Honey, Baby, Sweetheart Read Online Free PDF Page A

in it.”
“Picasso didn’t cut off his ear.”
“No kidding. What do you think I am, stupid? You’re not getting help from that sub is what I’m saying. I won’t let you alone with him.”
“I meant science. Not math. Science. Chemistry. Test tomorrow.”
“I want you to make me a promise,” Sydney said. My stomach lurched. I thought she was on to me. I’m a terrible liar. If you want to lie, your whole body has to be in on it, and I never could get all of me to fully cooperate. “If you ever, and I mean ever use anything you learned in chemistry in your real adult life, I want you to call me. From wherever you are. Even if you’re eighty, I want that call. ‘Sydney, I actually used something I learned in chemistry class.’ Promise me.”
“Okay,” I said.
She whacked my arm with the back of her hand and headed off toward home. After a safe while, I began walking in the other direction. I stopped at Moon Point, but I spent more time looking at my watch than at the paragliders. I left just as the sun ducked behind what suddenly became the dark shoulder of Mount Solitude.
The gates of the Becker estate were open again. It was just how I saw it in my mind when I was making it all up. There, guarding the gates, sat the question—yes or no? But my feet answered before I did. Travis Becker was rolling his bike by the handlebars over to the driveway. It looked heavy. He saw me standing there, watching him. He waved me inside, and I went. I was like one of the paragliders hiking up Mount Solitude to Moon Point. Instead of reaching the top and soaring down, though, I was one of the few who every year fell off the cliffside, unbalanced by the weight they carried on their backs. I went down just as fast.
“Want a ride?” Travis Becker asked.

I always thought the greatest thing would be to be able to fly, on some rich Oriental carpet, maybe, Arabian Nights-style, above a foreign, turreted city, or just with my own wings, swooping, antigravity, seeing things from a rare perspective. Riding on the back of Travis Becker’s motorcycle was the closest thing to flying I’d ever experienced.
He put his helmet on me. My head felt enormous and heavy in it, wobbly, like a newborn baby trying to keep its head up. He yanked the strap tight under my chin, too tight, cutting into the tender skin there. I tried to slip a few fingers underneath to loosen it.
“It needs to be secure,” he said. He knocked on the top of the helmet with his knuckles and smiled. For a moment I thought he was going to lean in and kiss me, just like that. It was strange to be seeing the real him,there on the lawn of his own house, when previously I’d only heard him spoken of in the halls at school, or once in the grocery store line. He had blond hair that was parted on one side and swooped over to the other, cut-marble cheekbones and a mouth that could almost be called feminine. His eyes were beautiful in an old-fashioned way; he could have easily been a coddled, sickly prince from years ago, a doomed artist from the thirties, or Anna Karenina’s Vronsky, dashing, the kind of guy a woman throws herself under a train for. He seemed to know that about himself; sometimes he would wear clothes that made you think of another time—a long navy wool coat with two rows of buttons, a beret and scarf, a Nehru jacket—but I didn’t know that then. I only noticed that he looked at you with the smugness of someone who has a secret, who knows something you don’t. The secret was probably money.
Travis straddled the bike, held one hand out to me so that I could swing my leg over. “Hold on,” he said. I did. I put my arms around Travis Becker. I had my arms around his waist, which was solid and definite under the soft cotton of his T-shirt. I could smell his cologne—a clean musk, a smell that made you want to free your hair from a ponytail. Maybe, I thought then, I won’t always have to be me after all. Still, I was nervous on that lawn, by that house. I