You Can Run Read Free Page A

Carnegie.”
    â€œWell. . . .” I began.
    â€œSee?” Morgan said. “Robyn doesn’t care. I don’t care. So can we please talk about something else?”
    â€œYou’re putting words in Robyn’s mouth,” Billy protested. “Robyn is a sensitive person. She cares about the people around her.”
    Morgan gave him an irritated look. “I’m someone around her,” she said. “You’re someone around her. But Trisha Carnegie? Trisha Carnegie is not around her.”
    â€œAround her?” I said. “Hello? Am I invisible all of a sudden?”
    â€œBesides,” Morgan said, “Trisha is so weird.”
    She wasn’t the only person with that opinion. Everyone thought that Trisha was weird. She dressed funny—plaid skirts with knee socks and cardigans; capri pants and bowling shirt combinations; shirtwaist dresses vintage 1955, paired with blazers. Some people could pull off a look like that. Not Trisha. Her crazy clothes only reinforced the weird way she acted. She had a row of safety pins stuck into one ear and a big metal stud stuck in the other—a look that was as retro as her wardrobe. Half the time, she wore twelve-hole steel-toed boots, the rest of the time, ballet slippers. She always carried a genuine Dolce & Gabbana backpack, though, because, by the way, trash-dressing Trisha was a rich girl. And always, always around her neck was a chain from which hung a gold ring—her father’s wedding band— and a little leather pouch containing a chunk of crystal.
    Trisha wasn’t a friend of mine. I don’t think she was anyone’s friend. She didn’t hang out with any group that I knew of. She barely talked in class. Sure, she had to do presentations like the rest of us, but she always picked out-there topics. Last year, in Western Civilization Up to the Fifteenth Century, she did a show-and-tell on the history of torture. Her poetry presentation in English was on—who else?—Sylvia Plath. In World Issues, she enlightened us all about the globalization of disease, including a gruesomely detailed account of the progress of the Ebola Virus through the human body. Very dark— that was Trisha.
    Kids who had gone to elementary school with Trisha swore that she hadn’t always been so weird. One kid I knew even insisted that she had been perfectly normal up until she was twelve years old. That was when she had completely freaked out. Apparently, she had never freaked back in again. The story I had heard went like this: Trisha and her father had gone on a camping trip together. It had been a real wilderness trip. They canoed their way through the backcountry, just the two of them, miles from civilization. Then one night when they were sitting around a campfire, her father had a heart attack. Trisha wanted to help him. But she was twelve years old and out in the wilds. What could she do? Someone said her father had taken a cell phone on the trip, but Trisha couldn’t get a signal. Someone else said that Trisha had tried to get her father into the canoe. Her plan: to travel back however many miles to where they had started. Maybe she would get lucky along the way. Maybe she would come across another camper. Maybe she would hit the jackpot and run into a doctor who was out camping with his family.
    But Trisha’s father was in no shape to walk, and she was too small to carry him. She dragged him a little way, but she couldn’t get him into the canoe.
    He died.
    Someone said he died while Trisha was signaling SOS into the darkness with a flashlight. Someone else said he died with Trisha screaming for help into an empty night on an island who knows how far from another living soul. Everyone who told the story said that Trisha had screamed herself silent by morning, when a canoe with two teenage boys in it happened by. Trisha got their attention by throwing rocks at them from the shore. But by then it was too