Silence - eARC Read Online Free PDF

these placemats.”
    Staci stared at her in shock. “Forty years?”
    Beth shrugged. “What can I say? We only just started to get to the end of the print run last year. Nothing ever changes here. Okay, look. Here’s the lumber mill, and here’s the cannery, those are where most people around here work. Here’s the school; grade school and high school right next to each other, so all anyone ever says is ‘the school.’ Here’s the Yacht Club—like you and me will ever get invited there!” She snorted. “Here’s the Hunt Club, which is mostly a bunch of old guys too cheap to go to a bar who got an old building where they can drink their own booze and smoke cigars without their wives around. This is the okay church—sometimes they do stuff for kids that doesn’t suck. This is the not-okay church—they hate gays, hate feminists, hate blacks, hate Mexicans, hate—you get the picture. This is the boathouse where the stoners hang out.” Marked with a little curl that could have been smoke. “Skaters hang at the high school parking lot. Jocks hang out here—the Municipal Gym. It’s just a gym, no classes, no pool or anything.”
    Staci felt in shock, but Beth wasn’t done. “This is where your ma works.” She drew a tiny glass about a block from the pizza joint. “Anything else is in the phone book, and you should be able to figure out where it is on this map.”
    “Internet?” Staci said faintly.
    Beth shook her head. “Dialup,” she replied. “Fifty-two baud if you are really lucky, mostly it’s not quite 24-baud. Except maybe the rich kids, I dunno, I’m not nearly important enough for any of them to talk to me. The Goths drive to the next town and the FreeSprings Mall, and use the free wifi there. There’s no cable here, and I dunno why. I know for cell we’re in some sort of dead spot; every year or two some cell company gets all excited about a whole town where no other cell company has come in, and they put up a tower and get frustrated because it won’t work. Maybe the same goes for cable. I know when you use the phone around here, there’s always a kind of weird background hum. The UFO crazies love it. Maybe that’s why the Blackthornes have their place out of town on Gray Oak Hill; it might be out of the dead zone.”
    “The Blackthornes?” Maybe she ought to try and get to know these people…if they had net…
    “Yacht Club people. More like the Yacht Club people. Ultra-rich. Own the cannery and the mill.”
    Well, so much for that idea. Nobody in the local silver-spoon contingent was going to have anything to do with the kid whose mom was the messed-up waitress for the local dive.
    “Anyway, that’s Silence. School doesn’t have classes in the summer, so you’ll have to hook up with the kids that aren’t working at the drive-in or something. Try to find a crowd to hang with, otherwise you’ll die of boredom.” Beth nodded as if she had experience of just that. “There’s not a lot of jobs around here unless you want to work at the cannery or the mill or on a lobster boat. That’s what the teachers all do in the summer, and most of the kids who are trying to make some money for a car. That’s the only seasonal work. Not like tourists would ever come here. ”
    “So, there’s Goths, skaters, and jocks, rich kids, and that’s all?” Staci asked, feeling a little desperate.
    Make that a lot desperate.
    “Well, there’s some nerds. It’s really hard to be a geek in a town where the net is dialup. They mostly stick to themselves, for obvious reasons. They mostly hang out at the bookstore.” Beth put her finger on where it was on the map she had drawn. “The Blackthornes don’t own that, but it’s one of the few places they don’t. They do own the drugstore. And the movie theater. And I think the drive-in. And the bar where your ma works, and the fisherman’s bar and the lumberworker’s bar.”
    “They own the whole town?” Staci said, aghast. “That’s—like,