Also Known As Harper Read Online Free PDF

like some junky old eyesore from the road.”
    She always talked about her grandmother as if she was getting ready to come walking across the yard at any time and take our home back. But we all knew her grandmother hadn’t been doing any walking for quite some time now. She’d been long dead, since way before Winnie Rae was even born.
    I was thinking on all sorts of mean things I could say in return, but I noticed that as Winnie Rae was taking herself home across the grass, she looked back with her eye on my green dresser with the blue flower decals.And I erased that coveting thought right out of her mind with a good evil eye to the middle of her forehead.
    When we’d finally packed ourselves into the car, I sat on top of Mama’s best antique lace towels from her mama and held tightly to Hemingway, so he wouldn’t slide off the three-legged stool that Mama’s daddy had built when he was sixteen years old.
    I could see Winnie Rae to the side of her shed. The sunlight was almost completely gone for the day, but I could still see the outline of her, crouched like a chubby little animal, watching us.
    I knew Winnie Rae to keep her bicycle and her antique-doll collection out in that shed, and I wanted Mama to drive right through the closest wall and see how Winnie Rae liked seeing her own things spilling around in the dirt.
    Hemingway had one eye on the car window to the side of him. He wasn’t used to riding up that high, and with every little turn of the steering wheel, his hand squeezed my arm, as if he was worried he was going to crash on through the glass.
    â€œSit tight, now.” Mama put her right hand around me, her elbow touching the back of the seat where I’d set out Flannery’s little peach sweater.
    I looked up in Mama’s rearview mirror, but thehouse was blocked by all of our piles. I wondered if Daddy’d had anything blocking his way when he left in his pickup. But then I remembered to ignore my thoughts of him, and I made my mind toss them in the pile beside our old house where we’d left what was broken or used up.

 
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Chapter Six
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    A MOTOR HOTEL sounds downright fancy on a big lit-up sign, but I knew the Knotty Pine Deluxe Motor Hotel to be where Mrs. Ione Early worked, and there was nothing fancy about it.
    I ran the tips of my fingers up and down the slick wood paneling on the walls. Someone had scratched
Leona
in perfect cursive above one of the beds. Hemingway took a running start from the door and dived onto the first bed. He sat up and took a couple of handfuls of the rusty orange bedspread and got himself a good bounce going.
    Mama looked at him, but I could tell she was too tired to get him to stop. “Keep an eye on your brother, Harper,” she said. “I need to bring some things in from the car.”
    I flipped on the overhead light, and it made a spidery orange glow in the middle of the ceiling.
    Hemingway grabbed on to the tan wooden headboard and pulled himself up on his knees. “I love horses. They’re almost as fast as dinosaurs.” He pressed his nose up against the painting on the wall above the bed and bounced his knees on the pillow. “These horses feel like your Christmas dress.”
    â€œIt’s velvet,” I said. “The artist painted right on the velvet.”
    He leaned back a little and got a better bounce going.
    â€œWatch yourself, Hemingway.” I put my hand out next to the orange ceramic lamp. The base of the lamp looked like the bumpy round squash Mama bought for her special casserole around Thanksgiving time. “There’s breakable stuff in here.”
    Mama carried in a cardboard box and set it down against the wall across from the foot of Hem’s bed. She held her arms out wide and walked in a straight line along the side wall. “We can stack quite a few things here against the wall, but we need to be sure to leave a walkway.”
    I saw the pointy