed out when they sensed body heat, extending their thorns to pierce skin and drain blood. Mia picked up the implement she’d designed as a catch-and-shield, a giant spatula with a hole in it. She held it to the thrashing plant, blocking it, until a single tendril poked through the hole. Her father deftly grabbed it behind the thorn at its tip, pulled it taut, and snipped it off at the base.
    â€œGood catch,” Mia said. He often got stuck by the thorn, but he didn’t like to use tongs for fear of damaging the delicate tendrils.
    He handed it off to Mia, who held it stretched between her hands to keep it from