Read Edna in the Desert for Free Online

scary like the one she got from seeing the coyote. All of a sudden, what someone else thought of her really mattered to Edna. She was frozen with no idea how to act, afraid this boy might not like her the way she was, since everyone, including her own parents, called her a brat.
    Finally helmeted, she got onto the back of Johnny’s bike. There was nothing to hold onto except him. She put her arms around his waist with just enough time to stay put before he sped off. The ride was uncomfortable and bumpy, the motor was loud and normally Edna wouldn’t have thought this was fun at all. From what she knew of dirt biking, it was a meaningless, environmentally unsound sport that wasted gas.
    Johnny moved a lot as he weaved around the cactus and the brush. He was good at it. She tried not to hold onto him too tightly, but it was a fine line between that and staying on the bike. Going over a bigger bump, she felt his muscles flex as he steadied it. She became lightheaded. It could have been hunger. She hadn’t eaten a thing since she threw up the pistachio nuts.
    Soon Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin glowed in the dusk ahead. A battle unfolded in the sky as the blue night rose up behind the hills and devoured the glowing band of pink above it. With the vision, the bike’s noise and Johnny’s torso, euphoria radiated through Edna. She’d never felt this alive before. She’d never get lost in the desert again, but this one time it was worth it.
    Cars were parked around her grandparents’ cabin, and boys and men loaded dirt bikes onto a flatbed. As they got closer, Edna noticed a sheriff’s car.
    “Is that the police?”
    “Your grandmother had to call someone. She couldn’t exactly find you by herself.”
    Johnny sped up in a clearing. What Grandma would do when she found Edna missing hadn’t occurred to her because it wasn’t supposed to matter. She’d jumped way ahead to her funeral.
    As they pulled up to the cabin, a flash went off.
    “Hi, Tom,” Johnny said.
    “Great get,” the man taking pictures answered.
    They coasted past Grandpa, still in his chair on the dimly lit porch. Edna didn’t like that everyone could see there was something wrong with her grandfather, but it was a lesser concern of the moment; she had Grandma to think about. She didn’t have the energy left to be as afraid of her as she might have been earlier. Johnny remarked that it looked like Edna had made the newspaper on her first day in the desert, and Grandma replied that it didn’t take much to get into The Desert Weekly . She didn’t look at Edna. Edna found this unnerving. An older man in a sheriff’s uniform approached.
    “So you’re our Edna?”
    “Yes. Thank you for finding me,” Edna answered in a voice that sounded so sweet she wasn’t familiar with it.
    “I’m Sheriff Wegman, young lady, and I hope you’ve learned not to go out into the desert alone without telling anybody ever again. You got a lot of people very concerned, especially your grandparents.”
    It was not the congratulations for surviving that Edna had expected. Frankly she found it rude, considering what she’d just been through. People may have been concerned, but was that really important? She had almost died. Usually she would have pointed this out, along with the fact that it was not her “grandparents,” plural, who were concerned about her, because her grandfather was practically a vegetable and hadn’t been concerned about anything in years. Also, “a lot of people” depends on what you mean by “a lot.” There were only about fifteen people here, at the most.
    Instead, Edna took the reprimand silently. She was following her new strategy of shutting up, especially since this was happening in front of Johnny. Actually, she was hiding behind his shoulder. He didn’t step away to give them any privacy, and when she thought about it later, she decided that he was protecting her.
    “I won’t do it ever again,” Edna promised.
    “It’s a lot of