Read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for Free Online Page B

the pack’s flap. She took out the stuff she had brought to eat and drink, laying the items out before her in a neat line. At the sight of the paper sack with her lunch in it, her stomach rumbled more fiercely. How late was it? Some deep mental clock attached to her metabolism suggested it might be around three in the afternoon, eight hours since she’d sat in the breakfast nook slurping up Corn Flakes, five since she’d started off on this endless idiotic shortcut. Three o’clock. Maybe even four.
    In her lunch-sack was a hardboiled egg still in the shell, a tuna fish sandwich, and some celery sticks. There was also the bag of chips (small), the bottle of water (pretty big), the bottle of Surge (the large twenty-ounce size, she loved Surge), and the Twinkies.
    Looking at the bottle of lemon-lime soda, Trisha suddenly felt more thirsty than hungry . . . and mad for sugar. She spun off the cap, brought the bottle to her lips, then paused. It wouldn’t be smart to go chugging half of it down, she thought, thirsty or not. She might be out here awhile. Part of her mind moaned and tried to draw away from that idea, just call it ridiculous and draw away, but Trisha couldn’t afford to let it. She could think like a kid again once she was out of the woods, but for the time being she had to think as much like an adult as possible.
    You saw what’s out there, she thought, a big valley with nothing in it except trees. No roads, no smoke. You have to play it smart. You have to conserve your supplies. Mom would tell you the same thing and so would Dad.
    She allowed herself three big gulps of soda, took the bottle away from her mouth, belched, took another two fast swallows. Then she recapped the bottle securely and debated over the rest of her supplies.
    She decided on the egg. She shelled it, careful to put the pieces of shell back in the Baggie the egghad come in (it never occurred to her, then or later, that littering—any sign that she’d been there—might actually save her life), and sprinkled it with the little twist of salt. Doing that made her sob briefly again, because she could see herself in the Sanford kitchen last night, putting salt on a scrap of waxed paper and then twisting it up the way her mother had shown her. She could see the shadows of her head and hands, thrown by the overhead light, on the Formica counter; she could hear the sound of the TV news from the living room; could hear creaks as her brother moved around upstairs. This memory had a hallucinogenic clarity that elevated it almost to the status of a vision. She felt like someone who drowns remembering what it was like to still be on the boat, so calm and at ease, so carelessly safe.
    She was nine, though, nine going on ten and big for her age. Hunger was stronger than either memory or fear. She sprinkled the egg with salt and ate it quickly, still sniffling. It was delicious. She could have eaten another easily, maybe two. Mom called eggs “cholesterol bombs,” but her Mom wasn’t here and cholesterol didn’t seem like a very big deal when you were lost in the woods, scratched up and with your eyelids so swollen by bug-bites that they felt weighted down with something (flour-paste stuck to the lashes, perhaps).
    Trisha eyed the Twinkies, then opened the packageand ate one of them. “ SECK -shoo-al,” she said—one of Pepsi’s all-time-great compliments. She chased everything with a gulp of water. Then, moving quickly before either hand could turn traitor and stuff something else into her mouth, she put the remaining food back in the lunch-sack (the top rolled down quite a bit further now), rechecked the seal on her three-quarter-full bottle of Surge, and stowed everything in the pack. As she did, her fingers brushed a bulge in the pack’s sidewall and a sudden burst of elation—perhaps partially fueled by fresh calories—lit her up.
    Her Walkman! She had brought her