Beware that Girl - Softcover

TERESA TOTEN is the award-winning author of The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B, which won the Governor General's Award for Children's Literature and the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award, and was a finalist for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award. She is also the author of the acclaimed Blondes series, as well as The Game, The Onlyhouse and, with Eric Walters, The Taming. She has been nominated for the OLA White Pine Award and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, among numerous other prizes. Although she was born in Zagreb, Croatia, Teresa left for Canada on that very same day. She lives in Toronto.

9780553507904|excerpt

Toten / BEWARE THAT GIRL

Tuesday, March 22

Kate and Olivia

Neither girl moved. The young blonde on the bed didn’t move because she couldn’t, and the blonde in the chair didn’t because, well, it seemed that she couldn’t either.

Two doctors, a nurse and an orderly barged in, disturbing their silence. They lifted the body in the bed using a sheet, changed the bedding, checked her pulse and heart rate, tapped, touched and shone lights into unseeing eyes. This time they removed the long cylindrical tube that had been taped to the girl’s mouth. The withdrawal of the tube was ugly.

The body seized, arced and then spasmed.

When they left, the girl in the chair resumed her vigil numbed by the reek of ammonia and latex. The doctors never told her anything, so she’d stopped asking. The bedridden girl was attached to a tangled mess of tubes and wires. They led from her battered body to several monitors and a single pole that branched out like a steel tree blooming with bags of IV fluid. Things beeped and hummed on a random timetable that neither girl heard. In the forty-­eight hours since their arrival, the girl in the chair rarely broke her vigil to stretch, sleep or go to the bathroom. Her normally perfect blonde hair clung to her scalp, greased darker now with sweat, mud and dried blood.

She sat spellbound by the monitors, by the ever-­changing colored dots, the indecipherable graphs and especially the wavy green line. The green line was important. She didn’t waver, not in all those hours—­not until Detective Akimoto cleared his throat in the doorway. She struggled to meet his eyes.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to need you to step outside for a moment.”

The girl turned to her friend, whose mouth was red and angry from where the tape had been ripped away.

The detective flipped open a small black notepad.

He clicked his pen several times.

“Now, please.”

Other men were outside, milling about the corridor. Cops.

“We have a few questions about your friend, and also about a . . . Mr. Marcus Redkin.”

Mark.

She rose slowly. The room swayed in the effort. “Yes, sir.” She stole one more glance at the wavy green line.

The girl on the bed was no longer inert, not entirely. But no one saw. Words fell out of her mouth, silently slipping off the sheets and onto the ground.

But no one heard.