The Girl in a Coma Read Free Page A

you, Rebecca doesn’t believe it. Maybe she’s right.
    As for me, I have a sort of boyfriend myself. Put that in the past tense. I had a sort of boyfriend.
    I fell in love with his family’s golden retriever. Jaimie Retzinger happened to be on the other end of the leash.
    He wanted to get married.
    I’m fifteen, for glory’s sake.
    He wanted me to change my name! I swore if I ever got married, I wouldn’t be a Retzinger. He didn’t like that I’m very fond of the name Allison Briscoe. Briscoe is the one good thing my mom ever got from my father, unless you count David and me.
    Jaimie Retzinger entered my life early last fall. We hung out together in a kind of witless oblivion but ended up getting on each other’s nerves. He’s not much for thinking or doing things; he’s not much for anything, really. It seemed a nice change at the time. He just lives in the moment, he doesn’t talk very much, or listen. Mostly he rides around on his secondhand Harley, which he bought when he was working for awhile and hasn’t paid off. He’s three years older than me but he still lives at home.
    My relationship with Jaimie Retzinger is complicated. We went to a school dance once. That was our only dress-up date. Somebody took our picture and it ended up in the yearbook. He didn’t like me being in school, he didn’t like being in the yearbook, he didn’t like when I passed my exams. He was happy when I decided to drop out. That would put us on a more equal footing and he liked that. You fill in the blanks: we split.
    More or less.
    He’d still come by occasionally after the snow forced him to stop riding his “chopper.” That’s what he calls his motorcycle, even though there is nothing custom about it. It’s just like he bought it, dints, dirt, and everything. He’d drop in to Tim Hortons, order a double-double to go, then hang around, drinking it out of the cardboard cup at a table, taking up space.
    My good glory, if falling for Jaimie Retzinger was the dumbest thing I ever did, getting rid of him, more or less, was the smartest.
    I mean, talk about no future in a relationship, with Jaimie Retzinger there was hardly a present. Whatever we had was all in the past.
    Thinking about him makes me want to swear. I used to swear a lot. I don’t any more. Glory is about it. It’s what my Nana says. We’ve been using that word in our family for hundreds of years.
    As I drift back into Pennsylvania, the last image in my mind is of Jaimie Retzinger. He’s smiling that scary smile of his, like he doesn’t know what he’s smiling about.

Three
    Rebecca
    Rebecca squinted against the rising sun and gazed directly at the two British soldiers. This seemed to make them uncomfortable. They were not used to Mennonite women making eye contact. Even among the Mennonite men, some would confront them face-to-face, as if daring the soldiers to challenge God’s authority, but others looked away, being shy, or fearful, or less certain of their faith.
    Johannes Haun stared Corporal Jonas straight in the eye.
    He hardly bothered to acknowledge Private Panabaker’s squalid existence.
    â€œIt is not likely, so, that the boy would kill his own papa, or steal a horse,” said Rebecca’s father. He spoke English with a heavy German accent, echoing what was commonly called Pennsylvania Deutsch. This was the language his people had brought with them when they fled Europe in search of religious freedom.
    While the men talked, Rebecca’s mind burst with images of Jacob Shantz in the shadow of the church. Could he possibly have murdered his father? When they had kissed, did he know he was going to do it? Was that why he wasn’t afraid about what his father might think? No, she answered herself. Satisfied with her conclusion, she let the images fade.
    Jacob’s father was not a popular man. If Mennonites had been allowed to dislike