Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy Read Online Free PDF

on the spot. But this effect wasn’t from looks. I’d call the deal demeanor. Lydia had demeanor. And a fairly decent set of knockers.
    “So what happened in the seventh grade today?” Lydia held her cheeseburger in one hand, peering at it suspiciously.
    “Do you really want to hear?”
    She turned the cheeseburger around to inspect the other side. Lord knows what she was afraid of. “Of course I want to hear. It’s my job. If I don’t want to hear, Caspar will take you to Culver Military Academy. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
    “I wouldn’t.”
    Lydia gave me a sharp glance. “Neither would I. Now tell me what happened in school today.”
    “I think I fell in love.”
    Lydia was back inspecting the burger. Maybe she expected something to crawl out before the first bite. “That’s nice,” she said. “How can you tell you’re in love?”
    “Because there’s this girl in class and I can’t stand her.”
    “That’s always a good start.”
    I was eating the Tuesday blue plate—pounded steak with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. “She hates my guts, called me Ex-Lax yesterday.”
    “Sounds like love to me.” Lydia finally took a bite, chewing very slowly. When she swallowed, twelve men in the room exhaled.
    The pounded steak desperately cried for ketchup but, for some reason I never understood, Lydia considered ketchup plebeian. If I used a dribble, we’d go into twenty minutes on the sort of people who put ketchup on food—the sort who eat pounded steak in the White Deck if you asked me—and I’d rather try to understand conflicting emotionalism.
    “I don’t like any of the kids at school because they’re all idiots, only I don’t like her the most and she’s not an idiot. Not liking the others is like not liking grits—big deal. But not liking her is like not liking a water moccasin. When she looks at me it’s like I have the flu. My stomach aches.” It’s hard to explain love at thirteen.
    Lydia looked at me with interest. “Better eat fast. That gravy is turning to axle grease.”
    Maurey said to Sam, “Let us walk through the oak forest along the stream.”
    He stood and together they strolled up the dirt path. Birds flittered over their heads, deer watched quizzically from the shadows. The forest had no underbrush. Everything was clean. It was a scene from Bambi .
    Maurey took Sam’s hand in her own. Their fingers entwined, not like shaking hands with a stranger, every pore of her hand touched every pore of his.
    At the stream they found a small waterfall tumbling over moss-covered rocks into a deep pool where trout jumped lazily for mayflies.
    “Let us sit,” Sam said.
    “Whatever you want,” she murmured, taking off her sneakers.
    They kissed, faces pressed together, arms around one another’s backs. Maurey smiled at him. “You know why I like you more than the other boys?”
    “Because we’re the only two in seventh grade who can read?”
    She laughed and shook her head no.
    “Because I’m a suave big-city Easterner who’s been to New York and seen a baseball game at Yankee Stadium?”
    “No, silly.” She leaned her head on Sam’s shoulder. “Because you’re so tall.”
    There was a crash. I lay in the dark, eyes open, hoping it was a one-time deal. Lydia and I’d had contact after 10:30 before and it never was good luck. Something heavy slid across the floor and there was another, smaller crash. What would Beaver Cleaver do if June was so drunk she trashed the living room?
    He’d go help her to bed.
    As I pulled myself out from between the sheets, a big crash came, followed by Lydia’s raised voice. “Cheers. You’re dead, Les, and I’m not.”
    The TV lay on the floor sideways. The big crash had been a couple of book boxes going over—science fiction and Westerns. Lydia stood with her back to me, her head up toward the moose.
    “Mom?”
    She turned. “Honey bunny?”
    “What’s up?”
    Lydia waved her shot glass in the direction of the moose