Winner Take All by T. Davis Bunn Read Free Book Online

seat, the counselor adds, “Sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is when to ask for help.”
    “There’s no problem,” she replies and leaves the office
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    And there isn’t. Not anymore
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    She severs all connections with her friends and the game. In fact, she stops almost everything that is not directly tied to school and her work. That term, she receives one C and manages to raise the rest of her grades to B’s and A’s. The crowd of former friends rename her Casper. The next term, she receives her last B ever. By that spring her former friends no longer even greet her in the hall
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    Two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, she graduates with honors. Two universities offer her full rides. She accepts the offer from Georgetown because they agree to defer her entry a year
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    The day she turns seventeen, she gives herself a ticket to Europe as her birthday present. Her parents do not even know she has left until they receive her one and only letter, sent the week after her arrival in London
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    Two months later she has made her way across France and down the length of Italy. Her passport and a wad of traveler’s checks are stuffed deep inside her backpack. She likes introducing herself as Casper, and by the time she arrives in Rome it is the only name she uses. She makes no plans further along than the next seventy-two hours. She wears Gortex ankle boots and high wool socks and hiking gear and a Gypsy kerchief sewn with silver spangles to hide her hair
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    She meets some Dutch backpackers at the hostel in Naples who invite her to take the train over to Bari. From there they will catch the two-day ferry to Athens. On the train ride they talk about mystic beaches untouched by tourist hordes—the southern coves of Crete, Cleopatra Island off Turkey, Lamu Island near the Kenyan coast, Niias in Indonesia. The child listens and laughs and shares a wineskin of fiery red. As the day trundles on, she aches with the realization she has finally found a reason to use the word happy and mean it
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    If only she could hold on to that feeling a little while longer
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    The second night of their boat crossing, three of the backpackers drug her wine and rape her repeatedly on the upper deck between the two smokestacks
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    All she remembers afterward is their drunken laughter and the way smoke keeps rising to stain the star-flung sky
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    T HE NEXT MORNING , Kirsten worked in Marcus’ front garden forming a periwinkle border around the central elm. She dug between the roots and tried to hold to a circular formation. A high summer wind blasted through a cloudless sky. Heat squeezed sweat from her forehead like a weightlifter working a sponge. Why she remained here at all was a question that only aggravated the fissure in her brain. Two warring factions battled in fierce mental salvos. Impossible choices. Impossible decisions.
    Six months ago she had started working as Marcus’ research staffer. Almost immediately the neighbors had taken her presence as a sign of something deeper in the making. They welcomed her with flowers and shrubs from their own gardens. It was the clearest possible message both of her own acceptance and of the affection they felt for Marcus.
    It was also a quiet signal of their watchfulness, for never did she receive the next gift until the previous one was planted. Half this neighborhood attended Deacon’s church. While they were far too polite to say a thing, Kirsten knew the eyes were scouting carefully. Her comings and goings were the subject of the same stream of gossip as their own children. This she knew from Netty, who had heard the mildly approving chatter at the supermarket checkout counter.
    The only exception to the community’s cordiality was Deacon’s wife, Fay Wilbur. She was inside right now, doing her thrice-weekly cleaning. The woman had said nothing, but Kirsten sensed the storm brewing. Fay eyed her with the same distaste she would a worm among her vegetables. There was going to be a reckoning. It