Carrier by Vanessa Garden Read Free Book Online Page B

instead made a face and placed a hand on my stomach. It couldn’t have turned out more perfect. While she was gone I’d place the note for Patrick in the fence.
    â€˜If you don’t mind, I’ll sit this one out. I still feel funny and...tired. I think I need to have another sleep.’
    Mum smiled at me in a way that let me know she wasn’t happy, then nodded her head and left. I could hear her rustling around the kitchen and then I heard her open the foyer closet for the shotgun, before she slammed the front door behind her.
    I leapt out of bed and waited by the door a good ten minutes before I opened it a crack and watched my mother, along with Charlotte, grow smaller and smaller until she disappeared behind the shrubs that grew all over the property. It would take her a good couple of hours to hunt. Just trekking to the front gate took about twenty minutes and she’d want to spend at least an hour or so hunting.
    Emma remained, edgy and patrolling the veranda, stopping occasionally to stick her head up and howl up at the ominous sky. The girls always did this before a storm.
    I stepped out from beneath the veranda. The mirror sky had now turned darker and seemed to have lowered.
    The air was moist and heavy and carried the musty smell of earth. The tree branches were bereft of birds. Everything, including insects, seemed to have vanished. Only dried leaves and dust and broken twigs — dead things — seemed to come to life in the swirling winds.
    Fishing the note out of my pocket and clutching it tightly in my fist, I raced down the veranda steps and stopped only to scoop up a couple of eucalypt leaves to wrap the note in. Emma yapped at me and followed when she saw me run down to the fence. I stuck the note up high, twined it around the wire as best I could. If only the wind wasn’t so strong.
    Emma took the end of my jeans in her mouth and tugged me back towards the house, a low growl at the base of her throat. I shook her away but reluctantly left the fence, with my note stuffed between its wires, praying Patrick would see it.
    Back inside, I wiped the sweat off my face with a dish cloth, returned the bunch of keys to the top of the cupboard from earlier that had been poking at my bum through my back pocket, and collapsed against my squeaky mattress. At least Mum hadn’t drugged me. I wouldn’t be feeling so wired if she had.
    Stuffing my face into the softness of my pillow, all I could do now was hope that Patrick had found the note before the wind took it away, or the rain bled the ink…or before Mum got to it.
    I groaned into the pillow before sitting up and reaching for Alice’s journal. Even if Mum came home this minute she still had to skin the rabbits, so I had a bit of time.
    I was so eager to hear my cousin’s words again that my hands shook while I flicked through the pages to find my place.
    A Boy!
    Okay, so I was going to write about my breakout but that’s not even journal-worthy because, well, I met a boy today. A real, live boy! While my aunt was hunting south, I climbed over the front gate and headed north to the waterhole she always talks about…and that was where I met him!
    He has dark hair and beautiful green/grey eyes — I call them ocean mist. He laughed when I said that and do you know what he did? He reached out and touched my cheek! I flinched a little, because of the disease and everything, but, oh God, it felt like heaven.
    He is from a place about thirty or forty k’s north from here. To think people have been this close, practically in our backyard all this time, and we didn’t even know it.
    Oh he is beautiful and funny and tall and muscular and he can pick me up with one arm around my waist and swing me around like I’m only a doll.
    Anyway, I don’t want to sound like I’m desperate or anything — what am I saying — I haven’t seen a boy in five years. I am so desperate! I’d even go as