Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff Read Free Book Online Page B

his dog and baby and wife without even a note or a forwarding address. After a while I reach through the seats and turn it off. The feeling of trying to tune the radio matches the feeling of trying to tune in what’s happened to Matthew. No matter how much the scanner scans a few millimeters this way or that, the story won’t come into focus.
    The road here isn’t at all like England. Most of the time it has trees on both sides, dense as a fairy-tale forest and seeming to go on forever. You think you’re in a kind of wilderness and then suddenly the road flattens out and becomes a town, and all around are big square buildings called MAXVALUE and SUPERTREAD and WORLD OF RIBS . We are passing through one of these stretches when Gil pulls off the road in front of PHONE UNIVERSE .
    We’ll get you a cheap pay-as-you-go, he says, so you don’t have to phone Mum by way of London.
    What about you?
    I’ve got my laptop, he says and I smile. My father hates phones.
    I’m feeling homesick. I look at Honey and bury my head in the loose folds of fur at her neck and try to love her enough to make up for what she has lost. She responds politely, gazing at me without any particular warmth.
    I take her out for a walk, then put her back in the car and join Gil, who is staring at a phone that’s hopelessly wrong while the girl behind the counter recites all the reasons he should buy it. Spotting the simplest and cheapest phone, I say, We’ll have this one. The girl looks about seventeen. She’s chewing gum, wears too much makeup and is annoyed that I have chosen such a rubbish phone when she was recommending the newest most expensive thing. All our texts are free, but not to England or Holland. The girl looks it up in a book and it turns out they’re not insanely expensive, unless you go crazy and start sending texts to everyone you’ve ever met.
    We set off again. I’m putting Suzanne’s and Matthew’s numbers into the phone and following our progress on the map. Now that there’s just one lane in each direction it’s fairly slow. Mostly because of Gil’s driving, which is not exactly expert and also a little bit wandery due to being on the wrong side of the road, something he occasionally forgets. He doesn’t notice the cars piling up behind us, looking more and more annoyed. Whenever there’s a straight stretch of road and the broken passing line appears, cars pull out and flash by at twice our speed. Gil doesn’t look, just drives with his eyes straight ahead, his shoulders hunched over the wheel. He has to concentrate very hard because driving is not one of his natural skills. I’ve turned off the GPS because it jabbers constantly and annoys us both.
    The Automobile Association of America number gets copied from the back of the map where Suzanne wrote it and entered into the new phone, so that makes three people to text in America. For an instant I consider sending the AAA a text reassuring them that we’re doing just fine and they don’t have to worry about coming to tow us out of a ditch at the side of the road.
    What I do instead is send Matthew a text.
    Hi Matthew. It’s Mila. Gil’s daughter from London. We’re in America looking for you. Honey’s with us. She’s missing you. Please tell us where you are.
    I wonder if saying that Honey misses him is mean, suggesting that none of us cares about him as much as she does. But in the end I send it, thinking he should know the truth. Then I wait. But there’s no reply.
    Gil and I talk a little bit about what we see, but mostly we drive in silence.
    Where shall we stop for lunch? Gil asks eventually. Food becomes a big subject when you’re driving.
    Let’s keep going till we see a restaurant we like.
    So we do. We drive through a village full of big Victorian houses. Some of them look all newly painted and some look incredibly run-down. Occasionally we pass a shack that could be right out of a cartoon—windows all different sizes like someone’s found them