In Zanesville Read Online Free PDF

her other girlfriends call her Whinny, and everyone else calls her Mister Ed. Although my sister has a
     number of questionable friends, Mister Ed isn’t one of them. She rarely tortures younger kids even though younger kids have
     been known to torture her.
    “How’s it hanging?” she asks Meg upon arrival.
    “It’s hanging down,” my sister admits.
    “How’s it hungigungadin?” I say inanely, just to insert myself in the conversation.
    Meg reaches over, takes my wrist with both wet hands, and twists the skin in two different directions. Mister Ed diplomatically
     looks away as I struggle silently against the pain and then give up and holler out.
    “Company will go home if you can’t get along in there,” my mother calls from the dining room.
    I go to the doorway. “I’m sleeping over at Felicia’s,” I tell her.
    “You don’t tell me what you’re doing, you ask,” she says, without looking up from her sewing. She’s remaking a wool shift
     that I made last winter in sewing class.
    “Can I sleep over at Felicia’s?” I ask.
    “No,” she says, holding up the dress, which she has cut down and removed the darts from. “See? I could have told her: you
     needed darts like a hole in the head.” She believes the home-ec teacher at our junior high to be incompetent. Besidesthe sleeveless shift, we also learned something called huck toweling, which is a made-up name for a cross-stitch design on
     a dish towel, and how to make a reversible three-cornered scarf. The shift my mother is working on actually has a matching
     scarf made out of wool, which gave me a rash under the chin.
    “I’m leaving now,” I tell her.
    Right at the halfway point, Felicia materializes out of the darkness.
    “I thought I was coming to your house,” she says.
    “No, I’m coming to yours,” I tell her. From where we’re standing—on a sidewalk shielded by a hedge—we can see right into the
     Casper house, where another kid I went to elementary school with lives. A boy with the ruinous name Milton, and a buzz cut
     to go along with it. Inside the Casper living room, a man is sitting on the sofa folding laundry.
    “What did your mother make for dinner?” Felicia asks. “My mother made french fries out of a bag.”
    Her mother makes the food I like and my mother makes the food she likes. All the extra fried chicken Raymond didn’t eat and
     I didn’t eat is back there, sitting on the counter, waiting for my dad to get hungry again. Nevertheless, we can’t go back
     to my house because there are too many people over there. We have to sleep on the living room floor when Meg has a guest,
     and last time we did that was in the spring, and Felicia fell all the way down the stairs after a trip to the bathroom in
     the middle of the night. She cracked her tailbone, had to be taken to the emergency room, and was then made to carryaround what looked like a foam rubber toilet seat for a month. At school she shoved it in her locker first thing in the morning
     and winced her way up and down the halls, sitting on the side of her hip in class and crying in the bathroom. Only at home
     and at my house would she use the rubber donut, which made a discouraged sighing noise when sat upon.
    She’s fully recovered now, able to slide down the mossy terrace in a yard patrolled by a bitten-up cat named Zero. We cross
     the street and go into her house, the bottom half of a rambling duplex. Felicia’s father works the night shift, but her mother
     is here, still in the white optometrist’s dress, lying on the sofa with her shoes off and a cool cloth across her eyes.
    “Girls?” she calls out. “Girls? Is somebody there?”
    Felicia crosses the room silently and leans over her mother’s still form. When Phyllis calls out again, she says, WHAT? scaring
     the washcloth right off her mother’s face.
    “Hi there, honey,” Phyllis says to me. She gets up on one elbow. “I’m going to tell you like I told Flea: call the fire