The Queen of Everything Read Online Free PDF

cruelty. Kale had
perfect features-- his nose, mouth, and eyes might have been designed to meet
exact factory specifications. He was athletic and muscular, but he was short.
Short was the thing that probably gave him the pissed-off air, like somebody had
messed up in manufacturing and he wasn't going to forget it. He was popular, and
there were always rumors about him: that he once killed a cat in some brutal
fashion, that he had a tattoo on his penis that said i get a rise out of you .
For some reason those stories only seemed to add to his allure. Melissa was
crazy for him. Kale worked at the Hotel Delgado docks on the far end of the
island, where boaters cruising the islands got together for parties and to use
the showers. Melissa would walk her dog, Boog, out there to try to get Kale's
attention, even if this meant driving way out to the other side of the island
and basically carrying poor old Boog around under one arm.
    36
    '"The Bad Killers!" Kale read. He paused and
grinned at the class before looking down at his paper again. In his story a
couple of guys were walking into a diner, talking. I watched Ms. Cassaday. She
stalked to the window, crossed her arms over her chest. She listened to him
read, and I could see her cheeks flushing red.
    Finally Ms. Cassaday whirled around. "Enough!"
she shouted. '"The Bad Killers,' Mr. Kramer?" She stood over his desk. Her ears
were turning red now too. I'd never seen anyone's ears turn a color like that
before. Kale Kramer peered out from the brim of his hat and shrugged.
    "Hey," he said.
    "Poor, poor Hemingway. Like he wasn't depressed
enough. You think I wouldn't recognize Hemingway? Even butchered to
hell?"
    "Oh man," said Mathew Bukowsky, who sat next to
me.
    I thought the same thing. I wish she wouldn't
say hell. I could just see Rosemary Lewis going home and telling her
mother, getting Ms. Cassaday in trouble.
    "And what exactly is this?" Ms. Cassaday tapped
the brim of Kale's painter's cap. "Besides a nice floral? No caps in school, am
I right? Even if they're pretty?" She looked around the class as if
someone might actually speak up. "I begin to understand Hemingway's despair when
I think
    37
    of a kid in a flowered hat stealing his
work."
    Kale Kramer looked exceedingly pissed off. You
got the feeling he and Ms. Cassaday despised each other. For a moment his eyes
flashed anger, his jaw muscles clenched. I thought again of my father and me
that morning. Kale's fingertips grabbed the edge of the desk as if he might
knock it over. Then a smirk returned.
    "Hey, this is a fashion statement," he said,
stretching the elastic of his hat with his thumb.
    "Oh, and what's the statement? How much you
like marigolds? You stole from Hemingway. I'd like to send you to jail for
theft," Ms. Cassaday said. "Or twist your perfect nose off your pretty little
face," she said. She picked up his paper and ripped it in half, made a show of
tossing it into the wastebasket. "Since I can't do either, you'll have to give
me ten pages by tomorrow. Okay, everyone, pack up."
    The class groaned in Kale's behalf. "But I
work," he said as we filed out.
    "Life is hard," Ms. Cassaday said. "Sometimes
the shits," I heard her mumble after her back was turned. She sounded as if she
meant it. Behind me I heard her sigh. In the narrow rectangle of glass on the
door, I saw her at her desk Ming coffee cups, trying to figure out which one was
still warm.
    "Dyke," Melissa said to me outside in the hall.
Loudly, and more for Kale's benefit, I
    38
    guessed, than mine. I thought about seeing Ms.
Cassaday and our old typing teacher, Elaine Blackstone, working at the oyster
farm last summer. I thought of Ms. Cassaday's troubled sigh.
    "What do you expect from a lesbo," Kale Kramer
said. "Hey." He nodded his head to me. "Catch."
    Before I knew it, I was looking down at his
cap, which I held in my hands. He grinned at me. 'I'll call you tonight," he
said, as if we were Mr.