Leaving: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

don’t look right on my skinny face,” he said. “You got your face already. It takes a man’s face a long time to show, but a girl got her face when she start high school. That’s how I know you’ll be pretty for sure. Now!” He took a hit from the joint.
    While he closed his eyes and inhaled, she scratched herself once on the arm for the one compliment, hard enough that a white line appeared. He held the joint out to her, and she pinched the end but didn’t smoke it.
    “Have a hit,” he said.
    “Say I’m bad,” she said.
    “You’re bad, girl. You’re so bad.”
    She took a drag off the joint.
    “That’s why I love you,” he said.
    “You lie.”
    “I’m not lyin.”
    “You don’t love me. There ain’t nothin about me to love.”
    “Sure there is. I love your big ole nose and your big ole dark eyes and your big ole big oles.” He bent forward laughing and she slapped the back of his neck.
    “Stop it,” she said.
    “Honest, though.” He sat up, looked at her, his thick eyebrows raised. “If I was on my own, I’d marry you. We’d live in our own big ole house, and I’d take you with the band on tour all around the country.”
    This time Lida laughed, but Marcus’s face was serious.
    “That ain’t right,” he said. “Now! You gotta say you’d marry me.”
    Lida looked at her feet and put the toes of her pumps together, which meant it was going to be a wish she wanted to have come true. But before she made the wish, she tested him.
    “You’d still marry me if I got a ugly ole mustache?”
    Marcus looked at her face closely to make sure she didn’t. “Sure. Yeah.”
    “What if I got no big ole big oles?”
    “But you got ’em. Can’t do nothin ’bout that.” She had to move away from him, go somewhere so she could see him better. She stood up and crossed the concrete aisle, sat on a box and looked down at him in his white tee and bell-bottom jeans. He had wide shoulders and a hard chest from swimming at school.
    “What’d you do if I got another man?” she asked.
    “I see you most every night and every day at school and every morning ’fore school, and you’re only with me.”
    “But if I did?”
    “I’d kill him.”
    “How you gonna kill him?”
    “I’d shoot his head off with a bullet.”
    “How you gonna shoot no one’s head off?”
    “We gotta gun right behind the register since the BART tracks went up.”
    “You a liar.”
    He scrambled to his feet and disappeared into the front of the shop. Lida waited without moving. There weren’t any windows in the stockroom, and she stared at the ceiling where the smoke had settled around the hanging yellow lights. It was easy to forget in this room, forget that there was an outside.
    “All right. Who is he?” Marcus returned with a black .38 revolver hanging by his leg. Lida looked at his big hand, his long fingers, the same ones that strummed his guitar, now gripping the handle of a gun with a firmness she’d never seen in him.
    She turned away and walked slowly toward the back of the room; she tried to picture the confrontation—the shooting, the body—but she couldn’t get herself to willingly conjure Easton’s face. She turned and looked at Marcus instead.
    “You’re crazy,” she said. “I ain’t got no other man. Get yourself up outta here with that.”

CHAPTER 2C
    MARCH 1993   •   LOVE 13
    LOVE WAS IN the quiet-room almost every day that month, including the morning of his last day at the house. A residential staff member sat in the office holding the rope to the quiet-room door, only Love’s shiny knees visible.
    They’d carried him in an hour earlier during breakfast, all three staff on duty, one holding each arm and one wrapped around his legs. They carried him from his room, where he’d broken his window with the Sega, through the living room with the Rocket-ship Behavior-Level Board pasted to the wall, past the dining room table where the other five children sat on Silence, eating their