The Secret Language of Girls Read Online Free

his bow and arrow if you want.”
    “Marylin, come try this on!” Marylin’s mother called from upstairs.
    “Back to the drawing board,” Marylin said, standing.
    Kate dribbled her basketball back down the street. Some democracy, she thought, the ball hitting her foot and careening off of it. Two cardinals startled from the branches of a pine tree, and Kate watched them fly away before running after the basketball, which was headed straight for Mrs. Larch’s rose trellis. Mrs. Larch was the sort of person who would call your mom if your basketball knocked over her trellis. She was a very touchy woman.
    Kate had just managed to outrun the basketball and scoop it up when the ambulance lights began flashing in her driveway. Then theambulance backed out onto the street and headed toward her.was written in big block letters above its bumper.
    It must have pulled into the wrong driveway, Kate told herself. They should really give those ambulance drivers better directions.
    “Kate! Katie! Come quick! Something terrible!” Tracie stood on their front porch waving frantically in Kate’s direction.
    What the heck’s wrong with her? Kate thought. And then she dropped her basketball in Mrs. Larch’s yard and ran so fast, she thought her heart would explode.

    The hospital was filled with pinging noises. There was the ping of the elevator as it stopped on the third floor, and pings that came from behind the high counter of the nurses’ station, and the pings pinging on the machine next to Mr. Faber’s bed. The machine and Kate’s dad were connected bya tangle of wires. Kate was scared to get too close to her dad. She was the sort of person who would trip and cause all the wires to come unattached from her dad’s chest. She thought those wires might be what were keeping him alive.
    “I’m fine, really I am,” Kate’s dad was saying to Tracie, who was standing next to his bed and crying so hard, her eyelids had swollen into cherry tomato–size pink puffs. “The doctor says that as far as heart attacks go, mine really wasn’t that bad. It was more like a protest than an attack. Honestly, sweetie, there’s no reason to cry.”
    Kate did not cry. A whole gang of tears had gathered behind her eyeballs, but they weren’t budging. Kate wished she could cry, just so her dad wouldn’t think Tracie loved him more than she did. It seemed to be a law in her life that she cried only when she didn’t want to, like last week when RobbieBallard had called her “Kate, Kate, the Big Fat Primate” during a game of red rover.
    “Maybe we should let your dad rest, girls,” Kate’s mom said from the doorway. Marylin’s mom, Mrs. McIntosh, stood behind her. Mrs. McIntosh had driven Tracie and Kate to the hospital. She still had a few sewing pins stuck in the sleeve of her blouse. Kate wondered if she had finished making Marylin’s heart.
    “It’s the stress that caused it,” Kate’s mom told Mrs. McIntosh in the hospital cafeteria later. “Stress and not enough exercise. And his family has a history of heart problems. Thank God he doesn’t smoke.”
    Kate swirled her straw around the bottom of her milk-shake cup. Then she sucked on it as hard as she could, pulling up the last few drops of chocolate shake and making a noise like a really small person burping.
    “Gross!” Tracie exclaimed. “How can youmake noises like that when Daddy’s just had a heart attack?”
    Kate shrugged. She didn’t see how the two things were connected. What did burping noises have to do with heart attacks? If she drank her shake as quietly as she could, would her dad’s heart perk up and beat good as new? If she pulled on her straw really hard so that her milk-shake cup caved in, would the machine her dad was hooked up to start pinging so loudly it would sound like a marching band?
    Mrs. McIntosh looked at her watch. “Why don’t we go upstairs and say good-bye to your dad,” she said to Tracie and Kate. “And then we’ll go back to my