The Cinderella Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

arteries many times—and with a sense of peace. His worry
was the harm to Snow of contaminating her with even a drop of Jared’s poison, his poison.
    “You sure you want to mingle your blood with mine?”
    “Positive!”
    Jared’s evil might be hereditary. But it wasn’t contagious.
She was safe, Luke decided.
    The boy without hope became the blood friend of the fairytale
girl. Snow told him about imaginary worlds most children had heard of but were
foreign to him, including her favorite, Peter Pan.
    Snow would have been a perfect Wendy Darling, stitching
tattered shadows, making a home for Lost Boys. But Luke could never have been
Peter. He was a boy in appearance only, and he couldn’t wait to grow up.
Alarm-clock crocodiles and hook-handed pirates would be welcome menaces to him—trivial
threats in comparison with his sadistic father.
    Snow also told Luke the truth about her life with Leigh.
    The revelations worried him, Snow thought, though he wouldn’t
admit it. He didn’t like Snow’s description of Leigh’s business and wanted to
know where Snow’s parents had lived—or traveled to—during the year before Snow
was born. When she said they had never left Chicago, he looked as if there was
a significance to her answer that she was supposed to understand.
    Luke was curious about Leigh’s life before she met Snow’s
father. Curious herself, Snow asked her. A three-sentence summary was all Leigh
would provide. Born in southern Illinois, she moved to Chicago at sixteen. Her
parents—and later, her mother and stepfather—had too many kids and not enough
money. They were probably relieved, she said, when they discovered she was
gone.
    It saddened Snow that Leigh’s family might have been happy to
have one less mouth to feed. It explained, in a sad way, why Leigh had vowed to
never go hungry again.
    Luke also wanted to know if Leigh used drugs.
    “She used to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. But she doesn’t
do either anymore. Why? ”
    “No reason,” he said. But once again Snow got the impression
he knew something worrisome that she didn’t . . . and that he had no intention
of revealing it to her.
    She didn’t push, was afraid to push, for fear he would withdraw.
The fear was minor compared to what she felt every time Luke missed school. Was
this the day he had chosen to walk away? Only when she rushed to the ravine and
found the jar filled with coins would her fear—on that particular day—subside.
    Snow didn’t tell Luke she didn’t want him to leave Quail
Ridge. Nor did she ask him to delay his departure until she was old enough to
go with him. But she made him promise to tell her before he left.
    The father who declined to feed his son also refused to
permit Luke to earn money to feed himself. There would be no summertime paper
route for Luke, and he wouldn’t be weeding neighborhood gardens or mowing
neighborhood lawns. Since Luke no longer swam, however, he had plenty of time
for chores around the house.
    It would be safe, Snow decided, for her to help Luke with the
summer jobs his father wanted him to do. Jared would be at Hilltop Country Club
from dawn until dusk.
    She was sure Mrs. Evans wouldn’t tell Jared that Snow was
there, once she and Luke asked her not to. Maybe she would even bake cookies
for them, and they could weed her garden in return.
    Luke’s response was swift. Snow was never to come to the
house on Meadow View Drive. Never.
    Despite Luke’s chores, their summer was bliss. Working from
opposite ends of parking lots, they would scan the pavement for coins, casting
clandestine glances at each other when one was found. Cans and bottles were
similarly collected. And on one bright blue day, they walked into Quail Ridge
Bank and converted their weighty cache of coins into the airy splendor of
bills.
    The best times were spent in the forest. Wonderful times, but
not cloudless ones. Luke did chin-ups on tree limbs the way he had thrown
snowballs on Christmas Day—up and