Sons from Afar Read Online Free PDF Page B

entirely different. Maybeth was really pretty, round and strong looking; Celie Anderson looked delicate, beautiful. James watched Celie Anderson that March morning. She bent her head over the French book and her mahogany hair moved, like a curtain, brushing against her cheek.
    She was popular, of course, but he didn’t think she was going steady with anyone. She’d come to Crisfield in ninth grade; he’d first seen her the first day of French I-A. All of James’s classes were A, the most advanced. Celie was only in the advanced French because, he found out by listening to what she told the teacher, she’d lived for two years in France. Her parents were divorced, he found out by listening from his corner of lunch tables in the cafeteria. She lived with her mother, who worked in a real-estate office and wanted to be a painter. That was how Celie had gotten to live in France, because when her parents were divorced her mother went off to France to study painting, taking Celie along with her.
    So, James thought, they had in common a lack of father, he and Celie Anderson. He loved to hear her speak French, say anything in French, even something as commonplace as conjugations or putting the right pronoun into a sentence. She made the language sound graceful and quick, the way she spoke it. Mr. Norton enjoyed it too, James could see that in the expression on the teacher’s face. Celie wasn’t that good with grammar; she just had a broad vocabulary, which probably came from having actually used the language.
    Some days, James said good morning to her—but never bonjour —he had a terrible accent—and sometimes she lifted her face to answer hi, looking right through him. “Good morning,” he said, that morning.
    â€œHi,” she answered, not seeing him.
    James minded, but he guessed he didn’t mind as much as if she’d absolutely ignored him. He went right back to his seat beside Andy Walker. He opened his notebook and took out the homework. He watched, out of the corner of his eye, the way Andy checked his own homework paper against James’s, changing things when they didn’t agree with what James had written.This had been going on all year, and Andy had never said a word to James except now, on the baseball squad, occasionally Andy would grunt in James’s direction. James figured, Andy had to know James knew that Andy was copying, if only from the way James always hunched his shoulders and angled his body so Andy could never copy from him during tests. Sixty-four was the highest Andy had ever gotten on a test. James knew that from watching papers returned. That made him laugh, inside himself. Andy would never say a word, but he needed James in order to get the C he had to have to go on in French. James didn’t know how Andy had ever gotten into this A section, except he must have sat next to somebody smart last year too. Mr. Norton seemed to think that Andy tensed up on tests, and Andy didn’t contradict the teacher. During tests, Andy did a lot of rustling around in his seat and throat clearing, a lot of erasing and writing over; he always kept his paper until the last minute. That was one of the games students played, to convince a teacher they were really trying, so the teacher would be a little easier on them when it came to grades. In James’s experience, the game usually worked. It worked for Andy anyway.
    James wished he could figure out some game for getting through baseball. Or at least, he wished he could figure out some way of not always looking like the worst, slowest, weakest, stupidest, when they stood in rows and did warm-up exercises. The coach, a big burly man with a big voice that could carry across the whole diamond, had no interest in James except every now and then to say, “Come on, Tillerman, a little sweat never hurt anyone.” Andy Walker, of course, was up in the front row, his light brown hair damp at the hairline, his