3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online

backpack of the next-slowest person disappearing into the trees. She had the wrong kind of everything for hiking. She was tall but thin-boned and delicate. Her body didn’t grow muscles like other people’s did. Her limbs ached, the skin on her feet blistered easily, her hair defied gravity. What if she got left behind and lost? She tried to pick up her pace, her sholders aching under the straps of her pack, her ankles wobbling over every rock and crevice.
    What was this thing, hiking? she wondered. Why did people like it so much? Was it really anything more than just kind of walking along? It seemed to her that there should be more to it than just walking along in order for it to deserve its own name and all this devotion and so much gear.
    Her parents had never taken her hiking. They themselves had probably never hiked. She was pretty sure that people in Ghana, real Ghanaians, didn’t hike much. She remembered that people in Kumasi, her hometown, walked a lot, and through rough terrain, but the point of it was to actually get somewhere. They called it traveling. Here, it seemed, people had so many cars and buses and subways that walking became practically like a novelty. Hiking -was walking for nothing. It was walking for nothing to nowhere and for no reason. With big, uncomfortable boots on.
    Was she alone out here? She had to go faster to catch up to the group. What if she broke her ankle? Would anyone notice or care? Probably only the bears would notice. Maybe wolves. Did they have wolves around here?
    She stared at the treacherous ground, -which kept tripping her every five minutes. She was the slowest person in the group by a mile. What if she lost the trail? What if she was already going the wrong -way? She felt her anxiety mounting. Would she know how to gather food to prevent herself from starving? Would she know -which stuff -was poisonous? She pictured herself rolling around on the ground after ingesting poisonous mushrooms. She pictured the bears feeding on her carcass.
    “In Belgium, I think they call it a butpuck.”
    Ama startled, jumped, and pivoted. A guy from her group -was standing there.
    “What?” she said. Her heart -was galloping—the only fast thing about her.
    He -was pointing at her towering pack. “A backpack. The -word in Flemish sounds like ‘butpuck.’ I don’t know how you spell it, but that’s how you say it.”
    “Oh.” Ama looked down. Where had he come from? What-was he talking about? She -was terrible at conversing -with boys to begin -with, and this made for a very difficult opener. She -was supposed to laugh, maybe. She felt the seconds tick by. She’d lost her chance to laugh, hadn’t she?
    “I lived in Belgium until I -was in first grade. That’s just an odd fact that stuck in my mind from then.” He stopped for a second. “No, wait a minute. Maybe that’s not how you say backpack. Maybe that’s how you say bathing suit.” He shook his head. “You can see I didn’t keep up that well -with my Flemish.”
    His name was Noah, she recalled. He was from New York. He had longish, kind of greasy hair but a very big and very cute smile.
    “I lived in Ghana,” Ama blurted out, before she could talk herself out of it. “Until I was in first grade.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes.”
    “My mom -worked at a software company in Antwerp,” he offered. “That’s why we lived there.”
    “We were just … from there,” she said. “I mean Ghana. From Ghana.” Why -was she such a loser?
    “Believe it or not, I used to speak Flemish fluently, and now I’ve forgotten almost all of it. As you can tell. Except butpuck, -which either means backpack or bathing suit. Do you still speak … -what do you speak in Ghana?”
    “English, mainly. And a bunch of other regional languages. My family speaks Akan. And my mom’s from Côte d’Ivoire, so -we speak French, too.”
    “And you can speak all three?”
    She -wasn’t sure -where the line between interesting and abnormal should