Free Underdogs by Markus Zusak Page B

to help her. Steve didn’t seem to care, for any of us.
    Where did it go?
I thought again. How could that picture turn into this one?
    Had years defeated us?
    Had they worn us down?
    Had they passed like big white clouds, disintegrating very slowly so that we couldn’t notice?
    In any case, this was pretty awful, and it was to worsen.
    It worsened during the night when Sarah went out and didn’t come back for hours.
    She left with the words “I’m goin’ out for a walk,” and a lot of time passed while she was gone. The rest of us acted indifferent to it at first, but by just after eleven, we were all worried. Even Steve seemed a bit affected.
    “C’mon,” our father told us. “We’re goin’ out lookin’.”
    No one argued.
    Rube and I went out in the panel van with Dad while Mum and Steve stayed home in case Sarah showed up while we were gone. We checked the pubs and all her friends’ places. Even Bruce’s place. Empty. She was nowhere.
    By midnight, when we got home, she still wasn’t back, and all we could do now was wait.
    We each did it differently.
    Mum sat, silent, not looking at anyone.
    Dad made coffee after coffee and drank them down like there was no tomorrow.
    Steve put a heat pack on and off his ankle and kept it elevated, determined.
    Rube mumbled something very quietly, at least five hundred times: “I’m gonna kill that bastard. I’m gonna kill that bastard. I’m gonna get that Bruce Patterson. I’m gonna kill that … I’m gonna. I’m gonna …”
    As for me, I ground my teeth together a bit and leaned forward with my chin resting on the table.
    Only Rube went to bed. The rest of us stayed.
    “No sign?” Mum asked when she woke up at one o’clock.
    “No.” Dad shook his head, and quite soon, we were all falling asleep, under a white, aching kitchen light globe.
    Later on, a dream was arriving.
    Interruption.
    “Cam?”
    “Cam?”
    I was shaken awake. I jumped. “Sarah?” “Nah, me.” It was Rube. “Ah, bloody you!”
    “Yeah.” He grinned. “She’s still not here?” “No. Unless she walked straight past us to bed.” “Nah, she’s not in there.”
    That was when we noticed something else — now Steve was gone as well. I checked the basement
    “Nup.” I looked back up at Rube. So now just the two of us went out on the porch, then out on the street. Where the hell was he?
    “Wait.” Rube turned around, looking down the road. “There he is.”
    We saw our brother sitting, propped up against a telegraph pole. We ran down to him. We stopped. Rube asked, “What’s goin’ on?”
    Steve looked up, and I had never seen him afraid like that, or as knotted up. He looked so lanky, and still like a man; he had always seemed to be a man. Always … but never like this. Not a vulnerable one.
    His crutches were two dead arms, lying there, wooden, next to him.
    Slowly, meltingly, our brother said, “I guess.” He stopped. Started again. “I just wanted to find her.”
    We said nothing, but I think when we helped Steve up and helped him walk home, he must have seen what the lives of Rube, Sarah, and me were like. He’d seen what it was to fall down and not know if you could get back up, and it scared him. It scared him because we did get up. We always did. We always.
    We took him home.
    We —
    From there, we all waited in the kitchen again, but only Rube and I were awake. At one point, he whispered something to me. The same thing as before.
    He went, “Ay, Cam. We’re gonna get that Patterson bloke.” He sounded so sure of it. “We’ll get him.”
    I was too tired to say anything but “We will.”
    Pretty soon, Rube was asleep, like Mum, Dad, and Steve. It didn’t take long for my own eyes to feel like cement and I went as well.
    All of us, asleep in the kitchen. I dreamed. It’s coming up. Not a bad one.
    When I woke up again, there was an extra person now, sleeping like the rest of us, at the crowded kitchen table.
    I’m standing in an empty goal. The stadium