The Brutal Language of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

said was no fair until I reminded him of how he had tried to sell me to Garrett. “You broke the bond of trust,” I informed him, copying something Jonquil had said, and he nodded pitifully.
    What neither Mrs. Googan nor I had anticipated was that my losing the semifinals would reignite Garrett’s anger on behalf of Jennings. He began a campaign of kicking so strenuous that I developed a cyst on my tailbone and had to stay home from school for a week. At the end of the week, when the cyst was at its most inflamed, the doctor sliced it open and drained all the pus. He proceeded to examine me inside and out, though I had no other health complaints, after which he tersely informed my mother that my hymen was missing.
    My mother demanded to know where it had gone and I quickly claimed I had been born without one. She searched my room anyway, almost as if she were looking for it, and found the Polaroid pictures of me instead. “ Sputnik my ass!” she said, flipping through them. “You haven’t lost any weight at all!” I wanted to tell her Jennings loved those pictures and that contrary to what she or Dr. Flay might think, I didn’t anticipate any future problems finding men. But I didn’t, of course. I watched out my bedroom window as she charged across the street to Jennings’s house, pictures in hand, prepared to shock and dismay his mother.
    It had been light out when my mother left to see Ms. Jennings, and it was dark when she returned. She had been crying, I could tell, and she no longer had the Polaroids. “Where are my pictures?” I demanded to know, and she looked at me like I was Jonquil.
    â€œ Your pictures? Your pictures?”
    I didn’t have an answer to that. While she was gone I had cooked up some Old El Paso, and now we sat down together to eat it. My mother had one taco and I went ahead and had three, since she didn’t seem in the mood to count. For once she watched me eat with a kind of interest, as if she were thinking, How in the world can a thirteen-year-old eat so damn much? Somebody tell me, please.
    I smiled at her while I was chewing and she turned stern again. “Well!” she announced suddenly. “ Your pictures have been chopped up and placed inside Leslie Jennings’s purse to be disposed of at her office, where that sorry son of hers can’t retrieve them and piece them back together.”
    â€œOh,” I said. I wiped red, spicy grease from my fingers, which smelled of beef and corn.
    â€œAs for you,” my mother continued, “there will be no more visits across the street.”
    I didn’t say anything. I had no intention of going back there anyway. It was a little late, but I was planning to listen to Jonquil from now on, no matter how sad it made me.
    â€œI’m telling you,” my mother continued, “if I find out you’ve been over there, you’ll be out on the street like your sister.”
    There was no point in disputing that, either, since if she did put me out, my sister would take me in and I’d be happier than ever.
    I returned to school to find that Garrett had been expelled for attacking me, and that Mrs. Krieg had been replaced by Mr. Sconzo, who was fat like me and said if anyone bothered me to let him know so he could kick some booty. He listened to old American folk music instead of classical, and told us to try to enjoy the songs as a whole instead of picking out all the little bitty parts.
    Jennings and I were civil in school. He asked if I would mind leaving my bedroom curtains open at night when I undressed, which I saw no harm in doing. I missed him terribly.

    Three years later, as sophomores in high school, Garrett and I were in class together again. It was math, and he had changed considerably since the seventh grade, wearing round glasses and a short haircut reminiscent of John Lennon before he was killed. Beyond that, everything else about him seemed thicker and