A Place Apart Read Online Free PDF

like dark violets. His hair was brown, and it formed dry little curls over his head. Sometimes I’d go deaf from looking at him, and I’d not hear what he was saying. There was that smallness of his that I never tired of thinking about, those neat perfect hands with clean, shaped fingernails—so unlike my hands, which were bony, the cuticles gnawed and the nails chipped.
    When Hugh and I first became friends, I talked to Elizabeth about him, about the way he looked. She never said anything one way or another until, one day, after I had been going on and on, she suddenly burst out, “Tory! I’ll tell you what Hugh Todd looks like to me! He looks like the tenor in a rat opera!”
    I was speechless. We were cool to each other for a few days, but then we got over it. I had had to remind myself that it often happened that, when you had two friends, they couldn’t stand each other.
    Maybe if Elizabeth hadn’t been my friend, she wouldn’t have felt much of anything about Hugh. But for other people, it was as though he were off by himself in some place where liking or disliking just didn’t count. He didn’t seem to come to school so much as he seemed to visit it.
    â€œI guess I know what you mean,” Elizabeth was saying. “But I hope you’ll let me read your scene some time.”
    â€œI probably won’t finish it until the fall term,” I said. “Mr. Tate wants me to make it longer. And I will show it to you, Elizabeth. Really!”
    â€œI hate to write,” she said. “I got Tate to let me do a research paper on the history of New Oxford.” She started laughing. “It’s got about five sentences of history. I’ve stretched them out like rubber bands.”
    I was so relieved she’d given up the idea of seeing the scene that I told her about the first one I’d written and then thrown away.
    â€œI just started to make up a dialogue one day. It was about a man slowly finding out that the murderer he’s been tracking is himself. Tate said that was an old, old story, and there was no reason why it couldn’t be written again. He just thought it would be a better plan if I wrote about something I knew. So I did.”
    Elizabeth ate chocolate and said nothing. I don’t know why I’m so contrary; I wanted her to ask me what I had written about. I made a face at her calm profile and instantly got into one of those tornado rages at myself which hit me at least once a week. By the time she turned to smile at me, a bit of chocolate sticking to her upper lip, the rage had gone, like hornets veering off in a wind.
    â€œWell, I’m going to tell you,” I said, “at least, tell you what it’s about. The scene takes place in Boston. It’s a rainy day. The daughter is about to go and get the wishbone from the Thanksgiving turkey, which has been drying out in a kitchen cupboard. She has a wish to make. At that moment the shop teacher from the school where the girl’s father is the principal knocks on the door. He comes into the living room and tells the family the father has died on the street of a heart attack.”
    â€œThat’s almost what happened to you!” Elizabeth said.
    â€œTate says that’s what’s wrong with the scene. He says you can’t simply write down what happened—unless you’re a reporter. He says you have to burn out your personal feeling in some way. I don’t know what he means. But I keep working on it, and it’s getting longer, and Tate says I’m going in the right direction, whatever that is. He says I should think of it as a one-act play, not just a scene. And he asked me what wish the girl wanted to make … he says when I know what that wish is, the feeling of the scene will be right.”
    â€œI don’t like wishes,” Elizabeth said. I was about to ask her what she meant by that when Miss Edsey, the science teacher, walked