Read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for Free Online

her—the rubber-band which had held it in a ponytail was long since lost—hurdling small trees which had fallen in some long-ago storm, topping a ridge . . . and suddenly there was a long blue-gray valley spread out before her with brazen granite cliffs rising on the far side, miles from where she was. And directly in front of her nothing but a gray shimmer of early summer air through which she would fall to her death, turning over and over and screaming for her mother.
    Her mind was gone again, lost in that white no-brain roar of terror, but her body recognized that stopping in time to avoid going over the cliff-edge was an impossibility. All she could hope to do was redirect her motion before it was too late. Trisha swerved to the left, and as she did her right foot kicked out over the drop. She could hear the pebbles dislodged by that foot rattling down the ancient rock wall in a little stream.
    Trisha bolted along the strip where the needle-coated floor of the forest gave way to the bald rock marking the edge of the cliff. She ran with some confused and roaring knowledge of what had almost happened to her, and also some vague memory of a science fiction movie in which the hero hadlured a rampaging dinosaur into running over a cliff to its death.
    Ahead of her an ash tree had fallen with its final twenty feet jutting over the drop like the prow of a ship, and Trisha grabbed it with both arms and hugged it, her scraped and bloody cheek jammed against the smooth trunk, each breath whistling into her with a shriek and emerging in a terrified sob. She stood that way for a long time, shuddering all over and embracing the tree. At last she opened her eyes. Her head was turned to the right and she was looking down before she could stop herself.
    At this point the cliff’s drop was only fifty feet, ending in a pile of glacial, splintery rubble that sprouted little clumps of bright green bushes. There was a heap of rotting trees and branches, as well—deadwood blown over the cliff’s edge in some long-ago storm. An image came to Trisha then, one that was terrible in its utter clarity. She saw herself falling toward that jackstraw pile, screaming and waving her arms as she went down; saw a dead branch punching through the undershelf of her jaw and up between her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo, then spearing into her brain and killing her.
    â€œ No! ” she screamed, both revolted by the image and terrified by its plausibility. She caught her breath.
    â€œI’m all right,” she said, speaking low and fast. The bramble-scratches on her arms and the scrapeon her cheek throbbed and stung with sweat—she was just now becoming aware of these little hurts. “I’m okay. I’m all right. Yeah, baby.” She let go of the ash tree, swayed on her feet, then clutched it again as panic lunged inside her head. An irrational part of her actually expected the ground to tilt and spill her off the edge.
    â€œI’m okay,” she said, still low and fast. She licked her upper lip and tasted damp salt. “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She repeated it over and over, but it was still three minutes before she could persuade her arms to loosen their death-clutch on the ash tree a second time. When she finally managed it, Trisha stepped back, away from the drop. She reset her cap (turning it around so the bill pointed backward without even thinking about it) and looked out across the valley. She saw the sky, now sagging with rainclouds, and she saw roughly six trillion trees, but she saw no sign of human life—not even smoke from a single campfire.
    â€œI’m all right, though—I’m okay.” She took another step back from the drop and uttered a little scream as something
    (snakes snakes)
    brushed the backs of her knees. Just bushes, of course. More checkerberry bushes, the woods were full of em, yuck-yuck. And the bugs had