Harry Sue by Sue Stauffacher Read Free Book Online Page B

hole.
    Every once in a while, I could save Homer from the hole by grabbing him, not his body, but his mind, with an idea.
    “Homer,” I said, trying not to, but sounding desperate anyway. “I need a favor. Remember Violet, that lousy cheese eater who can't do her own time? She disrespected me in a major way, Homes, and I need to lay it down.”
    But my words were going nowhere. They were just puffs of air that came out of my mouth, just sound, like the traffic in the street below. I wasn't judging it right at all. Homer had already lost his balance.

Part 2
Falling
    Some of the Monkeys seized the Tin Woodman and carried him through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks. Here they dropped the poor Woodman, who fell a great distance to the rocks, where he lay so battered and dented that he could neither move nor groan.
    —
The Wizard of Oz

Chapter 8
    I knew right then something that might work, but I sure hated to do it. Homer wouldn't make me if he could help it. Cons hate to go back to the scene of the crime. Nobody wants to relive it.
    “Okay,” I said. “It's gonna be okay, Homer. Let me get the file.” I pressed the Kleenex to his face until he stopped leaking and reached under the mattress to pull out a file thick with yellowed news clippings.
    Somewhere in this mess was the two-inch clipping about the Marshfield boy who'd broken his neck diving off the Grand Haven pier. But the bulk of the file, which his mother had dutifully clipped and collected at the urging of her young son, wasabout me, Harry Sue, the little girl who'd survived being thrown from a seventh-floor window.
    I sifted through the pile to find Homer's favorite clips, not the ones that described what happened— the who, what, when, where, how—but the ones that in the weeks following the tragedy analyzed what had happened from every possible angle.
    “This one's from the
Ottawa County Courier,
” I said, my voice still shaking.
    “LeDeaux,” Homer whispered, his voice hoarse. “The scientist.”
    I took the cup of water from the holder at the side of the bed and put the straw in front of his lips, just barely touching. There was an important difference between the way his mom did it—parting his lips with the straw like he was a baby—and the way I did. Mine was a question: “You sound hoarse. You want to drink something?” Hers was a decision: “My baby needs a drink.”
    Homer lifted his head, drank from the straw, and dropped it again.
    “‘Girl Survives Ninety-Foot Drop,’ by Pierre LeDeaux. A five-year-old girl has lived to someday tell the story of how she survived a fall from the seventh floor of Destiny Towers.
    “‘The statistics are rather clear,’ said Dr. Omar Melendez, chief of the emergency trauma unit at Ottawa County General. ‘Without extenuating circumstances, such as a parachute, we have no dataon the survival of individuals from drops above the seventh floor. Less than two percent of individuals survive drops from the seventh floor. By the fifth floor, your rate of survival increases to fifty percent, and most will survive a drop from the second floor as long as they don't fall headfirst.’
    “‘The child's survival is attributed to a combination of factors,’ said First Response Team Leader, fireman Harper Rowell.
    “‘You got rain, rain, rain, for three weeks. Heavy tree cover. Mulch. Go figure. If you'd dropped a watermelon from that high up, it's not hard to imagine what would have happened.’
    “But survive she did. Little Harriet Clotkin will be a noteworthy addition to the record books….”
    “Notice how he never says it,” Homer whispered. “He never says the word.”
    I knew the word he meant. But for now I held it inside, like a winning card, tight against my chest.
    Homer was trying. I could see it. But he was like the Scarecrow after the winged monkeys had done their work on him. All the stuffing pulled out of him, his legs in one tree, his arms