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    Cuts Like a Knife
    Cuts Like a Knife
    Cuts Like a Knife
    Ebook78 pages57 minutes

    Cuts Like a Knife

    By Darlene Ryan

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Daniel has been crazy about Mac from the moment she transferred to his school. She's smart, funny, loyal and fiercely independent. The only problem is, when life gets too hard for Mac, she runs away. But she always comes back.

    Except now Mac's grandmother is dead, their house is about to be torn down and she's been humiliated in front of the entire school. When Daniel finds out Mac has been saying goodbye to her friends, he realizes she's planning on leaving for good. Getting more and more desperate as he searches the city, Daniel finds an unexpected and unlikely ally. But can he find Mac before he loses her forever?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOrca Book Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781459801226
    Cuts Like a Knife
    Author

    Darlene Ryan

    Darlene Ryan has been writing for as long as she can remember and was the 2006 poet recipient of the Dr. Marilyn Trenholme Counsell Early Childhood Literacy Award. As Sofie Kelly, she writes the best-selling Magical Cats mysteries. She lives with her family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. For more information, visit www.darleneryan.com.

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    2.5/5

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    • 3/5
      It's not Shakespeare, I'll give you that. A nice story - a page turner, even. Well written and a decent structure. Muddled with clichés, though.

    Book preview

    Cuts Like a Knife - Darlene Ryan

    Cuts Like a Knife

    Darlene Ryan

    ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

    Copyright © 2012 Darlene Ryan

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

    Ryan, Darlene, 1958-

    Cuts like a knife [electronic resource] / Darlene Ryan.

    (Orca soundings)

    Electronic monograph.

    Issued also in print format.

    ISBN 978-1-4598-0121-9 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0122-6 (EPUB)

    I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings (Online)

    PS8635.Y35C88 2012       JC813’.6       C2011-907830-9

    First published in the United States, 2012

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2011943733

    Summary: When Mac begins saying goodbye to everyone she knows,

    Daniel becomes convinced he has to save her from hurting herself. Or worse.

    Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

    Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

    Cover photography by Getty Images

    www.orcabook.com

    Printed and bound in Canada.

    15  14  13  12  •  4  3  2  1

    For Lauren, who has grown into

    an exceptional young woman.

    Contents

    Chapter One

    Chapter Two

    Chapter Three

    Chapter Four

    Chapter Five

    Chapter Six

    Chapter Seven

    Chapter Eight

    Chapter Nine

    Chapter Ten

    Chapter Eleven

    Chapter Twelve

    Chapter Thirteen

    Chapter Fourteen

    Chapter Fifteen

    Chapter One

    It started out like any other day. Nobody wants to believe that. People say, Well, you must have missed something, or How could you not know?

    I think it makes them feel better. I think it makes them feel that if they had been me, if they’d been in the same place at the same time, they would have somehow done it better than I did.

    I know I didn’t do it perfectly, but I did the best that I could—at least I did something—and I hope that was enough.

    That day, Mac was already at the old lodge in the park when I came up the hill. I could see her up on the balcony off the main level. On the front of the old building, the door is at ground level and you can walk right inside. On the back, because the lodge is built into the hill, the main part is two stories in the air, so the balcony is maybe fifteen or sixteen feet off the ground.

    We weren’t even supposed to be on the balcony—nobody was—because there were issues with some of the decking boards. That’s city-government-speak meaning some of the wood was rotting. There was a chain blocking the bottom of the outside stairs. A yellow Keep Out, Danger sign hung from the heavy metal links.

    An old lady with a walker could have stepped over that chain. To keep kids out of somewhere, you have to do better than just a droopy chain. And those Keep Out, Danger signs? They just make some people more determined to get in. People like Mac, for example. Okay, and me. Call it teenage rebellion. That’s what my mother calls it.

    So, anyway, Mac was there first, up on the rotten wood balcony, on top of the railing. Yeah, I mean on the railing, as in walking across it like she was that guy who wanted to walk over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, although Mac was on a six-inch-wide piece of wood instead. Now, see, some people would say that was a sign, but I don’t think it was. Mac was always getting up on that railing, holding out her arms and walking from one end of the balcony all the way to the other end.

    Sometimes she’d close her eyes. Once she stopped in the middle and pretended she was jumping rope. She scared the piss out of me every time she got up there, but I knew not to let on that it bothered me, because if I did, then Mac would do something more over the top and maybe she would fall.

    I stepped over the chain and went up the stairs, getting to the top just as Mac got to the end of the railing. My heart was pounding in my chest, the way it always did when she got up there, but I just looked at her with a half smile and said, Hey, Mac.

    Hey, Daniel, she said. She jumped down and pointed at the Tim’s bag I was holding. What’ve you got?

    I opened the top, and she looked inside. Then she looked at me.

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