The Life Before Her Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

two of them. The brightness of it caused her eyes to fill with water.
    Family ... famine ... mine...
    The words trailed across her eyes as if they were moving along one of those neon bars they used to have on buses, telling you what the next stop would be. STATE STREET ... MAIN STREET ... WESTLAND PLAZA ... Until that moment, it had never occurred to Diana that the words bore any relationship to one another. Strange, she thought then, how associations came and went, making their odd revelations, as if thoughts were independent of their thinkers. Freud could have explained it, she supposed. Or Mr. McCleod, her high school biology teacher. Everyone else just let them come and go.

    After school the girls walk to Burger King.
    There, they'll lock themselves in the one-stall bathroom and change into the cutoffs they've crammed into the bottoms of their backpacks.
    Winter lasted a long time, and now that the sun has finally risen once more over the slush and frozen grass of early spring, the heat of it seems closer to the earth than it's ever been....
    A burning, benevolent presence above them. At school even the teachers seem giddy. They start classes late because they're standing in the hallways talking to one another long after the bell has rung. In the hallway there's a cool, snaking
breeze that winds from one end of the tunnel of it to the other, skimming over the gold-flecked linoleum and past the gray metal lockers.
    Outside, the birds roll around in the puddles, and the squirrels dash down the green hill that slopes away from Briar Hill High into the street. They are trying to chase one another into the branches of the trees on the other side of the road. Usually they make it, but occasionally one of them is made into a small bloody rug under the wheels of someone's mother's station wagon or SUV.
    Crossing the parking lot on their way to Burger King, they see Amanda Greenberg sitting on the trunk of her father's BMW, swinging her long legs, which are bare beneath the short black skirt she's wearing. She's a senior. She's just been elected Mayqueen, which is Briar Hill High's version of prom queen ... the girl who'll wear a white gown and preside over the last dance of the year in the high school gym....
    Four boys are standing around the Mayqueen in a semicircle. She throws her head backward with laughter, fast and hard, the way you'd swallow a big pill.
    She is terrifyingly beautiful. An arrow of beauty. Her mother is black and her father is Jewish, and the union of those two has produced a face that is at once ancient and entirely new—long pitch-black hair, dusky skin, and eyes so blue and acute they're hard to look at.
    She never notices the two younger girls walk by.
    Next year one of those younger girls will be Mayqueen, but no one has even begun to dream of that yet.
    ***
    "I HAVE GOOD NEWS, " P AUL SAID, LOOKING AT D IANA over their daughter's bright head.
    The sun numbered each one of Emma's golden hairs.
    Diana stepped up onto the porch, and her shadow fell on her family.
    "What?" Diana asked.
    Paul looked excited. His eyes were wide. It was comic and adorable, that look of a happy child on the face of this professor. Her love for him, welling up, made her chest hurt. She put her hand flat against her ribs, and behind them she could feel her heart like a wingless bird in that cage.
    "Tell me, sweetheart," she said.
    Paul cleared his throat and tried to sound serious, though he was smiling widely. He said, "Your faithful servant here has been asked to give the Arthur M. Fuller lecture at the university in the fall."
    "Oh, Paul," Diana said. She moved her hand from her chest to her mouth in a gesture of wonder and enthusiasm, but there was a chemical smell on her palm—something cleaner than soap—and she moved the hand away fast, wiping it on her black pants.
    "Oh, Paul," she said again. "I'm so proud."
    It was an incredible honor. The Arthur M. Fuller lecture was usually reserved for celebrities, dignitaries,