Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

you nothing, not ever again.”
    Neesa Nell held her hand out, arm straight, for the lip-gloss, and then stiffened, like a pointer back onto her prey: All she lacked was a tail. “Don’t look now, girls, but somebody’s coming. Hold your breath, ladies.”
    The new girl had to have heard this. From that distance, she couldn’t have missed it— no one’s English is that bad.
    But on she came, the new girl did, like she’d take us all out in one fast punch from those eyes. She walked straight up to where the Miss Pisgahs huddled. And sat down.
    They were so stunned—we all were—that nobody spoke. L. J. even shut his calculus book and made a point of cleaning his glasses, like he didn’t want to miss anything. The girls cut their eyes right and left at each other, shredding the air between them. But Farsanna Moulavi sat still, right there in the tatters of silence.
    In fact, she sat still through the end of that inning and the whole limping next one and into the last. Then she rose, not hurried, not one little bit, looked slowly around her, those eyes looking short-fused and burning—then descended the bleachers.
    I wondered when they’d go off, those eyes, and blow us all clear off the Ridge and down the French Broad. Never seen anything like it myself, the new girl’s way of behaving. It was like she’d had the great gate of teenage social approval clanged shut in her face—and in public. And yet she’d walked away from it all in one piece. Even defiant.
    Me, I couldn’t help but like her a little—a little —for that, even if she was strange like they said, like I’d seen for myself.
    A kethunk, kethunk behind me signaled Reverend Riggs making his way down from the bleachers one step at a time, his spherical body balanced, just barely, on each metal step. His head was bobbing in Bo’s direction, both arms already beginning to rise as if he could hug his son clear through the fencing that guarded home plate.
    Farsanna had stopped walking just around the back of home plate which Jimbo had just crossed for our final run. She stood still, Jimbo turning toward her. He grinned.
    “Good game,” he said to the new girl.
    Her back to me, I couldn’t see her expression, only that her head cocked, unsure maybe what Jimbo meant, his words or his grin. I could see that she nodded, and walked on.
    The kethunk behind me had ceased, Reverend Riggs’ round body motionless there on the third-to-last bleacher step. Perspiring from his balding blond head down into his yellow necktie, he was watching his son, who was watching the new girl walk away from the field. Reverend Riggs’ eyebrows crinkled together over the bridge of his nose.
    _________
     
    So there we sat in the back of Em’s truck, and there came that look of the new girl’s again, her eyes swinging to L. J., who never much liked repeating himself but was saying again, “Are you currently finding the Ridge at least marginally inhabitable?”
    She stared at him hard, her eyes stick-pinning him onto the side of the truck till he squirmed, a stabbed bug with glasses.
    When she finally responded, he got only this: “My father says it will be to us a hospitable place, no?”
    Silence followed—jarring silence, like potholes in paved road.
    “It’s, um,” I tried, thinking of Momma, “what we’re known for. Hospitality. That’s us. The South.”
    Jimbo helped me from there. “Hospitality,” he assured the new girl, “and charm out the wazoo. And, as you can see for yourself,” the sweep of his arm included us all, as well as the landscaping mulch and manure we were hauling, “cleanliness-next-to-godliness and golly-gorgeous good looks.”
    Farsanna cocked her head at him as if she were deciding whether Jimbo’s charm could be trusted. “We have,” she said at last, “for many years dreamt about America. Of coming here one day.”
    “ Here ?” L. J. blurted out rudely. He’d always had trouble respecting anyone who tolerated our town. He