City of Boys Read Online Free PDF

he stares dully at each story, and whenever my mother asks him for help with her puzzle, he stops reading and gazes straight ahead to think until, unable to help, he goes back to his article and she moves on to another clue. Like this the afternoon creeps slowly away; most of our days pass like this, slowly, the same things happening over and over, and at the rate time passes for us, it seems possible that I may never become an adult.
    The movie ends, another begins, and I watch that too, until my parents begin to move, anticipating the beginning of cocktail hour, which is almost upon us. Cocktail hour eases the abrupt decline of the day, transforming it into a gentle slide toward evening, and it changes everything–even the light turns a kind of soft gold, and it shines directly on my parents. I am not in the light, but I am close enough to it to feel its warmth, along with the sting of my mother’s martinisand the odd mellow wave of scotch on my father’s breath as he leans over me to hand my mother her drink.
    There is a kind of excitement that comes with cocktail hour, a feverish awareness that all things are possible; my parents’ eyes turn bright, their voices lift, their gestures grow large and happy. There is a sharp sparking light here, and when I look outside, all the other houses seem colorless and unreal, just a part of the fading blue landscape of evening. The families inside are having dinner and doing homework and watching television together; they will do tonight what they did last night and what they will do again tomorrow. Even Annie’s house is dim, lit only by the dulling orange blaze of sun reflected off the building behind it. I turn back to the television and listen as my parents come alive.
    The next day when I open my front door, Annie is there, leaning against the doorjamb, looking nonchalant. She has not knocked and may have been standing here all morning, since anytime after my father left for work.
    —Oh, she says, as though it is she who has opened her door to find me.
    —Hi, I say.
    —Listen, she says. —I never got your name.
    —Sally, I tell her, and she nods.
    —Sally, she repeats. —There are already three Sallys at school.
    She picks at a thread hanging from her cuff and pulls at it, but it is attached, and she smiles as her sleeve begins to unravel. —I hate all three of them, she says, and looks in the direction of the school, which is only a short walk away. My parents try to live close to schools so that I can walk there, and they try to plan our moves around the school schedule, so that, as they put it, I won’t be starting off onthe wrong foot. I will have, they say, as much chance as anyone to make new friends. And it is true, I always make friends in my new schools, and they are always the same: shy girls with thin hair and glasses and shy boys with pale round heads. They are so much like each other that I hardly remember them from town to town, their names or their personalities. Sometimes we exchange a few short, stuttering letters, but soon they are replaced by new friends who speak like them and walk and look and dress like them, who in fact resemble them so closely that only their ages change, and it is as though they are the same group of friends getting older with me.
    I find my new friends at the beginning of each school year, and they are always to be found, like me, scattered along the sides of classrooms, or creeping along the walls of the hallways—out-of-the-way positions we take to watch the rules of school play themselves out. Annie is not at all like my usual friends.
    —So anyways, she says now, —what were you doing?
    —Nothing, I say, and she gazes at me, waiting. —You know.
    She says nothing, so finally I say, —I was just watching TV. —TV? she says, and looks over my shoulder. Behind me the television runs smoothly from show to commercial to show again, and she listens to try to tell what’s on.
    —My parents don’t let me watch much TV,