A Girl Called Fearless (Excerpt)

Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 3

Dayla didn't show up at school on Friday. At first, I thought she was late. Sometimes peaceful neighborhoods would turn wacko, and you'd have to take a detour.

As the morning dragged on, I couldn't stop looking at her chair. The emptiest place in the world: where your best friend is supposed to be, but isn't.

I messaged her about twenty times before lunch. "Day! It's Avie. Are you sick? Text me!"

But when she didn't get back to me by the end of school, I knew she and Seth had taken off. Maybe she was trying to protect me by not saying good- bye or telling me where she was going, but I felt like Scarpanol had just killed one more person I loved.

After school, I locked myself upstairs in my room. Dad wouldn't be home for hours, so it was just Roik, Gerard, our domestic manager, and me. And even though they knew enough to leave me alone, I didn't feel like dealing with even one of their XY chromosomes.

I tore off my uniform tie and grey plaid skirt and kicked them into the closet. Then I pulled on a pair of jeans and put in my earphones.

I hadn't played Scarp Hole's Rage album in a long, long time, not since freshman year when I finally got that it was better to feel numb than replay endless pain. I knew exactly how the music would make me feel, but I went ahead anyway.

The first song begins with the lead singer, his voice bitterly quiet. I whispered the words along with him.

I rage at the darkness in my life

The stolen love, the stolen light.

Death was silent, but I'm

Not silent anymore.

The drums start pounding, and the guitars scream and he cries, "I rage," drawing out his pain over a hundred metallic bars until we both jump into the next lines.

Mistakes were made

That dug a thousand graves.

The lies, the bribes, the averted eyes,

Millions had to die before we cried

This was no accident,

No, no! No accident

And I scream out the chorus.

Someone has to pay

For the pain they caused.

Someone has to pay

For the lives they lost.

Death was silent, but I'm

Not silent anymore.

Rage! Rage! Rage!

No silence anymore!

I pounded my feet into the carpet, letting every note take me back. Back to the helpless, awful days of elementary school when Dayla and I and all our friends watched our moms and aunts and big sisters get cancer and die- way before doctors exposed the killer: Scarpanol, a hormone pumped into American beef. Scarpanol didn't kill little girls like me, but we were still casualties- left behind with dads and brothers and uncles who were shell-shocked and afraid.

I danced and danced and beat my arms in the air, lost in a house where no one understood.

Maybe Dayla was already in Canada. Maybe she and Seth were safe, but once she crossed that border, it was worse than her being a thousand miles away. It was forever.