Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

if it hurt terribly, she would not cry. Other girls she knew cried at everything, cried with a kind of delirious joy at stupid movies, sad books, lost football games, and bad grades. Robin amazed them all by failing to be moved even by the television rerun of Ali MacGraw’s death in
Love Story
.
    “I’m gonna start,” Ray said in a serious voice, and Robin nodded assent.
    She jumped at the first puncture and cried out.
    “Oh, shit, does it hurt a lot, Robbie?” Ginger asked. She raised the curtain of Robin’s hair and poked a new joint inside.
    Robin toked and shook her head. The moment the pain subsided, leaving only a mild residual sting, she felt peaceful again. The vacuum whined and Ginger and Ray quarreled in loud whispers behind her. “Look what you did, fuckup. You smeared the whole outline.”
    “Well, it was
bleeding
, prick. Do you want to get it all over my bed?”
    They were her friends, and they were funny, and good. Even the thought of her own blood, somethingthat usually made Robin uneasy, didn’t bother her now. It was possible to hypnotize yourself, she knew with sudden wisdom. You could do that, go outside your own body and give orders. In India, or somewhere, they could walk on fire or razor blades! Robin made tight fists and let the stubs of her fingernails bite into her palms, manufacturing new pain to distract from the old one.
    This hurt all right; each jab of the pen brought a fresh surprise of pain. Ginger murmured sympathy and stroked Robin’s hair. But she was in no danger of crying. She had not cried when her father died, either. And she had loved him, although that love was tempered by intolerable pity. She pitied him in his long loneliness, which was like her own, and again in his brief foolish happiness with Linda.
    Ow! The pen point piercing her skin hurt. The pain radiated up the curve of her back and traveled around to her chest, where her real heart thumped.
    His
heart had killed him all right, but not in the way that Linda said. He died of a
broken
heart that had suffered its fatal fracture eight years before and never healed. It just cracked slowly, slowly, the way the crust of the earth does. He was murdered.
    She could hear her own breath, and it was a harsh sound, like the wind at night after her mother was gone. Like the wind that blew Dorothy and Toto from Kansas. Like the wind when that door opened and took him inside.

6 Linda’s driving improved greatly during those weeks before their departure for Iowa. It was due partly to experience and partly to an extreme mustering of will. After parallel parking, entering major highways was the greatest challenge; to come suddenly abreast of all those other vehicles moving at suicidal speed, and to have to find one’s place without breaking stride!
    She tried to think of it in terms of dancing, how she always managed to place her foot between her partner’s feet for the briefest moment, without hesitation or loss of beat. But that didn’t work. Driving was not like dancing.
    Yet there seemed to be a kind of music that everyone else heard and drove to. If she could only relax a little, she might hear it also. Real, car-radio music didn’t help. Everyone could be tuned to a different station. It was more like an inner song, like those rounds you sang in school. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the … And you had to enter at the precise moment … 
merrily
, merrily … so that the rhythm was flawless and the music endless.
    Other drivers honked and cursed at her less, she thought, and her own physical responses were less dramatic. She wasn’t always sweaty anymore, and she didn’t feel like throwing up or have tachycardia after a fifteen-minute ride on the Jersey Turnpike, or a round trip through the Holland Tunnel. But she knew that none of these minor excursions really prepared her for the long-distance journey. How about endurance? And what about consistency?
    One morning, after she dropped Robin at school,Linda