Sanctuary by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

brother for being different.
    And that’s all Douglas is. Not crazy. Not retarded. Just different.
    When I was through, Douglas, who knows the truth about my “special ability”—but not about Rob; no one knows the truth about Rob, except for Ruth who is, after all, my best friend—let out a big gush of air.
    “Whoa,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Those poor people,” he said, meaning the Thompkinses.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “I’ve seen the daughter,” he said, meaning Tasha. “At the store.”
    “Really?” Somehow I could not picture shy, pretty Tasha Thompkins, always so conservatively dressed, in Underground Comix, where Douglas worked.
    “She’s into
Witchblade
,” Douglas elaborated. He seemed really concerned. I mean, for Douglas. “What did it look like, anyway?”
    He had thrown me. “What did what look like?”
    “The symbol,” Douglas said, patiently. “The one on Nate’s chest.”
    “Oh,” I said. I went over to his desk and drew it, not very expertly, on a pad of paper I found lying there. “Like this,” I said, and handed it to him.
     

     
    He took the pad and studied what I had drawn. When, after a minute, he continued to squint down at it, I said, “It’s supposed to be a gang symbol, or something. It only makes sense if you’re in the gang.”
    “This isn’t a gang symbol,” Douglas said. “I mean, I don’t think so. It looks familiar.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Because you’ve probably seen it before, driving under the overpass. Somebody spray-painted it there.”
    “I never go by the overpass,” Douglas said. Then he did something really weird. I mean weird for Douglas.
    He got out of bed and started pulling books off his shelves. Douglas has more books—and comic books—than anyone I know. Still, if you wanted to borrow one, and took it down off the shelf and forgot to mention it to him, Douglas would notice right away it was missing, even though there are maybe a thousand other ones that look exactly like it right there on the shelf beside it.
    Douglas is one of those book people.
    Seeing that he was going to be occupied until well into the night, I left. I doubted he even noticed. He was way too absorbed in looking things up.
    In my own room, I undressed quickly, slipping into my pajamas—a pair of fleece warm-up pants and a long-sleeved tee—with lightning speed. That is because my room, which is on the third floor, is the draftiest room in the house, and from Halloween until Easter it is freezing, in spite of the space heater my dad had installed.
    I don’t mind the cold, however, because I have the best view of anybody from my bedroom windows, and that’s including Mike, whose view into Claire Lippman’s bedroom is what caused all that trouble a few months ago, when he decided to drop out of Harvard because he and Claire were in love. My view, which is from some dormer windows high above the treetops, is of all of Lumbley Lane, which in the moonlight always looks like a silver river, the sidewalks on either side of it mossy banks. In fact, when I’d been younger, I used to pretend Lumbley Lane was a river, and that I was the lighthouse operator, high above it… .
    Whatever. I’d been a weird kid.
    That night, as I undid Rob’s watch, which he’d given me a few months earlier, and which I wore like an ID bracelet, (much to the bewilderment of my parents, who thought it was a bit odd that I went around with this bulky man’s watch weighing my hand down all the time), I didn’t look down at the street. I didn’t pretend Lumbley Lane was a river, or that I was the lighthouse operator, guiding tempest-tossed ships safely to shore.
    Instead, I looked across the street, into Tasha Thompkins’s bedroom window. The lights in her room were still on. She had probably heard the news about her brother by now. I wondered if she was stretched out on her bed, crying. That’s where I’d be, if I found out either of my brothers had been killed. I felt a wave