The Blue Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

to a corner of the room and pried up a loose floorboard. Reaching into the space that was revealed, she pulled out a battered plush toy cat, all lanky, droopy limbs. I could see it had been a calico once, but the plush was so worn away that only the memory of color remained.
    “This was my only real toy,” she added.
    “God, that’s so sad.”
    She got a hurt look.
    “Not the cat,” I said. “I mean what your mom’s done to your room.”
    “It happened the first weekend I went to stay with my dad. I came back and it looked like this. She’d even boxed my books and put them in the basement storage, but I managed to convince her I needed them for my studies.”
    I looked at the bookcase and could see how the mismatched spines of the books would drive her mom crazy.
    “So I guess it wasn’t like this when your dad was here,” I said.
    “Just not as much. She talks about him like he’s dead.”
    “I noticed. Why don’t you live with him?”
    “He’s always out of town for work, or I would. It’s not that I hate my mom, it’s just ... hard.”
    “It’d sure drive me crazy.”
    I picked up one of the dolls from the dresser, then put it back down.
    “You don’t mind me snooping?” I asked.
    She shook her head.
    “I just have this insatiable curiosity about other people’s stuff,” I said. I sat beside her on the floor. “So what else do you have stashed away?”
    “Nothing much. Pictures of my dad. Some CDs that Mom’d hate. My journal.”
    I made no move to take a closer look and got up when she returned the plush cat to its hiding place, sliding the floorboard back into place. I liked the idea of a hidden stash but would hate having to use it like she did.
    “That’s one of the doors into hell,” she said when I wandered over to her closet.
    I laughed. “What do you mean?”
    “Just take a look.”
    I opened the door to an array of clothes, all neatly arranged on their hangers, blouses on one end, dresses on the other, skirts in the middle. I fingered the nearest skirt. Of course, it was good quality material. I tried to think of something nice to say about them, but we’d already been through the whole business about her clothes.
    “I hate that everything I own has been picked out for me,” she said.
    “That bad, huh?”
    She nodded. “Except for my books and what I’ve got stashed away. But the rest of my life is all focused on making me into the dork I already look like.”
    “I don’t think you look like a dork.”
    “How can you say that? If we’re going to be friends, you have to be honest with me.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t judge my friends by the clothes they wear.”
    “Oh, come on. You do the casual punk thing, but you have to be spending time planning it out.”
    “I do. But clothes are only for fun. They don’t say who I am—not really, not inside. I don’t think I’ve ever had an original look. I just see somebody wearing something I like—in a magazine, on the street—and I think, that’d be fun.”
    “Fun.”
    “Mm-hmm. And my idea of fun changes from day to day. For instance,” I added, giving my pleated skirl a swirl, “today, this is fun.”
    Maxine shook her head. “God, I wish I could be like you. You are so sure of yourself”
    “It just seems like that,” I told her.
    “How’d you ever get to be that way?”
    “That’s kind of a long story.”
    “I suppose,” she said with a glum look, “you’re going to tell me it’s the same way you got to be brave.”
    “Not really.”
    I came and sat on the bed with her. Opening one of the textbooks I’d brought, I laid it on the comforter between us, just in case her mom came to check up.
    “There was this girl back at my old school,” I said. “Her name was Emmy Jean Haggerty, and she was this real hillbilly who got bussed in from the hills up around the old coal mines north of town. People’d rag on her mercilessly because of her raggedy hand-me-down clothes and her thick hill-country drawl,