You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

million directions, with just as many questions. She was already making a list in her head of all the people she needed to call. “Please hold on to the shirt, just as it is. Don’t wash it or anything. I am going to make a few calls to the people who are supervising Karin, and if they are with her, I will agree it’s nothing. If not, you’ll be hearing back from me shortly.”

“How old is Karin?” Maaike Bol repeated.

“She’s…she’s twelve,” Grace said. “I’m sorry, but I need to hang up so I can check on her now. I have your number. I’ll call you back.”

Chapter 17Wild Things

I’ve made it through the woods, Karin thought. She tried to muster up a sense of pride in her journey so far, but she was still so creeped out and kind of trembling. Everything that had happened in the last hours was so messed up. What even was that? Who were those freaky people, and could that really have been a gunshot she heard when she ran away? She’d never heard a gunshot in her life. Only in movies and on TV.

All she knew was, it was good that she had gotten away, and she was safe. She was okay.

It had to be after midnight, like, probably way after midnight by now. The air had turned much colder, and she was all wet and shivering. It didn’t feel good at all, but she told herself, I’m not going to die. It’s just sweat, as her father would have.

As she stepped into an open space, she saw more of the weird twisted dead trees, which she knew so well. They didn’t bother her now. Past that, she saw an upright block of wood that had markings on it. Arrows and numbers. It was a trail! A well-worn path, a pale yellowish path of sand and dirt, which almost glowed white in the moonlight. She didn’t have a map that would’ve told her which trail this was, so the markings didn’t make much sense. Was it the trail that would lead to the campsite? She didn’t care about cocoa and hot dogs, but she wanted to find the grown-ups she was supposed to find. She needed to find them to get back to her mom.

She felt nearly giddy as she looked up and could see stars between what was left of the clouds. If things hadn’t gotten all messed up, they would all be sitting around the campfire right now, leaning back and staring up at the sky and counting those stars. Or picking out constellations with their Scout guides. Or else they’d just be talking, like regular people do, about nothing at all, and having fun. That’s what she should have been doing. She felt a lump in her throat, imagining all that she was missing. The other kids had to be there already and she was the only one who was lost. Were they thinking about her? Would someone come out to try to find her?

Karin knew things didn’t go the way they were supposed to go pretty much ever. Case in point: people’s fathers weren’t supposed to die all of a sudden. Especially when their daughters were ten. Moms weren’t supposed to fall to pieces. People weren’t supposed to ask if it was her father’s fault that he got killed, or suggest that he’d been doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing over there, especially when he was working for all of us—to inform all of us about what was happening in parts of the world nobody wanted to know about. Moms weren’t supposed to remarry that fast, and not to their father’s boss or his accountant or whatever he was.

Kids at school weren’t supposed to treat you bad because your dad was killed. They weren’t supposed to just stare at you from afar and act like you had some contagious disease. People you didn’t even know weren’t supposed to all of a sudden pretend to be your friends, like school counselors and teachers and everyone above the age of ten. Strangers weren’t supposed to call your house at random. Stepdads weren’t supposed to get so strange so fast, were they? And say creepy things to you and follow you to school? Moms were supposed to notice these things, weren’t they? They were supposed to protect you.

Karin was on her own now, out here, in the night, in the big, giant national park, which wasn’t supposed to be scary at all. Nothing, everyone said, was really dangerous in the Netherlands. It was so safe here. Maybe it was on the outside. Maybe it was for other people. But for Karin? Not really.

That was part of the reason she had joined Scouts, to get out here and to do the dropping this summer. She wanted to get away and be able to take care of herself. She wanted to be away from home for a while. To not hear the screaming and fighting and noise of Martijn hurting her mother downstairs. To get away from him—that weird way he had of watching her all the time. Not like he came into her room or anything, but he kind of hovered. It wasn’t normal.

But then the a-hole had volunteered to be the parent guide on this trip. What a creep. Why couldn’t he let her just go away for a weekend? It was like he somehow had to own her and her mom. Her mom had once told her that it was “good to have a man around the house, to keep us safe.” Ha. What kind of dumb thing was that? They were way safer without him.

Karin realized that she had been walking looking down at her feet, so she decided to look up and not think so hard, because thinking hard sometimes started to feel really bad.

She saw shapes in front of her—a big, wide tree next to a pair of large boulders—and all of a sudden, something started to