So Close Read Online Free PDF Page B

maybe I wasn’t about to have a bucket of blood dropped on my head. 
                  I’d read all of Steven King—I was like that—I’d find something in the stacks and just binge on it, all in a row—but Carrie was my favorite.  Only child of a single mother, obviously.  I think it comforted me because with all Delilah’s faults at least she was not that .  She wanted me to date.  And she never asked anything so dumb as, “Why don’t you bring ‘em round the trailer?”  She’d just have me swing them by her job where she’d give us a free soda, or whatever, depending on where she was working at the time—and send us on our way.  She talked to the guys I’d bring by like people—didn’t flirt with them or overprotect.  It was kind of her finest hour.  She couldn’t make a parent/teacher conference to save her life, but the boyfriend thing she’d always been good at.  And she didn’t really have anything to worry about—even if she’d been capable.  After watching her, guys were something I held out like a diaper you were running to the pail. 
                  Pax’s house was on South Ocean Boulevard, which, I would later learn, is a coveted stretch of coast just down the way from the Lauder family and Donald Trump.  The front gate, high and curlicued, looked like something off the cover of a romance novel.  At my approach it swung open, letting me onto a long drive, at the end of which was the white stuccoed Westerbrook mansion, crawling with help, like a wedding cake left out at a picnic.  I pulled up beside a truck being unloaded of tables and chairs.  On the lawn that rolled down to the surf a parquet dance floor was being assembled.  Taking a breath I hopped out in my cut-offs and flip-flops, which I’d chosen after rejecting every sundress Delilah threw at me, because if I’d shown up there looking like I was trying to impress him and then he was as big a dick as I was expecting the humiliation might’ve finished me off. 
                  The entrance had a staircase you could leave a glass slipper on.  The double doors opened and out came a girl about my age wearing a green shift the shade of mint chip ice cream and carrying a clipboard.  With her pointy nose and chin she was very pretty in a tight, controlled sort of way.  “Can I help you?” she asked as she clip-clopped gracefully down in her low-heeled sling backs.  “Which team are you on and then I can tell you where to park.”             
                  “Team?”
                  “Catering, set-up, bar?”   She flipped her pages.
                  “Oh, sorry, I’m here to see Pax, actually.”
                  She dropped the clipboard, blushing.  “Apologies.”
                  “Hey, honest mistake.  You have a ton of people here.”
                  “I think he’s sailing with James.  Is he expecting you?”
                  “He said three.  Who’s James?”  We rounded the corner of the truck and she saw the duct tape holding my Honda together.  She tensed back up. 
                  “Did he stiff you?”
                  “Sorry?” I asked.
                  “He does that all the time—running out on bar tabs—or forgetting his credit card—I don’t think he has any malicious intent—I think he’s just wasted.  I can write you a check.” 
    I was not there for a handout.  I shouldn’t have been there at all.  “This was a mistake—please tell him Amanda—or actually, don’t.”  I opened my door, silently asking it not to fall off its hinge.
                  “Don’t what?”  We turned to see him striding from the back of the house in white shorts, his tan torso bare.  “Hey, you came.”  He smiled at me.  “And you’ve met Pym.”
                  “Not