The Night the White Deer Died by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page B

to feel the anger come into her voice. She wasn’t really angry at him, but there it was—rising hotly to the surface. “You’ve got me locked into something I don’t want to be into.”
    For a full minute he looked at her in offended silence. Then he turned and walked off, leaving her standing, and she wasn’t certain if he’d understood or not.
    At any rate it made little difference, because by the time another week had gone by, it was quite evident that whether Julio allowed her freedom or not, the other boys wouldn’t dare ask her on a date. Julio quitfollowing her, quit making the sounds at her to get her attention so that she could look at him and be ignored, but it made no real change except that now
nobody
was around her.
    Except the girls, of course, but it was difficult for her to be friendly with them to any great depth because their lives were so vastly different from hers.
    Not bad, not good, the way her life was not bad, not good to them—just different. And the difference was so profound that she knew she could never change enough to become true friends with any of them, at least not for years.
    And her mother was working very hard, too, now that the hot summer was over. The crisp nights and soft days of fall, with splashes of gold in the aspens as they dropped their leaves and the almost unbelievable beauty of high desert and low mountains as they turned their faces to winter had come into their lives so subtly that Janet couldn’t really remember ever having lived anywhere else. Nor wanting to—she was due to visit her father in California for Christmas, and as much as she loved her father, she was wondering if she could get out of it.
    There was too much beauty here to leave, and even being basically alone—when her mother was deep into sculpting, nothing else existed—Janet was not unhappy.
    The dog followed her always, though she still hadn’t named him, and in a strange way the small animalfilled that part of her life that would normally have been lonely or sad.
    Even the dream had ceased coming, and she had to force herself to remember when it had last come or just how it went; some of the images in the dream, the doe and the pond, were blurred in her memory, and now and then she smiled when she remembered the significance she’d given the dream.
    It was all so silly, she thought now, so little-girlish and silly. The whole thing, the dream and the way it had scared her for no reason and the way she would wake up drenched with perspiration, and the way the dream took her mind, made her part of it all, was all so ridiculous that she now wondered sometimes if perhaps she hadn’t been a little off, a little crazy.
    Maybe she was having trouble changing from a girl to a woman, she thought one cool evening halfway through the month of November, when there was a taste of winter in the air—a tease—and she sat alone in the kitchen while the
chink-chink
of her mother’s hammer and chisel came from the studio room. But then she smiled and thought that all of
that
was silly, too, just like her strange infatuation with Billy had been, or the hot anger that came when she talked to Julio, or the fact that she was sitting now alone in her kitchen even
thinking
about all the silly things that had been bothering her. She was on top of things right then; right at that moment, she would thinklater, she was in complete control of her life and herself.
    It had been six weeks since she’d seen Billy. She was settled in school, and she’d quit having the dream. Later she would think of that moment and wonder why it couldn’t have lasted all her life, why it just couldn’t have gone on and on, with her in complete control of everything that mattered to her.
    But of course it didn’t, the way nothing can ever be good forever and nothing can ever be bad forever.
    Because it was that same evening that she went to bed early, feeling so good about everything. She’d left her window open, the window that