Girlchild Read Online Free PDF

kind of curly hair that Mama tries for with the giant metal rollers that just end up giving her a giant headache.
    “You fell backwards, right on your back.” She crouches over me in the stickers and weeds and waits for me to answer. When I don’t, she says, “Ain’t you ever done it before?”
    I’d just climbed the fence, the Girl Scout Handbook tucked into the top of my pants so I could sit and look like I was reading there and not waiting for my neighbor Marc to see me, to maybe say hi to me when he got home, but I couldn’t keep my balance when I pulled the book out and now I’m on the wrong side of
the fence and my lungs feel like they’re the wrong size and Mama is probably wondering where I disappeared to. I don’t know if this girl is asking if I ever climbed the fence before or if this is the first time I fell off it or even if it’s the first time my lungs and mouth stopped agreeing about breathing, so I just shake my head no.
    “Don’t worry. You’re not broke, just empty,” she says. She’s wearing a checkered dress with a lacy collar that is gray and stringy and I can see past her big, brown shoes and up her dress where her panties are big like shorts with no elastic at all. I start to blush but she must not know I can see her weird underpants because she stands up and says, “There. You’re getting your color back.” She puts out her hand.
    “I’m Viv,” she says, and helps me up. “Viv Buck.”
    “Rory Dawn.” My lungs are working right again. I take a deep breath and stickers poke at me through the back of my shirt. It feels funny and proper to say my last name but I add it because she seems to be waiting for me to, like she did. “Hendrix.”
    I point over the fence, “That’s my house.”
    “That’s a trailer,” Viv says, and she laughs. She must be new on the Calle.
    I start pulling stickers out of my socks and she reaches down for the Girl Scout Handbook where it landed on the wrong side of the fence with us. “Are you a Girl Scout?” she asks me.
    I’m so glad we don’t have to talk about what’s a trailer and what’s a house that I tell a great big lie. “Yes.”
    “Me too!” she says, and holds up her right hand, her palm toward me. Her thumb holds down her pinkie finger. Her three middle fingers point straight up. She stands just like that, waiting, like she did for me to say my last name.
    “You must’ve really knocked yourself out, goose,” Viv says after a minute of looking at my face that’s turning red again because I
know I’m supposed to do something. “Don’t you salute around here?”
    And then I remember page twelve and raise my right hand, palm forward, pinkie and thumb down, middle fingers extended. I give Viv the Girl Scout Salute and it’s the first time I’ve done it without a mirror.

trail of the trefoil
    T here’s never been any other Girl Scouts on the Calle except me before, and I’m not official or anything. I guess I’ve never even seen a real live Girl Scout and I didn’t expect to, but I’ve got a copy of the Girl Scout Handbook . It wasn’t always my own. At first, I borrowed it from the Roscoe Elementary School library, borrowed it over and over again until my name filled up both sides of the card and Mrs. Reddick put it in the ten-cent bin and made sure to let me know that she did. Maybe Mrs. Reddick was a Girl Scout before Dewey hid her away in the stacks and his decimals took over her life. Maybe that’s why she put it out for me—she does have excellent posture and the Handbook covers posture in detail in Safety and Health under the heading “The Right Use of Your Body.”
    It’s an old copy and it’s starting to fall apart, but I hold on to my Handbook because nothing else makes promises like that around here, promises with these words burning inside them: honor , duty , and try . Try and duty I hear all the time, as in “ try to get some sleep” and “get me some duty -free cigs from the Indian store,”