Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

and we all adored Jimbo, so I made a habit of stealing glances at the Reverend whenever I could, hoping to see whatever Jimbo saw there. Once again this day, though, I could see nothing much but that yellow triangular flag of a tie.
    Sitting beside me, L. J. was scowling into a calculus textbook—the first time our school ever offered the class, and only because L. J. insisted. It had to be hard for a boy to be clumsy and stringy and smart in a school that cared nothing for schooling. He sat in that heat, the sweat on his nose making a slide for his glasses, him pushing the horn-rims back into place once a page.
    Beside L. J. was little Welp, who’d never been smart or athletic or cute. Like always that year, he’d gone out for the team—he’d puppied after Emerson and Jimbo since we were all small. But he’d not made even the first cut, and muttered all through every game I remember about how the coach didn’t like him, had something against him, that life was unfair. And sometimes when he thought no one was paying attention to him—we rarely were—he’d fuss over how maybe if he’d had a dad to defend him, or even a mom, a mom who was sober …
    In fact, it was Welp, occupied with carving “Bobby” into the chocolate top of his Snickers bar with his pocketknife, who first noticed when the new girl came walking alone toward the bleachers.
    “Well,” he said through a mouth full of Snickers, “who let the black panther out of her cage?”
    “Shut up, Welp,” L. J. and I said together, without looking at him. Welp was the sort you learned to handle that way.
    But he got a good flutter and flap from the gaggle of girls sitting down the bleachers from us. They were the Miss Pisgah types, with Neesa Nell Helms as their leader, their hair in identically angled Farrah Fawcett swoops they recurled and resprayed between classes. Here in the bleachers, deprived of mirrors and plugs, they calmed themselves with strawberry lipgloss they passed like a pipe.
    The girls turned and looked at Bobby and laughed, even as we all watched the new girl approach.
    “Where do you s’pose she thinks she’ll sit?” Neesa asked, with her volume cranked up to full. “I’d real gladly let her sit here—except for my having a nose.” She sniffed high in the air then, and crinkled her face.
    Passing behind home plate, the new girl paused, like she was watching the game for real, and not just stalling for time because she had no place to sit.
    “I don’t reckon they learn them to shower in …” Hayley Neal held up her palm and one fist, “wherever the place is she comes from.”
    “My folks say,” another one offered, “her kind’s got overdeveloped glands of some sort, bless their hearts. Been proved. Our yard man’s so bad you can’t hardly stand close enough to give him instructions.”
    Hayley squealed. “Look, Neesa. Emerson Maynard’s staring at you again, I’m swearing. I been saying he likes you.”
    Neesa’s eyes sliced back to me. “Lands, who could tell that all the way from left field?”
    Hayley Neal must’ve forgotten Em’s kid sister two rows behind to bear witness. Or maybe she’d calculated, like most every other girl at our school, on my not much counting. “Lord, Neesa, look! I’m swearin’, I swear I’m swearin’!”
    I gave them both glowers of utter disgust meant to slay them right there on the spot. But they lived. Lived, and even flipped on Hayley’s transistor. Three Dog Night crooned from her purse: The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and wr —. Hayley wrinkled her nose, and she shut the thing off.
    “I swan,” Neesa was broadcasting, “I do believe Jimbo Riggs is the one staring this way. At you , Hayley Neal. You know, I sure see what you mean: He is awful cute.”
    The bill of Bo’s cap ticked toward us, but then back over the plate—someone was at bat.
    Hayley played at gasping and smacking her friend. “You hush, Neesa, or I won’t tell