Skin Privilege Read Online Free PDF Page B

disc. Desperate, she reached into the floor of the backseat, groping for a loose CD. She fished out three empty jewel cases in a row, cursing more loudly with each one. She was about to give up when the tips of her fingers brushed a cassette tape underneath her seat.
    Her Celica was around eight years old and still had a tape player, but Lena had no idea what this particular cassette contained, or how it had even ended up in her car. Still, she popped it into the dash and waited. No music came, and she turned up the knob, wondering if the tape was blank or had been damaged by last summer’s scorching heat. She turned it up further and nearly had a heart attack when the opening drumbeats of Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’ filled the car.
    Sibyl. Her twin sister had made this tape two weeks before she had died. Lena could remember listening to this exact song nearly six years ago as she sped down the highway, heading back to Grant County from a drop-off she’d made at the Georgia
    Bureau of Investigation’s lab in Macon. The drive had been much like the one she was making today: a straight shot down a kudzu-lined interstate, the \ few cars on the road whizzing by eighteen-wheelers and mobile homes that were being transported to waiting families. Meanwhile, her sister was back in Grant County, being tortured and murdered by a sadist while Lena sang with Joan Jett at the top of her lungs.
    She popped out the tape and turned off the radio.
    Six years. It didn’t seem like so much time had passed, but then again, it felt like an eternity. Lena i was just now getting to the point where her dead! twin was not the first thing she thought about when j she woke up in the morning. It usually wasn’t until later in the day when she saw something funny or heard a crazy story at work that she thought about Sibyl, made a mental note to tell her sister, then i realized a split second later that Sibyl was no longer j there to hear it.
    Lena had always thought of Sibyl as her only j. family. Their mother had died thirteen days after giving birth. Their father, a cop, had been shot dead! by a man he’d pulled over on a speeding violation, i He’d never even known his young wife was pregnant. As there were no other relatives to speak j of, Hank Norton, their mother’s brother, had j-raised the two girls. Lena had never thought of her l uncle as family. Hank had been a junkie during her j childhood and a sober, self-righteous asshole j during her teen years. Lena thought of him as more i like a warden, somebody who made the rules and | held all of the power. From the beginning, Lena had I only wanted to break out.
    She pushed in the cassette tape again, twisted the knob to lower the sound to a low, angry growl.
    I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation …
    The sisters had sung this as teenagers, their anthem against Reece, the backwater town they lived in until they were old enough to get the hell out. With their dark complexions and exotic looks that came courtesy of their Mexican-American grandmother, neither one of them had been particularly popular. Other kids were cruel, and Lena ‘s strategy was to take them on one by one while Sibyl kept to her studies, working hard to get the scholarships she needed to continue her education. After high school, Lena had spun her wheels for a while then entered the police academy, where Jeffrey Tolliver plucked her from a group of recruits and offered her a job. Sibyl had already taken a professorship at the Grant Institute of Technology, which made the decision to accept the job that much easier.
    Lena found herself thinking about her first weeks in Grant County. After Reece, Heartsdale had seemed like a major metropolis. Even Avondale and Madison, the other cities that comprised Grant, were impressive to her small-town eyes. Most of the kids Lena had gone to school with had never traveled outside the state of Georgia. Their parents worked twelve-hour days at the tire plant or drew