Bound for the Outer Banks Read Online Free PDF

Louis. BeBe had been thrilled to find the school. She informed Ella that it would give her another possible spiritual path to follow since it was Catholic and she didn’t “know squat” about Catholicism yet. And it was only forty minutes to Biloxi so BeBe could come down to the bungalow and they could spend time together some weekends. “And,” exclaimed BeBe, “we can still head over to the Big Easy for the day!”
     
    BeBe had insisted that Ella live some of her formative years in the South because BeBe would declare, “I do not want you talking like a Yankee!” She would pinch her nostrils together and start yelling, “Waaahhhnnda! Waaahhhnnda! Come heeyah Wanda and look at this!” She would say this in a grating nasal voice that Ella had indeed heard more than a few times while shopping with her mom in Queens.
     
    “Honey you’re going to have a sweet, Southern accent whether you want it or not. Trust me. It will benefit you in the future.” BeBe had told Ella of all her many travels before meeting Joseph Barrantine and how men’s eyes would glaze over when she began to speak. She even had men offer to pay her good money just to sit and talk to them.
     
    It would drive Blythe Barrantine close to crazy whenever someone tried to imitate a Southern accent and they began speaking in double negatives or failing to make their subjects and verbs agree.
     
    “’I ain’t got no paper!’ ‘He weren’t in the garden this morning.’ What the hell are they talking about? That’s not an accent. That’s just stupid.” Blythe would continue to rant. “Don’t they teach the difference between ACCENT and SYNTAX in these fancy acting schools?”
     
    BeBe would always turn to Ella and say, “Elle, just because we’re Southern doesn’t mean we’re ignorant. I can assure you stupidity doesn’t stop just south of the Mason Dixon Line!”
     
    So it was decided that Ella would attend Saint Stanislaus at the beginning of her eleventh grade year. The girls at Saint Stanislaus were predominantly from wealthy southern families. Ella began to see exactly what her mother had been speaking of regarding the soft, rounded accent of the southern girls as opposed to the harsh, grating, nasal accents of the “Yankee girls” as BeBe would refer to them.
     
    Ella already spoke with somewhat of a southern drawl because of the large amount of time spent with her mother. BeBe’s accent was not terribly heavy but when she got upset or especially excited about something, which between the two accounted for approximately ninety percent of the time, her accent became much more pronounced. By the end of Ella’s junior year, she was speaking a drawl which sounded like “honey coated heroin.” At least that was what one of the senior boys at neighboring St. Patrick’s School in Biloxi described it as. Ella had met Jack Murphy while lying on the beach with some friends from Saint Stanislaus when his Frisbee landed on her beach towel.
     
    When she was told a date for the Sadie Hawkins Dance was mandatory Ella was appalled.
    “This is ridiculous,” she thought. “I feel like this is a weird form of forced dance prostitution,” she told her roommate Shelby.
     
    “For God’s sake Ella, Saint Stanislaus wants to graduate women who can become heads of corporations, in order to do that you have to learn to manage men. If you don’t have enough gumption to ask a man to a stupid Sadie Hawkins Dance how do you expect to control one in the board room one day?” Shelby crossed her arms waiting for Ella’s response.
     
    Ella said nothing. She wanted to scream, “I’m not here to be a CEO one day. I’m here to make sure I don’t lose my accent!”
     
    She immediately realized the absurdity of the statement, but the truth was she had no desire for some power position in a company. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing, but the one thing she knew was she didn’t want to work in an office for a