The Only Girl in Town by Ally Condie EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Ally Condie
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Friendship
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
now
I am walking back from the water when it happens. I am looking down at
my hands in the late-summer sun. It is the time of day when afternoon
slides into dusk. I am looking at them, thinking, these are my hands, that is
so strange.
My hands are my hands. Like in kindergarten when you have to practice
writing your name over and over again until it looks so weird. You start to
wonder, Is this really my name? This can’t be my name. Like a straggle of
string unraveled from a sweater, a trail made by a snake in the mud.
I am thinking that and then
I feel the world
empty around me.
Cicadas stop screaming.
Cars stop humming along the road past the edge of the wood.
My phone, which had been buzzing buzzing buzzing in my pocket, goes
silent. When I pull it out, it’s cold and dead. When I turn it on, there is no
signal.
In the distance, the water splashes over the spillway, but no one calls or
cries out.
I know before I know
that everyone is gone.
2.
now
Just your mind, my brain says. Just your mind playing tricks on you.
Everyone’s not gone. The world’s not empty. That’s impossible. Get in the
car. Go home. Everything will be fine.
I’ve made it through the woods and I’m standing where we leave our
cars when we go to the jump. Parked under a heavy-branched tree is my
beat-up old Subaru. Silver. Long scratch on the driver’s side door and an
old, peeling KEEP LITHIA GREEN bumper sticker on the back.
But there is no sense of coming and leaving. No engines turning off or
on, no crunch of footsteps in the gravel of the parking area, no people
calling out to one another in greeting or farewell.
I unlock the car and get in and lock it.
The car is hot and muggy inside, an empty Gatorade bottle rattling
around in the front seat where Sam or Sydney or Alex or Ella or Jack used
to sit.
I hear my friends laughing. I see Sam turn his head to look at me, the
lights from the dashboard illuminating his face. The air rushes in through
the windows and it smells of summer rain.
I turn away from the memories and put my hands on the steering wheel.
Then my forehead against it.
Breathe, I say.
Just your mind.
3.
now
I send a message to everyone in my contacts. The message says:
Hello?
I wait.
Nothing, no one writes back.
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