change.
Trisha went the final ten yards on her left side with her left arm stretched out and her face buried against the fold of her elbow. She thumped against something hard enough to bruise her ribs on that side ... and then, before she could even look up from her arm, a needle of pain drove into her just above her left cheekbone. Trisha shrieked and jerked to her knees, slapping. She crushed something-another wasp, of course, what else-even as it stung her again, even as she opened her eyes and saw them all around her: yellowbrown insects that looked weighted down in the tailsection, plump ungainly poison factories.
She had slid into a dead tree standing at the foot of the slope about twenty-five feet from the brawling streamlet. In the dead tree's lowest fork, just at eye-level to a little girl who was nine but tall for her age, was a gray paper nest. Agitated wasps were crawling all over it; more were flying out of a hole in the top.
Pain needled the right side of Trisha's neck, just below the bill of her cap. Another sting lit up her right arm above the elbow. Screaming, in a total panic, she bolted. Something stung the back of her neck; something stung the small of her back, above the waistband of her bluejeans, where her shirt was still pulled up and the plastic poncho hung in tatters.
She ran in the direction of the stream without any thought or plan or intent; it was just that the ground there was relatively open. She wove her way around the clumps of bushes, and when the underbrush began to thicken she bulled through it. At the stream she stopped, gasping for breath, looking tearfully (and fearfully) back over her shoulder. The wasps were gone, but they had done plenty of damage before she had managed to outrun them. Her left eye, close to where the first one had gotten her, was swelled almost shut.
If I get a bad reaction, I'll die, she thought, but in the aftermath of her panic she didn't care. She sat down by the little stream which had gotten her into all this trouble, sobbing and sniffling. When she felt a little bit in control of herself again, she took off her pack. Tight, fierce shudders wracked her, each one making her body harden up like a spring and pulling red-hot darts of pain from the places where she had been stung. She put her arms around her pack, rocked it like a doll, and cried harder. Holding the pack that way made her think of Mona lying in the back seat of the Caravan, good old Moanie Balogna with her big blue eyes. There had been times, while her parents were getting ready to divorce and then actually doing it, when Mona had felt like her only comfort; there were times when not even Pepsi could understand. Now her parents' divorce seemed like very small beans. There were bigger problems than grownups who couldn't get along, there were wasps, for one thing, and Trisha thought she would give anything to see Mona again.
At least she wasn't going to die from the stings, or she'd probably be dying already. She had overheard her Mom and
Mrs. Thomas from across the street talking about someone who was allergic to stings, and Mrs. Thomas had said, 'Ten seconds after it gut im, poor ole Frank was swole up like a balloon. If he hadn't had his little kit with the hyperdermic, I guess he woulda choked to death.'
Trisha didn't feel choky, but the bites throbbed horribly, and they had swole up like balloons, all right. The one by her eye had built a hot little volcano of tissue that she could actually look at, and when she probed gingerly with her fingers, a bolt of pain shot into her head and made her cry out in misery. She was no longer exactly weeping, but that eye ran helplessly with tears just the same.
Moving her hands slowly and carefully, Trisha examined herself She isolated at least half a dozen stings (she thought there was one location, on her left side just above the hip, where she might have sustained two or even three-it was the sorest place of all). Her back felt all scraped up and her left arm, which had absorbed most of the damage during the final part of her slide, was a net of blood from wrist to elbow. The side of her face where the stump of branch had poked her was bleeding again, too.
Not fair, she thought. Not f
Then a terrible idea occurred to her . . . except it was more than an idea, it was a certainty. Her Walkman was broken, shattered to a million pieces in its little side pocket. Had to be. There was no way it could have survived the slide.
Trisha tugged the pack's buckles with bloodstreaked trembling fingers and at last worked the straps free. She pulled out her Gameboy and that was smashed, all right, nothing left of the window where the little electronic blips had gamboled but a few shards of yellow glass. Also, her
bag of potato chips had burst open and the Gameboy's cracked white housing was covered with greasy crumbs.
Both plastic bottles, the one with the water in it and the bottle of Surge, were dented but whole. Her lunch- sack was smooshed into something that looked like roadkill (and covered with more potato chips), but Trisha didn't even bother looking inside. My Walkman, she thought, unaware that she was sobbing as she unzipped the inner pocket. My poor poor Walkman. To be separated from even the voices of the human world seemed more than she could bear on top of everything else.
Trisha reached into the pocket and pulled out a miracle: the Walkman, intact. The earphone cord, which she had rewrapped neatly around the little gadget's body, had come loose in a tangle, but that was all. She held the Walkman in her hand, looking incredulously from it to the Gameboy lying beside her. How could one be whole and the other so badly shattered? How was that possible?
It's not, the cold and hateful voice in her head informed her. It looks all right but it's broken inside.
Trisha straightened the cord, slipped the earbuds into place, and settled her finger on the power button. She had forgotten the stings, the insect bites, the cuts and scrapes. She closed her swollen, heavy eyelids, making a little dark. 'Please, God,' she said into it, 'don't let my Walkman be broken.' Then she pushed the power button.
'This just in,' said the female announcer-she might have been broadcasting from the middle of Trisha's head. 'A Sanford woman hiking a Castle County section of the Appalachian Trail with her two children has reported her daughter, nine-year-old Patricia McFarland, missing and presumably lost in the woods west of TR-90 and the town of Morton.'
Trisha's eyes flew wide open and she listened for the next ten minutes, long after WCAS had reverted, like someone with unbreakable bad habits, to country music and NASCAR reports. She was lost in the woods. It was official. Soon they would swing into action, whoever they were-the people, she supposed, who kept the helicopters ready to fly and the bloodhounds ready to sniff Her mother would be scared to death ... and yet Trisha felt a small strange trickle of satisfaction when she considered that likelihood.
I wasn't supervised, she thought-not without self-righteousness. I'm just a little kid and I wasn't properly supervised. Also if she gives me hell I'll just say 'You wouldn't stop arguing and finally I couldn't stand it anymore,' Pepsi would like that; it was just so V C. Andrews.
