Bitch Is the New Black Read Online Free PDF Page B

my lunch canister and telling people it was water. Needless to say, I never saw my legs or the light of day again that winter, and when the subject of moving to Spain came up, I was hardly in a position to whine it down.
    â€œDo they have Fraggle Rock ?” Watching singing mole men construct a never-finished underground maze of scaffolding was my only prerequisite for flying around the world with her.
    â€œYes, little brown-eyed girl, they’ve got everything in Spain,” she said, playing piano on my ribs as I stood accusing her in our kitchen—the first we’d had with a dishwasher. I wouldn’t let myself laugh or give her the satisfaction of knowing I’d follow her anywhere.
    â€œIs it in Spanish ?” I asked, slumping down to the floor away from her tickling fingers, realizing that our lives would always be like this: move here, move there, move here, move there.
    â€œYes.” She didn’t sound defeated. She knew she was abominable.
    â€œThen I don’t wanna go,” I said, fingering the grooves between the tiles on the floor. This was one of the first real house-houses that we’d ever lived in. She had a real job. I’d gone to the same school for almost an entire grade. She’d bought me a wild pony that I never rode once because, umm, it was wild, but I loved it fiercely. We kept Misty, named after a cousin I barely saw, at a stable not too far from our house-house. At six, I was finally ready to be settled, and here she was once again, all too ready to be restless.
    I got back at her by fixating on my death, constantly asking Frances what she would do when I died suddenly in my sleep or crossing the street to school. The countdown to Spain became a macabre advent calendar with questions about my imminent demise decorating each new day. If I didn’t ask about her life without me, I thought it might come that much sooner.
    â€œWhat would you do if I died tomorrow?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know, little brown-eyed girl.”
    â€œI’m serious! What would happen?”
    â€œI don’t know. I’d probably gather up all your pictures and your clothes and your toys and I’d move way up in the mountains somewhere.” Good answer, lady. Because if I didn’t exist, then she couldn’t either. More than a package deal, we were Siamese. Maybe Spain wasn’t such a crappy idea after all. We’d disappear together. Like old times.
    Or maybe not. In the end, my second-grade OCD couldn’t save us.
    Obviously there was a lot of packing and preparation in the months leading up to our escape, but me being six and totally self-absorbed, I remember none of this. Alls I know is that one day we were in the desert, and the next, we were on the 405Freeway trying to get to LAX with my grandmother in the driver’s seat. It was just the three of us, waiting with the rest of the cars to get to our respective point B’s. Sitting in traffic, I watched an accident on the shoulder through a frame made with my thumbs and pointer fingers. There was an ambulance, a mangled car, and a stretcher covered with a white sheet. No bueno . Convinced that whatever was underneath was dead, I held my breath because breathing suddenly felt like bragging. I squatted up to the window and watched from the backseat of my grandmother’s Nissan, trying not to choke on her cigarette smoke.
    â€œLena, sit back.” She was a barker. Effie, my mother’s mother, is the type of grandmother who’d rather give an order than a cookie. I loved her because I knew she could break me if she really wanted to. And most times I imagined she did want to. I admired her restraint.
    Without protest, I sat back down on my butt and shoved myself as far back into the upholstery as possible, craning my neck to see the coffin on wheels being rolled into the ambulance. Nobody seemed to care. I closed my eyes and smoked a secondhand Virginia Slim.
    At the airport, I