Last December Read Online Free PDF Page A

walk, and I basically never went out after dark since we’ve been in our new apartment, because I didn’t really have any after-school friends at St. Clair, and maybe that’s why Ma turned around with her hands still in the sink and just stared at me for a while without saying anything. Then she finally said, “Okay, Steven,” like she was agreeing to send me to fight the Russians in World War III. Anyways, I shrugged and said, “See ya later,” grabbed my coat, and left the apartment.
    When I got outside, it was cold. I forgot my gloves and hat again, and the ground was crunchy under my feet. In the places where the salt had eaten through, there were broken-off pieces, which looked like the shapes of little countries with all these bullet holes through them. I kicked one of the countries and it slid off the sidewalk and crashed into a whole bunch of pieces onto a sewer grate, and then I stepped off the sidewalk and crunched allthe little pieces so they went bloop-bloop-bloop in the sewer, and I remember wondering why the water wasn’t frozen in the sewer (I still don’t know, Sam). And then when I got to St. Clair, a serious wind hit my face, and my cheeks went numb right away, and my nose started to run, and my jeans went all hard and cold against my legs, and a half-empty streetcar squealed by, like it was complaining about the cold, and I thought of turning back, but I really really didn’t want to go back home.
    So I kept on walking and I remembered that there was a doughnut shop called the Donut Hole, right beside the shoe-repair shop Ma goes to, a couple of blocks away, so I put my chin into my coat and walked toward it, and when I finally got to the Donut Hole I went inside, but I realized by the way the girl behind the counter looked at me that she was expecting me to buy something. She was pretty cute, too, but way older than me, like nineteen or twenty-four or something. She had blond hair and she was wearing these big hoop earrings and pink lipstick on her big puffy lips and lots of mascara on her eyelashes, and I got nervous and started searching my pockets for money even though I knew I didn’t have any, but the funny thing is I did. I had two dimes and a penny in my front right pocket.
    And I was doing all this pathetic fidgeting right in front of the counter girl, and she had her arms crossed, watching me, and she finally said, “Don’t have enough, do you?” I shrugged and went red, and then she stepped along the counter and made her two long, nail-polished fingers like chopsticks from House of Chan (where Ma took me for my twelfth birthday) and dipped them into the matches box and grabbed four pennies, one at a time, andthen she said, “I’ve got a deal for you. If you give me what you’ve got there, then I’ll give you a quarter back … and then you’ll have enough to play,” and I said, sort of embarrassed, “Play what?” and she smirked and said, “You can’t fool a fooler,” and then she looked down at the end of the doughnut shop at this tabletop video machine and she said, “I know a video game addict when I see one,” and I didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t a video game addict, because she was being so nice and she was really sexy and it was so cold outside and I didn’t want to see or think about Ma or home or pregnancy for a while, so I just gave her the coins and took the quarter and went down to the tabletop.
    I sat down and looked at the screen. I don’t know if you are going to know what Ms. Pac-Man is, Sam, so I’ll explain a little. So you are this yellow guy, who is actually pretty much a female, and she looks kind of like a pizza with no topping but with a little bow (for hair she doesn’t actually have) and one slice cut out of her, and that slice is like a mouth, and the whole idea is for you to move Ms. Pac-Man through a maze while eating all these yellow dots, which are called pellets. If you eat all the pellets, you go to the next screen, which is