Servants of the Storm Read Online Free
Author: Delilah S. Dawson
cold and constricting. I put on my jacket and rock back and forth, trying to wake up my butt. I don’t notice Baker until he leans over to talk to me. I’d completely forgotten that I sit next to him.
“Yo, Dovey. Can I hitch a ride to rehearsal?”
I blink to focus, and for just a second I see a younger version of Baker instead of a high school junior. This high school boy is no longer the pudgy, pale kid in glasses with a hopeful smile andstriped shirt, forever following Carly and me all over the neighborhood. At first we put up NO BOYS ALLOWED signs and refused to answer the door no matter how long he knocked, but then he brought us Fudgsicles, a book of knock, knock jokes, and one of his cat’s kittens, and we were all best friends from then on. So much about him is the same—unruly dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes. But now he’s got contacts, he’s taller, and he has traded his stripes for non-ironic plaid. After Carly’s funeral we stayed unofficial buds, but in a drifting, foggy way. Like two rowboats lost on the same lake, occasionally bumping into each other.
“I have to do something afterward,” I whisper.
“Cool. I’ll come with.”
Mild irritation edges into the numb fuzz, raises my voice.
“That’s not what—”
“Did you want to read, Billie Dove?”
My head jerks up. Mr. Christopher is staring at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity. I guess it’s easier to ignore me when I’m not shouting.
“We’re on page one fifteen,” he says. “If you’re ready to join us.”
I look at my closed book. It’s new, since most of our books were water damaged. I haven’t even cracked the spine. I’ll read it, eventually.
“I’ll do it, Mr. Christopher,” Baker says, and he begins reading loudly and with unnecessary intensity, as if the entire book were written with the caps lock on. He reads like he’s fighting the book and thrashing around in the words. But he’s smirking.
Luckily, the bell rings just then, and his personal assault on Joseph Conrad cuts off midsentence. He follows me to my locker, and it’s like one of those cheesy movie scenes where everyone is moving really fast except for the main characters. Like Baker and I are walking underwater while the other people buzz around us like hummingbirds. There are a few other kids like us, kids who have lost best friends or siblings. We’re the ones who move slowly, heavily. But we try not to look at each other, our eyes sliding away, afraid of small talk that will bring back unwelcome memories. We’re a family of strangers in pain.
I open my locker, and it’s plastered with pictures of me and Carly. A photo of us riding bikes, another one we took at a slumber party with Tamika and Nikki, a few with our arms wrapped around Baker’s shoulders, all of us laughing. I unstick an old one and pull it out to look more closely. It’s Carly and me standing together in church dresses with our grandmothers on either side of us. Nana and Gigi look more alike than Carly and me, but you can see the pride in both of their smiles. That was the day Carly won a good citizen award in second grade for saving a cat that had fallen down the storm drain. I helped a little, but it had been her idea to put a branch down there as a ladder, and she had been the one who’d carried the exhausted, dripping cat back to the address on his tag.
The family had offered her a reward, but in typical Carly fashion she’d just put a hand on her hip and told them to spend it on tuna and a trip to the vet, because the poor cat was half chewed-upand skinnier than he should have been. I catch myself smiling in my locker mirror. God, that girl had a sassy mouth.
I trade my books, load up my backpack, and fight the hall traffic to the student parking lot. I’m lucky to have a car at all, even if it’s my dead grandmother’s 1997 Buick Skylark. One look at the cars around it tells you plainly that we don’t live in those fancy row houses and historic mansions
“Yo, Dovey. Can I hitch a ride to rehearsal?”
I blink to focus, and for just a second I see a younger version of Baker instead of a high school junior. This high school boy is no longer the pudgy, pale kid in glasses with a hopeful smile andstriped shirt, forever following Carly and me all over the neighborhood. At first we put up NO BOYS ALLOWED signs and refused to answer the door no matter how long he knocked, but then he brought us Fudgsicles, a book of knock, knock jokes, and one of his cat’s kittens, and we were all best friends from then on. So much about him is the same—unruly dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes. But now he’s got contacts, he’s taller, and he has traded his stripes for non-ironic plaid. After Carly’s funeral we stayed unofficial buds, but in a drifting, foggy way. Like two rowboats lost on the same lake, occasionally bumping into each other.
“I have to do something afterward,” I whisper.
“Cool. I’ll come with.”
Mild irritation edges into the numb fuzz, raises my voice.
“That’s not what—”
“Did you want to read, Billie Dove?”
My head jerks up. Mr. Christopher is staring at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity. I guess it’s easier to ignore me when I’m not shouting.
“We’re on page one fifteen,” he says. “If you’re ready to join us.”
I look at my closed book. It’s new, since most of our books were water damaged. I haven’t even cracked the spine. I’ll read it, eventually.
“I’ll do it, Mr. Christopher,” Baker says, and he begins reading loudly and with unnecessary intensity, as if the entire book were written with the caps lock on. He reads like he’s fighting the book and thrashing around in the words. But he’s smirking.
Luckily, the bell rings just then, and his personal assault on Joseph Conrad cuts off midsentence. He follows me to my locker, and it’s like one of those cheesy movie scenes where everyone is moving really fast except for the main characters. Like Baker and I are walking underwater while the other people buzz around us like hummingbirds. There are a few other kids like us, kids who have lost best friends or siblings. We’re the ones who move slowly, heavily. But we try not to look at each other, our eyes sliding away, afraid of small talk that will bring back unwelcome memories. We’re a family of strangers in pain.
I open my locker, and it’s plastered with pictures of me and Carly. A photo of us riding bikes, another one we took at a slumber party with Tamika and Nikki, a few with our arms wrapped around Baker’s shoulders, all of us laughing. I unstick an old one and pull it out to look more closely. It’s Carly and me standing together in church dresses with our grandmothers on either side of us. Nana and Gigi look more alike than Carly and me, but you can see the pride in both of their smiles. That was the day Carly won a good citizen award in second grade for saving a cat that had fallen down the storm drain. I helped a little, but it had been her idea to put a branch down there as a ladder, and she had been the one who’d carried the exhausted, dripping cat back to the address on his tag.
The family had offered her a reward, but in typical Carly fashion she’d just put a hand on her hip and told them to spend it on tuna and a trip to the vet, because the poor cat was half chewed-upand skinnier than he should have been. I catch myself smiling in my locker mirror. God, that girl had a sassy mouth.
I trade my books, load up my backpack, and fight the hall traffic to the student parking lot. I’m lucky to have a car at all, even if it’s my dead grandmother’s 1997 Buick Skylark. One look at the cars around it tells you plainly that we don’t live in those fancy row houses and historic mansions
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