Local Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

money for our escape from town by selling term papers, and June was our busiest time of the year. By the end of the month, however, we were no longer doing our best work. The pressure was on, the stupid among us had panicked, and I was writing all night. In part, I kept odd hours because my brother strongly disapproved of our venture, and Jason was so honest and good that a single look from him could make a person feel sordid and corrupt. But the real reason I was writing three or more papers at a time was that Eugene was in charge of the division of labor, and he’d divided it so that two thirds of the labor was mine. After all, he had started the business, so it was only fair that he administered everything, including our finances, which were kept in a joint savings account. Or at least, this was Eugene’s line every time I complained. And when I really considered my situation, it wasn’t so difficult to accept the deal he offered and keep my mouth shut. In August, Eugene would be leaving—he and my brother had done what no one in our town had ever managed before and had both gotten into Harvard—at which point the business would be all mine.
    So I kept cranking out term papers. I went through the great religions of the world, then turned to literature—Shakespeare’s comedies for the juniors, tragedies for the seniors. I wrote dream journals and essays about my various families, some so moving I brought myself to tears. At least, writing these papers kept my mind off the heat, which was nearly unbearable that June. I had a lot not to think about back then, including the horrible noise the cicadas made all day and night, an echo that could lead you to believe little bombs were going off on your neighbors’ front lawns. I certainly didn’t want to dwell on the fact that I’d probably ruined my hair for good. I had dyed it black and cut the front much too short, using a dull nail scissors, so that I now looked as though I were in a constant state of shock. Well, maybe I was, and maybe I had good reason to be. Not long ago my father had moved out and now my mother barely left her room. Even our dog, a Labrador retriever known to do little but sleep, had attacked Mrs. Fisher’s cat across the street and now, instead of roaming the neighborhood, he was chained up in our yard, eating cicadas, making himself sick.
    Through it all, the heat just kept getting worse. At school, people fainted during homeroom. There were fights in the parking lot of the Franconia Mall, real fights that were bloody and unforgiving and hot. After a while, all anyone could hear were those horrible cicadas and the whirring of air conditioners. It got so that I hated everyone—not Jason of course, who was too pure to hate, just everyone else who lived and breathed inside the Franconia town limits.
    The only one who seemed to understand me at that point in time was Eugene Kessler, and this notion was just about as scary as any I’d ever had. On truly hot nights, when the air was so humid and thick it was a triumph to draw a deep breath, I would sometimes see Eugene out in his yard. Somehow, I knew how alone he felt, and it gave me the shivers to think that alienation could be a shared experience. Eugene had found a great horned owl at a rest area on the parkway two summers earlier. Now, on nights when everyone else was at home with the air conditioner turned on high, Eugene would let the owl fly free. He’d been informed by a lieutenant down at the police department that he’d better keep the owl caged at all times, because of an incident involving a toy poodle that had been carried off, but Eugene had his own view of natural selection. He figured that the Yorkie who lived on the corner, and the Chihuahua who snarled from behind a fence over on Maple, had better run for cover when they spied the owl’s shadow above them. In Eugene’s opinion, their fate was in their own paws.
    Jason was