Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1)

Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) Read Online Free PDF
Author: P.G. Lengsfelder
fruit, gulls and ravens riding them, pecking as the skin popped, split open and peeled back.
    But a promise was a promise. I needed to make good on mine to Nemo, even as it gave me the jitters. And at some point I had to make the Johanssons pay. I was sure of that. I bided my time.
    My first Experiment & Observation was with my 7 th grade classmates, comparing the classical standards of beauty. Mrs. Petrick, our English teacher, read us Greek myths because she said many Greek and Roman myths were the basis for how we lived our lives and related to each other. Which gave me the idea. And maybe I’d finally make a few friends.
    Photocopying images from Papa Karl’s encyclopedias, I created posters contrasting the Greek Aphrodite —goddess of beauty, born out of sea foam and worshipped as the goddess of the sea— with Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty, the famous painting with her hair blonde and long as her body, born out of a seashell. For the girls, I pulled images of both the Greek (bronze) and Roman (plaster) statues of Adonis. Both naked. Roman Adonis bigger, in every way.
    At recess I sat quietly on the school’s low stone wall, the poster headline 'Pick the most beautiful, win a prize.’ The other 7 th graders always avoided me, but with a prize at stake they took their chances. I took mine.
    Del Green approached. “Hey look, the beast runs a beauty contest.”
    His buddy Smitty jumped in. “Eunis, you mind turning away while I vote, I just ate lunch.”
    And Angela, the youngest of the Johanssons, added, “With a nose like yours, can’t you smell what I’m thinkin’?”
    Laughter.
    I tightened. Stay on purpose . “You want a prize or not?”
    In a landslide the boys voted for Venus. Del summed it up. “She ain’t that hot.”
    “Then why Venus?”
    He leered. “Can see more skin.”
    Most of the guys avoided Adonis, but those that observed him claimed they had the bigger package.
    The girls’ vote was closer, bigger beat bronzer, but I had a smaller sample because Irene Kelmer with the wandering eye —the second ugliest girl in our class— asked me, real loud, “Did your parents lose a bet with God?”
    She got laughs from a couple of girls. That started it.
    “Yeah,” said Christian Hames, “but God didn’t give you the hooters he gave Eunis.”
    “Shut the hell up.” Mandy G. shoved Christian.
    Then Barbie, Christian’s girlfriend, shoved Mandy. “Maybe if you had tits you could put hands on your own guy. Or maybe the other way round.”
    That’s when Mary Bakke raised her sweatshirt to flash Mandy, three other girls jumped in slapping, and Irene spit in my face. I’m told I kind of snapped. I can’t remember exactly, only that I must have shoved her. Hard. I wasn’t sorry; she had it coming.
    She fell backward over the stone wall and started screaming at me. Next thing I knew, Mr. Price, the junior high Principal, shut me down. “Eunis! What do you think you’re doing?” He grabbed the poster and crushed it closed.
    “It’s just research.”
    “Inappropriate! Nudity! Lewd behavior!”
    I wore jeans and a blue work shirt, buttoned up.
    A few kids got detention, plus the drawing for the prize —a couple of Momma’s old issues of Star and People magazine— never happened. The kids hated me even more after that.
    Mr. Price called Momma to pull me out of school and Momma saw the four confiscated naked bodies. She went ballistic, tossed the poster and ballots into a small bonfire of accumulated garbage long overdue for burning. She threatened to lock me in my room for a month if I ever humiliated her like that again. Sounded pretty much like the status quo to me. I got a busted lip and a week’s suspension from school.
    What I learned: Beauty may change with the times, but the trends don’t render the previous beauties ugly. Oh, and showing skin helps. Just not my skin.
    ***
    A warm amber light —the only light of the day in my cellar bedroom— was thrown on the tiny wash basin
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