Come In and Cover Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

and she would grow up to be seven feet tall, and his delivery was so good that she believed him—and her mother told her to apologize for saying
that
, and then Ren had said, “You always pick his side. You’re a bad mother.”
    She had not meant for those words to come out, and she didn’t even mean them. But her mother’s hand came down with a smack on the countertop, and she said, “You will go to your room. Right. This. Minute. I don’t want to look at you right now, Aurenthia Leigh Taylor. And you will not come down until you apologize to me and to Scott.”
    And Ren had raced up the stairs, happy to escape. Now she felt a niggle of guilt and shoved it down. She and Scott always had to apologize if they called each other a jerk. Or an idiot or a moron or a butt. But now she had decided to wait out her mother. She would stay in her room until her mother or father came to check on her. Then they would see her puffy face and feel terrible. She could see it all like a movie in her head. She would pack her red overnight bag and put on her coat, and she would head out the front door and down the street. Mommy and Dad and Scott would stand at the door, begging her to come back. But she would leave and head to downtown Indianapolis. She would stand on a street corner and play the drums, and people would give her money so she could buy an apartment and groceries. She would learn to play the drums. Or she would live in the branches of a tree where she would build a nest like a bird. She would eat fruit and nuts and the free mints they gave you at restaurants.
    She was hungry. She could hear everyone talking at the kitchen table—she heard Scott’s snorting laugh—and she hated them all.
    Aurenthia Leigh Taylor. She hated her stupid, hard-to-say name. They all called her Ren, which sounded like “hen” or “pen” and made her think of barnyards. Scott called her Ren-tin-tin and barked at her. Her mother insisted she should be proud of her name, because she was named after her great-grandmother. Ren wished her great-grandmother had been named Danielle. She hated her great-grandmother. She hated them all. She hated herself for hating them. She watched the splatter-paint patterns her tears made on the pillowcase.
    She heard Scott’s footsteps outside her door. Before he even knocked, she slid under her bed, buried her face in the carpet smell. He opened the door, and she could see his Tretorns.
    â€œMarco,” he called to her, even though he surely knew where she was. “Marco.”
    She kept silent.
    â€œMarco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco,” he said, like a ball bouncing against the gym floor. Super-annoying.
    She gave in. “Polo.”
    His head appeared under the bedspread. “Come downstairs with me.”
    â€œNo.”
    He held out his hand, palm out. He smiled, and she could hear nothing but sweetness in his tone when he said it again: “Come downstairs with me. There’s cookies.”
    She held out her hand and followed him.

two
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    [We] argue for the reconceptualization of frontiers as socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created. . . . Some archaeologists are beginning to consider frontiers as interaction zones where encounters take place between people from diverse homelands.
    â€”From “Frontiers and Boundaries in Archaeological Perspective” by Kent G. Lightfoot and Antoinette Martinez,
Annual Review of Anthropology
, October 1995
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    In the still-dark morning, Ren woke to the creak of Silas’s bedsprings and his feet hitting the floor. She heard him pad into the bathroom, then the sound of running water. When she stepped into the kitchen a few minutes later, still smoothing her ponytail, he was there. He offered her a coffee mug before she said a word. He apparently made a habit of handling breakfast—he heated up the electric griddle, and Ed and Paul