Brighton Read Online Free PDF Page B

heel. “Here’s the number for this week. Twenty bucks.”
    “Forget it.”
    “How much was the payout last week?”
    “Five fifty.”
    “I missed by one number.”
    “Everyone misses by one number, Shuks.”
    The nigger pool was a neighborhood lottery run by the local bookies. The winning numbers were taken from the last threedigits of Saturday’s take at Suffolk Downs printed in the Sunday paper. Shuks played every week. So did all his brothers and Kevin’s grandmother. She hit the number once, and it was the only time Kevin had ever heard her laugh without any strings attached.
    “Just put the bet in. I’ll have Fingers’s money tonight.” Shuks flipped on the TV. A reporter stood in front of Charlestown High, talking about the new school year and the first full week of busing. The news report cut to videotape of a white kid wearing a Barracuda jacket inside out and throwing a bottle at a school bus stopped at a red light. Three more white kids pulled a kid with a yarmulke off the bus and beat him to the pavement. One of the kids started toward the camera with a bat, then everyone ran across the street. Two black faces peered out of a dry cleaners. The kid in the ’Cuda lobbed a brick through the front window and they poured in. A couple of cops on motorcycles rolled up as they cut back to the reporter still in front of the high school and talking a blue streak. Shuks turned down the sound.
    “Fucking assholes,” Bobby said.
    Shuks twitched a thumb and blinked. “How’d you like to get bused through Dudley Square every morning?”
    “Half those kids aren’t even in school. They just want to crack some skulls. And if the skulls are black, so much the better.”
    Shuks rolled an eye toward Kevin. “You expecting trouble?”
    Kevin went to Boston Latin School. Latin was the oldest public school in the country and offered its own entrance exam for prospective students. If you got in, it was free, at least until you flunked out. Every fall, eight hundred kids of every color and creed enrolled in Latin’s seventh-grade class. Six years later, about a hundred graduated. Kevin didn’t tell anyone when heapplied to Latin. Didn’t tell anyone when he was accepted. A month before school started, his mother found the letter in a drawer. She sat him down in the kitchen and asked what it was all about. When he told her, something stirred in her eyes, something fierce and young and bright and proud. Then his father banged through the front door and the spark was snuffed. She jammed the letter in one of Kevin’s pockets and started hunting around in the cabinets for a box of mac and cheese. Two flights up, his grandmother taped the letter to her fridge and took it off every time anyone visited so they could read it and marvel.
    “I go to Latin, Shuks.”
    “It’s on the other side of the city and you take a bus.”
    “I’m fine.”
    Shuks glanced at Bobby, who shrugged and dangled a set of keys. “I’m gonna get him some time behind the wheel.”
    “Donnie Campbell needs a pickup at nine.”
    “Where’s he headed?”
    “Logan. Said he’d be waiting on the porch.”
    “Got it.” Bobby turned to Kevin. “You ready?”
    There was a sound outside in the lot. Three sets of eyes looked to the door. Kevin’s grandmother wasn’t expected into work for at least another fifteen minutes. But sometimes you never knew.

6
    BRIDGET PEARCE sat in the kitchen, chin six inches off the table, shoveling Sugar Pops into her mouth as fast as she could. Her father sat across from her, fingers black under the nails from working on carburetors all week. Her mother was in between, clasping and unclasping her hands, a sure sign she was getting ready to speak. Shut up, Bridget thought. Just shut up .
    “It’s only up the hill, Jack.”
    “Up the hill. My ass, up the goddamn hill.” Bridget’s father picked up the blue-and-white ceramic shaker and tapped a sprinkle of salt over his eggs. Her mother moved the butter dish