Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Lillian Firestone, isn’t it? Why haven’t I seen you in here this semester? You showed promise your freshman year.”
    I did? I smile to be polite, but she’s wrong. “I—I’m left-handed,” I stutter as Mrs. Van Zant heads out the door.
    Elliot stares at me like I’m crazy. “So what? So am I! They tried to make me switch but I couldn’t.” He sharpens his pencil with a pocketknife, drums his fingers. He gestures come over here. He’s about to prove his left-handed drawing brilliance.
    I meander over with my dustpan.
    â€œTilt your head up,” he says. “Turn this way.” I don’t. I stare at the pile of pencil shavings he is creating on the floor. “I’ll clean it up,” he says. “Just turn here a sec.”
    He holds a pencil vertically, horizontally, and diagonally in front of my face. He squints, covers one eye, and measures the space between my eyes by sliding his inky thumb along the length of his pencil. His glasses look like he has finger painted them with dust and spit.
    â€œDrawing your face,” he says, pointing the pencil right at me, “I’d exaggerate the triangle shadow along your nose, and the cleft in your chin, and your cheekbones.” He taps his own cheeks, looks off, puzzled, as if my face is an unsolvable geometry problem. “You know, the combination.”
    Elliot stretches to get a side view. My cheeks burn. I turn from his dissection of my face. “When did you come from China?” he asks.
    â€œI didn’t.” I stare at spots of paint the color of dried blood on the floor. “I was born in San Francisco. In Chinatown.”
    â€œInteresting,” he says. I know he’s figured out that I’m adopted. No secret there. Elliot dives back into his yearbook drawings, his pencil turning paper into people.
    I remember almost nothing of Chinatown. My new mother explained my history to me when I asked about her big stomach. She had gotten pregnant with Ralph soon after my adoption. I didn’t have you in my tummy, Lillian. A lady who came here from China did. We know nothing about her. That’s all over now.
    My new mother couldn’t carry me because she worried that the baby inside her would stop growing like all the others had. So she lay on the divan, and whenever she sat up, the lap I wanted to climb onto disappeared. Even before he was born Ralph overtook it.
    In sixth grade, when Patty and Anita and I discovered the facts of life, I tried for the first time to imagine the man “involved” with Gone Mom. We didn’t dare mention it out loud, but we all thought my birth mother wasn’t married to him and had committed a mortal sin and would go to hell if she didn’t get forgiveness. I actually pictured her coughing and moaning in hell, all smoky and overcrowded. How could I know if she had ever properly asked for forgiveness? Done penance. Chinese people were heathens, not Christians. She might not have even known she was supposed to confess.
    Any other record of her existence is sealed forever. She has been sealed off inside me, too. But since I walked out of class, Gone Mom has been creeping in—turning my tear faucets, twisting my stomach, and unwrapping memories, like the one that awoke me last night. We were together in a dark room reaching for a giant, glowing pearl hanging from the ceiling by a chain.
    And now Elliot James has started poking at Gone Mom with his pencil.
    The door bangs open. I jump. Elliot is off withouta word. I watch him tramp across the empty practice field to his car parked on the street. I mop my face with a handful of damp paper towels that smell like dirt. I straighten the stools and wipe a cluster of round mirrors on gooseneck stands. They’re self-portrait supplies. Broken flashes of my face bounce up at me—my teeth, the view up my nose, a Cyclops.
    I squeeze my eyes shut, hold my cheeks. Go away,