A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty Read Online Free PDF Page B

tree I heard it chime. The old bel sounded off-key and weirdly sad, like a noise in a movie that tel s you something bad is coming.
    Roger made a bored, blowing noise and whispered, “Some kid’s box,” but I wasn’t bored. I felt al at once hyper and alert, like under my skul a pair of inside ears had pricked up.
    I found myself reaching for Roger’s hand and grabbing it, tight. Roger gave me a WTF look. He had this unspoken rule that I didn’t stuff myself into his same beanbag chair or sling my arms around him and be al snuggy-touchy like I used to with Briony. He didn’t want me that close to him.
    Not unless I meant it in a way I didn’t feel about him.
    When he saw my face, he left his hand in mine, mouthing, What? at me. I was like a dog on point, leaning forward, and Roger craned to look out the window, too, puzzled enough to be interested again.
    Tyler set the duck aside and picked something else out of the box. Something smal and strangely curved, cream-colored under the dirt. He turned it around and around like a raccoon washing something, and as he spun it, the dirt fel away. He reached down and picked up another one just like it. I couldn’t make out what they were, not at al , not until he held the two pieces together. When I saw the way they fit, saw the shape and how they hooked on the ends, I gasped. Roger did, too. Then he clutched my hand back, very hard. We looked at each other, and his big eyes were as round and green as crab apples.
    We looked back down, and Tyler’s mouth had gaped open wide enough to let drool fal out. We knew what he was holding. It was smal , too smal to be a grown-up’s, but I’ve watched about fifty mil ion CSI and Bones reruns with Big. It was a teeny jawbone.
    Roger breathed out, “Is that from a person?”
    Tyler bent down again and picked out a piece of faded pink fabric, streaked with slimy brown. It hung like a rag in his hands, and I saw that it was a ruffly baby dress, and that’s when Roger and I heard the sound, this horrible moaning wail. Tyler dropped the dress, and Roger and I both jumped.
    It sounded like someone tiny and damned had been in the darkness under Liza’s tree, and Tyler had yanked its sleeping ghost into the sun. I screamed a short sound like a bark and clutched at Roger’s hand so hard I felt his own bones grind.
    But the noise wasn’t coming from a ghost. It was coming from my house. The back door slammed open, and my mom came stumping and wailing into the yard on her walker. Big was right with her, saying urgent things no one could hear. My mom unleashed a noise that held every bit of hel she had left in her, and I squeezed Roger’s hand so, so tight, so tight. My mom sucked in a desperate whoop of air, and then a new wail came. I thought it was because of the tree, but she wasn’t looking at the tree.
    The wail changed and became shaped, words made mostly from vowels. My mom was screaming words at Tyler. He stood there staring with that tiny, awful jawbone stil in his hand. My mother said a thing over and over, a thing no one but me and Big, who’d listened to Liza for almost four months now since the stroke, could possibly understand. It was a garble, but after the third time I could make it out, what she was screaming, and it made no sense.
    My mom let go of the walker, like she was trying to run at him, and her bad leg gave out, and she went down stil screaming those crazy words with poor Big trying to catch her.
    “What the what?” Roger asked.
    “She says that it’s her baby. She says the bones are her baby.” I ground Roger’s fingers to paste, and he clamped down, grinding mine right back, because it sounded so unpossible.
    My mom’s good leg kicked at the ground, like she was trying to swim to Tyler and take the little curve of bone away from him. Big fel to her knees, reaching for Liza, white and shocked and weeping. Liza kicked and stretched her arm toward Tyler, straining toward the dress and the bone, demanding