Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis Read Free Book Online Page A

took out her notebook.
    Dear Shauzia:
    I hate it when I make things worse. Why do I behave so badly? Why can’t I be nice?
    She helped Asif stand up, picked up the bundles and the baby, and the children walked away from the cave. They didn’t look back.

EIGHT
    They walked for two days before the food ran out, and then they walked for two days more.
    Parvana’s belly had that ache it got when she didn’t feed it. It was a mixture of pain and emptiness. Her head felt empty, too, and she felt dull and stupid.
    Hassan wailed the first day after the rice was gone, but by the second day the wail had dwindled to a thin whine, like the sound he had been making when Parvana first found him.
    “Hassan needs to rest,” Asif said. Parvana suspected it was Asif who needed to rest, but he would never admit that. He moved more and more slowly, and his face had the same expression her father’s face had when he was in pain.
    Parvana put Hassan on the ground, then her bundles. She held onto Asif’s arm as he sat down. When he was tired, he often slipped and rolled onto his side when he was trying to sit. This embarrassed him and made him grumpy.
    “Is there any water left?” Asif asked.
    Parvana untied the bundle with the plastic water bottle in it and shook the bottle so Asif could hear that there was still a bit sloshing around. He reached out his hand, and she passed it over.
    She was going to remind him to take it easy, to not drink too much, but what was the point? It didn’t make any difference whether Asif took two swallows or one. They still needed to find more water soon.
    Asif poured a little bit of water into the cap of the bottle. Parvana watched him pour it, bit by bit, into Hassan’s mouth, not spilling any.
    “Isn’t that good?” he asked. “Would you like some more?” He gave Hassan three capfuls of water before taking a swallow himself. Then he passed the water bottle back to Parvana.
    “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Parvana asked Asif. She realized that she didn’t know anything about this boy who was traveling with her. She knew he came out of a cave, but she didn’t know where he came from before that. She knew he was annoying, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t know who had hated him enough to tear up his back.
    “I’m alone,” Asif replied shortly.
    “So am I,” Parvana said, “but I’ve got family somewhere. What about you? Do you have a family somewhere else?”
    Asif tried to get Hassan to play with his finger, but Hassan didn’t seem interested in playing. He didn’t seem interested in anything.
    “No,” Asif said finally.
    “Did they go away? What happened to them?”
    “I had a family. Now I don’t. That’s all there is.” He wouldn’t say any more, and Parvana wondered why she’d bothered to ask.
    She took out her notebook.
    Dear Shauzia:
    Another day of being hungry, with nothing around that looks like food. I don’t even know if I am hungry any more. I’m just tired, and I feel like crying all the time. We’re almost out of water, and I don’t know what to do.
    Remember those fairy stories we read in school, where someone taps a magic wand on a rock and water pours out of it, or where someone rubs a lamp and a genie comes out to grant three wishes? I believed in that when I was little, but now I know that a rock is just a rock, and that rubbing a lamp only makes it shiny.
    Maybe when I’m old and spend all my time dreaming in the sun, I’ll be able to believe in those things again. But what do I believe in until then?
    “You’re not very smart,” Asif said, “to be carrying all those things in your bag. It’s tiring you out and making you mean. You’re stupid.”
    Parvana slammed down her notebook. “How dare you call me stupid? I have to carry all these things. Who else is going to carry them?”
    “I could carry something. I could carry Hassan.”
    “Don’t be silly. You can barely walk.”
    “I could carry him on my back. It’s not so sore