Secret Star by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

fault, “You don’t call me a jerk!”
    â€œI’m not. I—”
    â€œWhere you been! I told them you were sick.”
    â€œTess,” Kamo said, his voice quiet, surprised, warm, as if nothing were wrong now that she was there. “I been looking for you.”
    â€œGet the hell inside,” Butch told her. He grabbed her by one arm and tried to propel her toward the stockroom door. She yanked her arm away.
    â€œStop it! I’m not going in. I’ve got to talk with Kam.”
    â€œWhat the hell for? You talk with freaks?” Butch tried to step past her to hassle Kam some more. She stood in his way. He glared, then turned and stomped into the IGA, slamming the door behind him.
    Tess felt her knees go watery. Without meaning to, she folded to sit on the gravel. Kam hunkered down and swiveled his lopsided face to peer at her.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said.
    â€œAbout what?” He hadn’t done anything wrong that she knew of.
    â€œEverything. How’s your dad?”
    His voice was too gentle. And she hadn’t wanted to think about Daddy being sick, Daddy acting mad at her. Without warning tears started running down her face. She sobbed.
    â€œTess?” He sounded frightened. “Is it bad?”
    â€œNo,” she managed to say through her sobbing. “He’s okay.”
    Kamo put his arms around her.
    It felt strange, yet right, having him close. She leaned against him. He patted her back and didn’t say anything, just held her.
    It felt good. But Tess hated to cry. What if somebody came out of the IGA and saw her? “Crap,” she muttered, pulling away from Kam, rubbing her face, hiding behind her hands. Her face had to be as red as turkey wattles.
    Kam crouched watching her.
    â€œDaddy’s okay,” she told him. “He gets that way, and then he takes his pills, and then he’s all right again.” Until sometime maybe he wouldn’t find his pills, or somebody would ask too many questions, maybe he wouldn’t be all right. But Tess didn’t want to think about it. “He’s mad at me. Or upset. He’s not talking.” Daddy had hardly said a word to her that morning. “I been looking for you all day, and now my gut’s killing me.”
    â€œYou were looking for me?”
    It had seemed like everything depended on finding him, yet Tess found she could not explain why. She fumbled for words without finding any, and God knew what he was thinking. She felt her face burn even redder.
    He looked away from her, studying the hills, the locust trees standing black and feathery against the sky. He said, “You going to work?”
    She shook her head. Couldn’t go in there now, not with tear tracks on her smudgy red face.
    â€œHome?”
    â€œNo. Daddy knows I’m supposed to be at work.”
    Kam seemed to understand that there were some things she couldn’t explain to Daddy. He nodded. “C’mon,” he said, and he stood up and stretched his right hand, the good one, down to her.
    She got up without touching his hand. They walked silently up the steep road, out of Hinkles Corner, down through the salvage yard and past the sawmill. Tess began to suspect he was taking her home after all. “Where we going?”
    â€œDinner.”
    They cut through the woods, came out in an abandoned pasture, and headed downhill between clumps of sassafras and honeysuckle toward the creek. Tess could see an oxbow of water shining in the low light. But halfway down to the river bottom, Kam rounded an outcropping of rock and turned toward a run-in shed cows had once used. When they reached it he ducked inside, and Tess realized it was his camp.
    He had a tarp on the ground, and some blankets to sleep in, and a blanket spread over a muddle of stuff in a back corner, and cardboard tacked up over the drafty places in the walls. A roof to keep off rain, three walls—it could have been