Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry Page B

where Bryony, now in dry clothes, is rubbing her hair with a towel. There’s a slight frownbetween Bryony’s pale eyebrows, and she’s a million miles away, barely even noticing Gigi at all. After all the horrified looks shared over her head, the worried whispers, and the sympathetic smiles of the past week, Bryony’s naked dislike is an honest relief. Gigi doesn’t want to be asked if she’s OK, she doesn’t want to have Adele place a trembling, tentative hand on her shoulder; it all makes her feel too full, as if she might split open and spill out a thick, stinking stew of guts and dark mud all over the floor.
    Gigi sits surrounded by Bryony’s abandoned Barbie dolls, grubby soft toys, and Justin Bieber posters stuck askew onto the walls with oily lumps of Blu Tack and wonders if she remembered to close the window in her own bedroom back home. If she didn’t, the monkeys will have gotten in again, probably knocking the curvy kudu horn and the collection of bones and stones that she keeps on the windowsill to the floor. She wonders if the monkeys (who have little black faces and gray bodies, like Siamese cats) will notice the crack in the corner of her room near the ceiling that looks like a map of the Nile, and swing on the frothy bridal extravagance of the mosquito net that’s tied up and screwed into the creosoted wooden beam above her bed.
    Gigi shuts her eyes and curls her body over her folded arms to try to contain the longing. She tries to remember every detail of the picture of Buddha, which was painted on the wall by her bed by an artist friend of Simone’s called Angela, who came to stay on the farm last year. Angela was a small, loud American who’d been living on retreat in India for years before she came to volunteer at the rescue center, and she’d worked the letters of Gigi’s name in Hindi to swirl with the clouds in the sky above Buddha’s head.
    Angela had already returned home to the States by the time the men came. Simone was in Scotland. Phineas and Lettie were at church. It had just been Johan, Seb, and her mother in the house.
    Gigi grinds her teeth together, hard, and fights for air.
    She tries to breathe back the plant sap and dung and dust scent of home, but all she can conjure up is the salty tin smell of blood.

CHAPTER NINE
    â€œHEY, DOMMIE, do you remember when we both pretended to be Hermione Granger?”
    â€œOh, ja.” Dommie grins and rolls her pencil across the large, smooth expanse of the art room table they’re sharing. “We were such dorks.”
    â€œI know.” Bryony takes her own pencil and draws a soft, curved line across the sheet of paper. They’re supposed to be making sketches of ideas for the “What South Africa Means to Me” interschool art contest, but all she can think about is yesterday’s storm and the way that ghastly white mask seemed to stare at her before it fell from the Matsunyanes’ wall.
    She adds another pencil curve to the first, creating the outline of the pointed chin just below that awful open mouth, and then scribbles firmly over all of it.
    â€œBryony, don’t waste paper, please. If you’ve made a mistake, use an eraser to rub it out,” Miss McCrae says as she swoops past the desk trailing a cloud of cloves in the wake of her gypsy skirt. “Just think of the poor trees, dear.” Bryony dutifully turns the piece of paper over and readjusts her grip on the pencil.
    â€œMan, I can’t believe I spent so much time trying to make my hair frizzy to be more Hermione-ish,” Dommie says, smoothing the corkscrew curls that she now wears scraped back into a brutal ponytail to keep any sign of frizz from springing to life. “I must’ve been out of my mind.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Bryony places the tip of her pencil on the page. “But all that magic stuff that we were so into . . .”
    â€œOh, remember when we made