Picture Me Gone Read Online Free Page A

she’s so entertaining it doesn’t matter. I prefer her explanations to the real ones anyway.
    Her plan was for us to train the rats to carry messages through the sewers—though what messages and to whom was kind of up for grabs.
    We weren’t allowed to name them, she said, because then we’d get attached, which was extremely unprofessional. So they became Rat One and Rat Two. The first time I picked up Rat One, he scooted up my arm and scrambled down into my shirt.
    The next day when two girls jumped up on chairs in the science lab screaming that they’d seen a rat, I didn’t even turn round, just said not to bother, there were no rats. Everyone stared at me suspiciously, like,
How does she know?
    Anyway, on Tuesday we fed the rats cheese and biscuits and bits of sausage and grass, but by the time we got home from school on Wednesday they had chewed through the cardboard box and were gone.
    We never saw them again. Catlin’s mum kept complaining that she heard chewing in the cupboards at night, and her dad said, Don’t be stupid you must be imagining things, and apparently there were big fights, though in that family there were always big fights. Cat said she thought the escaped rats were the straw that broke the camel’s back between her parents, i.e., ruined their marriage once and for all. There was no way I could tell her that she was wrong, that it was obvious from the first time you met her parents that they just didn’t like each other and would have got divorced sooner or later, rats or no rats.
    It must be horrible to realize that you come from two people who never should have got together in the first place.
    After the rat incident, we started spending more time at my house, where everyone got along and there was no shouting. Looking back, I wonder whether that was one of the reasons we stopped being friends.
    One time when we had to go back to her house after school, we found her mum out and everything perfectly tidy and all the windows in the house closed up tight, despite the fact that it was a beautiful spring day. It was cold and gray inside, like no one had told the house that winter was over. And outside, trees floated with blossom and birds sang.
    We picked up our code books from the clubhouse even though we didn’t play spies much anymore, and we didn’t even bother checking the fridge. We just wanted to get out of there.
    Mum doesn’t hear rats anymore, Cat said. They’ve deserted us, like a sinking ship.
    She looked downcast, so I squeaked
Avast ye hearties!
and
Mizzen ye swarthy poop deck!
and we slammed the door and ran back to mine, shouting in pig-pirate all the way. And when we arrived, Gil called hello from his study, Marieka showed up with bunches of asparagus, and you could smell hyacinths through the windows. At the time I thought it was nice but maybe it was horrible for Cat.
    The following year, when we weren’t speaking, it occurred to me that her new personality actually made sense—that kissing boys and smoking weed and stomping out of class and insulting teachers and generally acting about a hundred times worse and louder than you really are is what you might do if you didn’t want to think about having to go home to that sad gray house.

nine
    T ranslating books is an odd way to make a living. It is customary to translate from your second language into your first, but among my father’s many friends and colleagues, every possible combination of language and direction is represented.
    Gil translates from Portuguese into English. Most translators grow up speaking two or three languages but some speak a ridiculous number; the most I’ve heard is twelve. They say it gets easier after the first three or four.
    The people I find disturbing are those with no native language at all. Gil’s friend Nicholas had a French mother and a Dutch father. At home he spoke French, Dutch and English but he grew up in Switzerland speaking Italian and German at school. When I ask him which