The Heart is Deceitful above All Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

to blink closed.
    â€˜Stop that!’ She pulls my thumb out of my mouth. I had quit sucking my thumb a year ago and gotten a big star on my chart. But I’d seen her when I woke in the morning; she’d been curled up on the couch, her blankets tangled at her feet, her thumb deep in her mouth. It had made me laugh, although I said nothing.
    â€˜That was quick . . .’ I jolt awake, the sky a deep violet, and the blood pounding too loudly in my ears.
    â€˜Not tired anymore, huh?’ I gaze around, unsure of where I am. I feel panic surging, the same as when they left me, sent me away.
    â€˜You look like a bug-eyed rabbit. Told ya to only take half. You’ll learn to mind me . . .’ Her words come too fast and quiet past the hollow ringing in my ears. ‘Soon we’ll be gettin’ big money . . . don’t youworry, your grandfather won’t ever let your fosters get you back. Fuck them socials, tryin’ to tell me . . .’ Her voice turns high in imitation, ‘Maybe he’s better off with them. Fuck ’em. They try and get you back, your grandfather will squash them again!’
    â€˜They want me back?’ I say loudly, my body shaking.
    â€˜What? Hell no, hell no . . .’ She hits the steering wheel. ‘’Member the call, that phone call, just a few hours ago?’ I nod and can’t stop. ‘Well, that was the call, they all died. Your fosters, they’re dead as doornails.’ She pats my head hard again. ‘Cops killed ’em . . . ’cause of you . . . that’s why we hadda go. So you better not talk to cops or social workers, nobody . . . or we’ll get killed, cut up . . .’ She makes chopping motions with her hand.
    I wrap my arms around me. My skin is peeling off, and soon I’ll step out of it. I claw at my body to help the sloughing skin come off.
    â€˜What’re you doin’?’
    I shout past the loud buzzing in my head, ‘I’m digging myself out!’ and watch clean, cold shafts of sun shadows rip into my flesh.
    A small thread of lightning spools through the black sky. I sit up on piled-up blankets and keep my eyes on the bar’s big screen door. Pickup trucks and beat-up old long cars pull in and out next to ours. It’s not raining, but short distant claps of thunder break the crickets and jukebox noise.
    I used to run to their bed and she’d hold up the blanket like a tent, and I’d climb over her body, warm and soft like dough, to the empty center between them, and the thunder would attack around us
. My fosters, fucking fosters, like Sarah calls them.
    The screen door kicks open and a wobbly man in a cowboy hat leaning way too heavily on a small, yellowish woman, walks onto the muddy dirt. ‘Where’s goddamned car gone at?’ he yells, pushes her away, and stumbles behind the club.
    I watch the door again. Sarah went in to use the bathroom some time ago when it was still light; now it’s been dark a while.
    â€˜Don’t move,’ she told me, and I haven’t. I watch the door for her and the road for cops.
    â€˜While I’m in there going to the bathroom, you see any of ’em you hide down.’
    Cops almost got me once already. We were pulled over on the side of the road, I was asleep in the back, she was in the front with the seat leaned down.
    â€˜Ma’am, ma’am, you okay, ma’am?’ I heard her jump up. The flashlight waving above the blanket pulled over my head made me feel like I was hiding in a deep lake, breathing air from the sun’s penetrating rays. ‘Fine, I’m fine, just dandy, sir.’
    â€˜Don’t mean to startle you, but you can’t camp here, ma’am. You in need of assistance, ma’am?’ His voice was soft like the boys that came around to cut the lawn had been at my fosters, fucking fosters.
    â€˜No, no . . . just on my way to Florida; see, some of the family got a little tired .