It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC Read Online Free PDF

do. If a person asked you—I mean, would you ever tell they had asked?” Charlie had shaken his head. “Ever, ever? Cross your heart?”
    This time his headshake had been more firm, with a forefinger tracing an X on his breastbone. After a timeless moment he said, “Am I supposed to guess?”
    “If you were me, what would you do if a boy said—” and then she pronounced the whole Word right out loud, and stunned him with all the force of a lightning bolt between his ears.
    Charlie had heard it enough, but never from a girl. It was a Word so potent, so full of adult mystery, that Charlie had only a vague notion of its exact meaning because it wasn’t in the dictionary, and he would not even refer to it by its letter. He was more comfortable thinking of it as the Word after an E Word but before a G Word.
    His tongue had clung to the roof of his mouth as if glued there. He sensed that Sue Ann, though taller and older, was asking something heroic of him; not heroic in deeds but in wisdom.
    “Charlie, what should I have done?”
    At least he knew what always worked for him when faced by life’s great unknowables—such as that very moment. “Run,” he blurted, and took to his heels.
    Sue Ann was as fleet-footed as Charlie, but caught by surprise, she was left two paces behind all the way home. On the way her mood changed from uncertainty to suspicion and by the time Charlie swerved toward home he could tell by Sue Ann’s tone that he had failed to cover himself with glory.
    “Better not tell, you little scutter,” she had called, reluctant to cross the Hardin property line. “You just better not, is all.” There had been tears in her voice, and since that day they had treated each other with the reserve of near-strangers.

    Today, Charlie sensed that he was finally forgiven for the crime of being a boy unequal to the needs of a girl—that is to say, any boy. Sue Ann produced a pencil stub and let him print a “C” on one end of each of his seven eggs, then guided Roy through initialing his eggs with the understanding that any mix-up in those identical eggs would be a disaster equal to a Biblical flood. While the others followed suit, Roy became first to baptize his property by the simple tactic of whining to his sister about being the youngest and therefore always the most carelessly mistreated. When Roy saw Charlie preparing to dunk an egg, he insisted on having first turn at all six colors, with the result that Roy had one egg of each color with one left over while the other boys were forced to wait.
    Aaron had more exotic tastes. He had brought a tiny birthday-cake candle and used it like a pencil to draw invisible designs, marks that became visible when the dye failed to tint the egg through that tracery of candlewax. If Sue Ann wondered why Aaron’s designs featured block letters and words like “never miss” and “bam,” she chose not to ask questions.
    Charlie suspended eggs so that bands of different colors would decorate an egg. With the eventual fate of his eggs in mind, Jackie tinted every one of his a bright orange; he had noticed the previous year that a flying object of that color is easiest to track.
    It took the whole group some time to discover why Roy was now sobbing. With one egg still white, he had resolved to dye it in a manner as multicolored and spectacular as any of the others. But some choices ruled out others, and Roy did not realize this until he had dyed all his fingers and smeared the colors and achieved Jackie’s ridicule in the bargain.
    “Bee oh emm’s not a word,” Jackie said.
    “Sure it is,” Roy replied. “A bomb, like you drop from a plane.”
    “Nope, you needed another ‘b’ on the end,” Aaron said, and spelled it out. This was by now an impossibility on an egg that looked as if it had been decorated with ugliness in mind.
    “That’s crazy. It’d be ‘bombuh,’” Roy insisted, tuning up his eyewash equipment.
    “I’m sorry, bubba; Aaron’s