Free Wreath by Judy Christie

Lucky. Books were too heavy to carry when your load needed to be light.
    Instead, she had listed them in her notebook, the little library she’d left behind, mostly books from garage sales or thrown out from the school library because the covers were beat up or someone had scribbled in them or torn a page or scratched their initials into the cover. Wreath couldn’t understand people who spoiled books for other people. She handled books carefully, the way she might a puppy or Frankie’s fragile glass vase.
    The night now totally black, she took her flashlight out of its hiding place under a sack of clothes in the back and fished the journal from the pack. She picked the old pen up from the seat of the Tiger Van and tried to remember titles she’d seen at the library the day before. Maybe she should take a chance and try to get a library card. She jotted a few novels to read. Clarice was a fan of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and her English teacher in Lucky had liked it a lot, too. Wreath definitely needed to read that one.
    Swatting mosquitoes and sweating, she read through her book list, remembering what she liked most about various stories and reminiscing about what was going on in her life when she had read each of the books. A good story took away the loneliness when her grandma died and Frankie started moving around. Books kept her from having to talk to kids she didn’t know when she went to a new school.
    Someday she was going to have a nice house full of books. When she finished college and had a good job, making lots of money, she would have one of those rooms lined with shelves and a ladder on wheels.
    She had shown a picture of one of those rooms to Frankie, who smiled and said, “You’ll fill that up in no time.” Her mama always said Wreath got her love of books from her daddy’s daddy. “That man could sit for hours with his nose in a book.”
    Wreath didn’t know her father, so she certainly didn’t know his father. She thought instead Grandma Willis had instilled the love of reading in her, and Frankie agreed that was possible. “She started every day reading the Bible and after that read everything she could get her hands on whenever she could grab a minute,” Frankie had said.
    Until Wreath checked books out, she could read books she had found around the junkyard, many of them mildewed with a slightly distasteful smell but still intact. As the long summer evening grew darker, Wreath started a horror novel she had found in one of the junked cars, a scary, dark drawing on the cover. Its pages were brittle with age and began to fall apart before she finished the first chapter.
    She was kind of glad to put it down, the story adding to her anxiety as the night noises got louder, the van stuffier, and her imagination jumpier with fear.
    She fell asleep with thoughts of snarling dogs and mean men and a dark jumbled place where evil skulked. She dreamed of a kind woman who helped poor children, and the sight of the woman made her feel safe. She reached out, thinking it was Frankie. When she got closer, she saw it was a beautiful angel, dressed in white, but it wasn’t her mama.

    Wreath awoke, stiff, as usual, from the hard floor of the van. Except this morning she felt better. Happier.
    The thoughts about being found weren’t as close as usual. Nor was she worried about school … or the need to turn herself in to some faceless official. Those thoughts, as stuck to her as the hot, humid weather, had shrunk.
    On this morning, an odd feeling of peace and tension mixed up inside of her. She knew she had to do a few more things to make her campsite livable.
    Wandering through the old cars, she remembered her first glimpse of the place, back in the winter, when the trees were bare and the area deserted, coming out of Landry with her mother and Big Fun. Although she never had much use for Big Fun, she owed him for helping her stumble upon the junkyard, the only good thing to come out of the trip.
    Her mother had