After Eli Read Online Free PDF Page B

creek. That was prettier, with dogwood and crab-apple flowers in the springtime, and all the leaves red and yellow in the fall, and it smelled better too. The Monroes have pigs, and those can be pretty repulsive if the wind is blowing the wrong way.
    Anyway, that afternoon I rode out past the old Sowers house. Already it was looking different, now that it was being lived in again. There was a Volvo parked in the driveway, and furniture on the porch, and a hanging basket with a pink geranium. A lot of the hay had been cut down too, to make what was starting to look like a lawn.
    Then I saw that right in the middle of the lawn was this girl lying flat on her back with her arms stretched out and her eyes closed, and next to her, flat out too, were the sword-fighting twins. Right off I thought of a horrible murder scene like in
CSI,
with bodies scattered around. I could imagine them all outlined in chalk, with one of those yellow-tape things that the police put up that says DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE .
    But then the twins jumped up and came running over. Jasper was wearing a purple T-shirt that said I AM THE EVIL TWIN . Journey was wearing a purple leotard and one of those little ballet skirts and a pair of purple Crocs. It wasn’t often that I saw so much short purple all in one place.
    “What are you two supposed to be?” I said. “Grapes?”
    Journey shot me a look that said that if I was a fruit, I’d be a poison apple.
    “Purple is our favorite color,” said Jasper. “People who like purple are witty and sensitive.”
    “I used to like pink,” Journey said. “But Isabelle says that pink is a color stereotype. You know, like blue is for boys and pink is for girls. If Isabelle ever has a baby boy, she’s going to dress him in pink because she thinks color stereotypes are stupid.”
    I thought that if she really carried through with that, she’d also better get the kid a set of brass knuckles and a crash course in karate.
    “Right now we’re listening to the earth hum,” Journey said. “It’s Isabelle’s idea. She read about it in
Scientific American.
She read that the earth hums all the time like a giant bumblebee.”
    “Like this,” Jasper said, making a repulsive noise through his nose.
    Then Isabelle sat up and I forgot about the twins.
    What I knew by then about Isabelle, due to the twins’ having no sense of privacy or discretion, was that she was fifteen and went to some fancy school for the arts back home, which was in New York City, where she had a boyfriend named Simon Dewitt Paxton, who was presently spending a multiculturally enriching summer living with a family in France. I also knew that if she were a bird, she’d be a vicious parrot; that when the twins were three, she’d talked them into eating a bar of Ivory soap; and that she disapproved of cowboy hats.
    What I didn’t know, because the twins hadn’t bothered to say in spite of the fact that they have the verbal version of diarrhea, was that she was beautiful.
Beautiful
was not a word I usually used about girls, but it was the only word for Isabelle.
    Walter says that we are attracted to potential mates because of large differences in our major histocompatibility complexes, which are a bunch of genes that have something to do with making us immune to disease. Attraction is purely genetic and instinctive, Walter says, though I can tell you that if Walter does not learn to shut up about this, he will never have a potential mate.
    Anyway, I did not think about disease genes right then. What I thought about was how I’d never seen anybody as beautiful as Isabelle. And how Isabelle made Amanda Turner and her halter tops look too bright and loud, like those plastic dolls you win for throwing baseballs at ducks at the Fairfield County Agricultural Fair. She had straight, silky dark hair and skin like cream and these blue, blue eyes, the color the sky gets on a really perfect October afternoon. Everything about her was slim and crisp and