Leaving Eden Read Online Free PDF Page A

connected by one invisible string.
    Past the Tyree house, the sidewalk ended and the road got narrower. I continued on past Miss Easter Davis’s place and then by the run-down shack where the cripple Charlie McDaniel lived. Before Charlie got polio and had to walk on crutches, my daddy went to school with him and he could remember a time when Charlie walked straight as anyone. I looked directly ahead when I went by. The last thing I needed was to see Charlie. The sight of him always made me sad. But mad, too. Like somehow the two feelings were mixed up together.
    I was almost at Martha Lee’s, just turning onto High Tower Road, when I heard a car honking on my heels. I pretended to ignore it, but it slowed down and my worst nightmare sprang up in living color. There was Elizabeth Talmadge in the yellow soft-top Jeep her daddy’d bought for her. An early graduation present, she said. A whole year early. Seemed like everything came early to Elizabeth. Early and easy. She was the lead twirler for the Sparkettes and acted like that made her Queen of the World. The car was filled with kids dressed in swimsuits, heading out to Elders Pond no doubt.
    “Hey, Tallie,” Elizabeth yelled. She slowed down like we were best friends or something but really to take pleasure in my humiliation. I was probably the only sixteen-year-old in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia who didn’t have a license, let alone a car. If the universe were fair, Elizabeth would get a serious case of acne. Or eczema. Ringworm. But if I knew one thing for sure it was that the universe didn’t bother itself about being fair, so pure-skinned girls like Elizabeth Talmadge got to drive around in Jeep soft-tops while I rode a rusty Raleigh, sweaty as a hard-broke horse. Still, I had legs like a lifeguard, while the Queen of the World’s were soft as Wonder Bread.
    I looked straight ahead, like it was a good thing to be riding a bike, like I was riding it by choice, like I was in training for that important bike race over in France, like maybe I was going to escape with the least amount of humiliation.
    “Hey, Tallie,” a boy called.
    My ears would have recognized Spaulding (everybody called him Spy) Reynolds’s voice if he’d been speaking out in a crowd in the center of Washington, D.C. I felt heat flood my chest and rise up in patches to my throat and cheeks.
    I stood on the pedals, ignoring him, and pumped furiously.
    “What’s the matter, Bullwinkle? Cat got your tongue?”
    I was pumping so hard, I pulled right ahead of the stupid Jeep.
    “Nice ass,” someone said. Not Spy. I didn’t
think
it was Spy.
    “Shit heels,” I said aloud. I pictured the way I must have looked, all red-faced and sweaty in ripped jeans, looking like the poor trash they all thought I was. I wished my mama was around. Mama’d see to it that I had
style
. If my mama were there, Elizabeth Talmadge would freeze in her tracks, just struck dumb with my style. Then I remembered the
Glamour
Day
photo. My ticket out of Eden. I swore that before I headed for Hollywood I was going to make sure that Elizabeth got a look at it. And Spy Reynolds, too. I wanted him to see me looking like a movie star. For once—just once—looking prettier than any girl in town, even Miss Sparkette, the Queen of the Universe herself.
    Elizabeth punched the gas pedal and left me in a patch of dust. “Shit heels,” I yelled after her.
    Martha Lee’s house wasn’t exactly a trailer, but as near as a place could be without actually having wheels. Mama’d said she lived there to spite her daddy. Samuel Curtis owned half of Eden, but you wouldn’t have a clue to that by anything Martha Lee did.
    Her pickup wasn’t in the drive, so I fished the key out from under the cracked slab of black stone by the front steps and let myself in. The place was in its normal state, which is to say pure mess. I’m not the world’s greatest housekeeper, but you’d need a front-end loader to make a serious dent at