For Today I Am a Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

hours, how many hours would it take for A to clean the house all by himself? Eighteen hours.
    Bonnie slipped and fell onto the gray carpeting. Adele grabbed her chubby hands and pulled her upright. “Well, I love an
eighteen
night.” She spun Bonnie around. I took weaving jazz steps backward.
    Helen leaned on her elbows, resting an index finger in each ear. In a class of seventy-two students, forty-one students are taking French, twenty-two are taking German, and nine are taking both French and German. How many students are not enrolled in either course? Eighteen students.
    As the guitar began to wail on its own, Bonnie and I stopped trying to mimic Adele’s long-limbed grace. We jumped up and down, shook our arms free like monkeys. Adele, her small butt still swaying back and forth, picked up one of Helen’s markers and blacked out two of the digits in the year on the calendar:
1987
became
18.
    â€œI need that,” Helen said. Adele tossed the marker in Helen’s general direction. The three of us joined hands and danced in a circle through the end of the song. Helen groped for the marker on the floor.
    She went back to filling in the bubbles. Sarah is twice as old as John. Six years ago, Sarah was four times as old as John. How old is Sarah? Sarah is eighteen. Helen’s own numbers: the lesser seventeen, the imperfect 150 on her PSATs.
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    When the envelopes came, I knew what they meant. Businesslike, Adele’s typed name visible in the clear plastic windows. Crests with Latin words in tight circles, silhouetted birds.
    The letters arrived within a few days of one another and were stacked on the hall table with the junk mail no one had thrown away yet. I caught Helen flipping through them. She was irritated that they went unopened, that Adele didn’t care which ones were small and white and cursory and which ones were thick and yellow and welcoming.
    After Helen left, I wrapped them all up in a grocery-store flyer—
Save eighteen cents per pound on roasted ham
—and shoved them through the swinging lid of the kitchen trash. I thought of it as a portal. Things went in and were never seen again.
    They were back on the hall table within a few hours, still wrapped in the flyer. The ghost of eighteen dug them out from the bin. A streak of coffee grinds over a university logo, the hall reeking of eggs and orange peels. The smell caught Adele’s attention.
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    All summer long, Helen volunteered for one thing after another, so she could put the activities on her college applications. Adele took me with her when she visited Helen at the local nursing home. The first floor looked like a hospital—white reflecting on white, a long corridor of doors with numbered boxes and clipboards, a strip of wooden paneling running along each wall. The linoleum smelled freshly bleached. Unlike in a hospital, there was no one around. No one greeted us or asked us what we were doing there. A cart of medical supplies was abandoned at an angle in the hallway.
    We got into the elevator and went up to the fourth floor, where Helen worked. The silence persisted. On this floor, many of the doors were closed. I stuck my head into an open door as we walked by and saw a man lying face-down in bed with a bathrobe bunched up around his hips. His bare buttocks looked like empty sacks sliding off his spine. Adele shut his door for him.
    We found Helen in the lounge. She was spoon-feeding a woman fortified pudding, a beige substance that looked like it had come from a caulking gun. The woman tried to say something. “Just eat,” Helen interrupted, shoving the spoon into her mouth.
    I flopped down into an armchair. The remote control for the shelf television was attached to the armrest by a cord. I turned on the TV. It was muted. Hitting the mute button didn’t do anything. I turned to channel 18.
    The woman reminded me of a snowman, a human shape drawn broad and round, sinking deep into her