The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

when she was bored. She was ruminating on this thought as she walked inside to find her parents poring over a box of financial records on the living room floor, doing their budget.
    The house was coming along; that week her mom had spent her nights staining the floors on the first level so that they didn’t look so scratchy and decrepit anymore. Maggie popped some clothes in the hamper. She read in the living room until after her parents had gone to bed.
    Upstairs her room was stuffy; she could almost see the heat puffing out of the old radiator. She cracked open the window to let in the cold air, then stood and shivered and looked up at the stars, which seemed to get brighter every night as the weather got colder.
    She noticed some movement in the grass between the two houses.
    It was Pauline, standing in the moonlight. She was perched on a fallen tree that was propped at a sharp angle against another tree, walking up and down the incline with her arms spread wide to balance herself, wearing a knit hat and no jacket. She was so high that if she fell, she could have easily broken something, and Maggie sucked in her breath. Pauline happened to look up at Maggie’s window at that moment and waved wildly, going off balance slightly before righting herself. Maggie closed her window, went downstairs, and walked outside and across the grass in her socks, the cold seeping into the soles of her feet.
    “Are you practicing your balance-beam routine?”
    Pauline didn’t falter. “Oh yeah. I’ve been working on my dismount.” She looked down, let her arms drop, sighed, then descended onto the grass. “I hate parties.”
    “Why?”
    “Everyone wants to talk to me.”
    “That sounds terrible,” Maggie said sarcastically. “You’re, like, the opposite of a wallflower.”
    Pauline smirked. “I’m serious. I hate it. It makes me want to scream.”
    Maggie could picture it, how Pauline would draw people to her in a room, not just because of how she looked but because of her vibrating, infectious energy.
    “Why does everyone talk about stuff that they only pretend to be interested in?”
    “I don’t know. It’s just the way people are.” Maggie shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around herself, shaking her legs to keep her feet warm.
    “My mom’s that way. But I think it’s just because she’s not that happy. Because she misses my dad. I won’t be that way.” Pauline sighed, a thin trail of white steam rising from her mouth, then studied her. “I wish I were more like you. You seem so calm.”
    Maggie shook her head. “I’m not calm, I’m just . . . hesitant . It’s, like, I always think pretty soon my life will be this great story , as soon as it starts .”
    Pauline put one foot in front of the other, staring at her toes. “I can’t picture that at all for me. You never know when you’ll . . .” She stuck out her tongue to pretend she was dead. “I can’t picture staying in Door County, and I also can’t picture leaving. I can’t picture the future.” She grinned slyly. “Do you think that means I’ll die young?”
    “Probably.”
    Pauline laughed her scraping laugh that practically hurt the ears and climbed back onto the felled tree. “Maybe this is the way I go. On the dismount.”
    There was the squeak of a door opening onto Pauline’s back deck and the sound of chattering and dishes and glasses clinking inside. And then Mrs. Boden’s voice, calling to her.
    Pauline stepped back down again, her shoulders slumping like a three-year-old’s, her whole body curling over in disgust. “My mom always makes me hang around at these things because I’m her security blanket. Argh. Bye.” She flung up her hand, wagged it, and started walking. “Oh wait, I’m sorry I didn’t ask. Do you want to come over? It’s really horrible.”
    Maggie suddenly felt guilty about what she’d thought earlier. She looked back toward her house, then back at Pauline, hugging herself tighter. “It sounds