（外文电子版资料）Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.doc

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ELECTRONIC VERSION 1.1 (Mar 27 00). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. Pregame THE WORLD had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten oclock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mothers Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the back) and playing with Mona, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods. By eleven she was trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think, This is serious, this is very serious. Trying not to think that sometimes when people got lost in the woods they got seriously hurt. Sometimes they died. All because I needed to pee, she thought ... except she hadnt needed to pee all that badly, and in any case she could have asked Mom and Pete to wait up the trail a minute while she went behind a tree. They were fighting again, gosh what a surprise that was, and that was why she had dropped behind a little bit, and without saying anything. That was why she had stepped off the trail and behind a high stand of bushes. She needed a breather, simple as that. She was tired of listening to them argue, tired of trying to sound bright and cheerful, close to screaming at her mother, Let him go, then! If be wants to go back to Malden and live with Dad so much, why dont you just let him? Id drive him myself if I bad a license, just to get some peace and quiet around here! And what then? What would her mother say then? What kind of look would come over her face? And Pete. He was older, almost fourteen, and not stupid, so why didnt he know better? Why couldnt he just give it a rest? Cut the crap was what she wanted to say to him (to both of them, really), just cut the crap. The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten custody. Pete had protested the move from suburban