Casebook

Casebook Read Online Free PDF

Book: Casebook Read Online Free PDF
Author: Mona Simpson
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Coming of Age, Family Life
to eat her. I’d never seen my dad like that.
    They left, and I read “A Scandal in Bohemia” out loud while Hector sketched on my floor. *1 Hector could draw any Simpsons character exactly. Bart and Marge heads cluttered his homework.
    After Simon and Charlie arrived, we took over the upstairs and had a marathon night of Fawlty Towers while folding paper airplanes.I forgot about the whole bottom of the house until the girls pranced up shrieking. They’d messed around in my mom’s closet and had bras on outside their clothes and underwear as hats. Makeup smeared on their faces. I’d once used a bra for Mickey Mouse ears; maybe they remembered that. But the stuff they’d found was shiny . Black ribbons with what seemed to be miniature mousetraps hung down over Boop Two’s face. I didn’t want to think about my mom wearing those.
    “Put that back!” I yelled.
    You knew your mom’s underwear, everyone did, from before. I never went near that dresser now. She had only one desk drawer where I still rummaged. I’d picked through all her things when I was smaller, but that just stopped, the way once she’d come into my bath with me and now not, and it hadn’t seemed like the end of anything until my sisters dressed in her underwear made me remember what had changed. My mom and Eli were having sex probably. That was a lower, threatening world.
    My sisters, in their stupid ugly costumes, had no idea.
    Hector stroked my nose with his finger, from the top, where glasses would go, to the tip. “I’ve been told this calms a lobster,” *2 he said.
    We waded out onto the roof and flew our paper airplanes down under moonlight. Hector told a story about his aunt. She’d started to bake a cake and the recipe called for vanilla extract, so she borrowed a tiny bottle from her neighbor. Then, after she didn’t answer her phone for three days, the police found her passed out in her car, on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway. They took away her license. She’d have to walk now to AA meetings. The architecture firm had arranged a driver to take her to and from work.
    “Wait, vanilla extract has alcohol in it?”
    He said all extracts did and told us his mom was moving from Topanga into his aunt’s house in the Palisades, to help her.
    But then, when Hector went to the bathroom, Charlie whispered, “Aren’t his parents getting divorced?”
    I don’t know , I mouthed.
    Simon blurted, “My mom said they were.”
    When the bathroom door opened, we shut up. Hector stepped back out onto the roof. “What were you guys whispering?”
    We said, “Nothing.”
    He said, “Come on,” and finally we said. So we were the ones who told him his parents were breaking up.
    “I thought it might have been something like that.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why they didn’t just say it.”
    That night, Hector invented mutants. We snuck downstairs and stole stuffed animals from the Boops and found the sewing kit. Simon had gone to Waldorf School until third grade, and he knew how to sew. We amputated limbs, jabbing our hands with the needles, trying to attach them to other sockets. We scissored off heads. We worked for hours and only completed the kitten with a pig’s head and lobster claws. The Boops were out cold. After midnight, as we sprawled half asleep, Airplane! flickering over my friends’ faces, I heard tires. I knew the sound of our tires. I stepped onto the roof.
    “Your holiday weight,” he was saying.
    She made a moo-ey sound.
    “Oh, come on. I love your tummy. Your tush and your tummy are the only overtly sexual parts of you.”
    I went inside. I didn’t want to hear more. I felt unsafe, all of a sudden, as if wolves were biting at our walls. For a long time, I turned on one side, then the other, bumping into Hector; I couldn’t sleep. In the morning, though, it was just our house, sun on the kitchen cupboards, my mom whisking eggs, Hector and Charlie already at the table drinking OJ. The Boops played jacks on
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

The Language of Secrets

Ausma Zehanat Khan

Sky Lights

Barclay Baker

An Inch of Ashes

David Wingrove

Skinny Dip

Carl Hiaasen