Bloodline Read Online Free PDF

messages on her desk. “Unless you get ’em early.”
    â€œWhich is what you do here?”
    â€œTry. Like fishing with a net full of holes. Too many of them slip through. Sexually active at thirteen. Hanging around with guys who are twenty. Lambs among the wolves, you know? Little girls looking for a man to love them. Men looking for something else. I mean, it’s a minefield. Try to teach them about contraception and some fundamentalist parent goes to the school board. Contraception? I’ve got fourteen-year-olds who need prenatal courses. Fetal alcohol syndrome. What smoking does to a fetus. Nutrition. You can’t grow a healthy baby on warm Pepsi and potato chips.”
    She shook her head.
    â€œBut that’s what they pay you the big bucks for,” I said.
    Genest almost smiled. Almost.
    I told her I’d like to talk to her more. She shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œHey, I can talk, but what good is it going to do?” she asked. “I mean, my kids don’t read New England Look. So it’s sort of like a freak show, isn’t it? Parade the poor dumb bumpkins up and down for the people who went to Williams and Wesleyan. So when the summer people come up to Owls Head or Hancock or any of those places,they’ll think twice about crossing over to the west side of Route 1. I mean, face it: They don’t really care about any of this. Not really. Come on, Mr. McMorrow.”
    â€œJack.”
    â€œOkay, Jack. But I’m right, am I not? I mean, what’s the point? So these people in rich suburbs around Boston and Hartford and Greenwich will maybe have a pang of pity before they put the magazine down and jump in the Volvo to take the kids to soccer practice? Or drop little Erica at ballet?”
    â€œIf you think like that, the New York Times would only report on Scarsdale. Pretend the Bronx doesn’t exist,” I said.
    â€œMaybe they should, for all the good it does the kids in the Bronx. I did my student teaching in Roxbury, in Boston. This woman from the Globe came and did a story about violence in the schools. You know. Kids bringing guns to class. Shooting at each other at locker break. That place was like the Wild West, it really was. And this was back when that was news. So the story was fine. I mean, she did a good job. Talked to a lot of people. But in the end, what did it change? Kids are still killing each other. Drugs and drug money are just eating them up. And some guy in Newton skimmed the story before he turned to the important stuff. Like the Red Sox.”
    â€œBut people should know,” I said. “The chances of it doing your kids any good may be, I don’t know, slim to none. But if nobody knows, they’re just none. Forget the slim.”
    â€œI know what you mean,” she said, conceding maybe a millimeter. “But I only have so much time, and spending it talking to you may be wasting it.”
    â€œThanks a lot,” I said.
    â€œNothing personal,” Genest said.
    A buzzer went off in the hall, followed by a growing roar, like a subway train approaching. There were footsteps and then the shuffle of somebody behind me. I turned to see a girl. She was small and slight with thick black eyeliner and bright red lipstick that made her look like a female impersonator.
    â€œMiss Genest,” she said urgently. “I gotta talk to you.”
    I smiled at Miss Genest and excused myself. I said I’d still like to talk to her.
    â€œWhatever,” she said.
    As I stepped out the door, the girl slipped in, giving me a practiced glance that was supposed to be provocative. She smelled of cigarettes and bubble gum.

5

    T he smaller maples on the fringes of the swamps were always the first to go. They flared crimson and red-orange and orange-red, Crayola colors that were shocking against the still-deep greens of the bigger maples and alders around them. These were the first brushfires, fuses that sizzled around the