The Quiet Streets of Winslow Read Online Free PDF Page B

thoughts were and you would imagine what she was feeling, and for some reason you would lose track of the fact that you couldn’t know. You couldn’t know with anyone.
    At night I was affected by the fact that she was sleeping behind a thin partition twelve feet from me. I would lie on the futon and masturbate like I used to at home when I was in middle school. If Jody was aware of what I was doing, she never said. It would have embarrassed both of us, and there wasn’t that kind of closeness between us anyway. She didn’t want it and maybe she didn’t know how to do it and neither did I. It might not be enough to want to. You might have to make room for it in yourself, set aside some of you for some of it. Then you would have to get used to that new configuration. So I left Jody alone when it came to my sexual feelings. I was afraid of looking like one of those jerks who wanted things from her, and I thought that when she was ready she would come around to me. Only, the longer I waited the longer it didn’t happen.
    In the afternoon we sat together on the steps of the RV. Each RV was set into a private island of eucalypts and pine. Beyond the trees you could see the narrow, white-gravel roads that wound through the park. They were like paths in a fairy tale, Jody said, like you’d expect them to take you someplace good. Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders. It was soft and dark against her white sweatshirt. We would watch the light dying, and if Jody was cold, she would say, “Put your arms around me, Nate,” and we would sit that way. We would sit that way long past sunset.

chapter eight

    TRAVIS ASPENALL
    N OBODY COULD HAVE predicted it, my father said, that much rain in April—enough for Tonto Creek to flood with five families from Black Canyon City camping alongside it. Four children washed away. It was in the newspaper and on television; and in English class on Monday, when Mr. Drake read to us, Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky , Selena Maynard started crying and it turned out that she used to babysit for one of those drowned children. Mr. Drake walked her down to the nurse’s office. We were pretty much silent while he was gone. We didn’t look at each other. Some people went so far as to look at their books.
    â€œI wish I had never done anything with Selena,” Billy said to Jason and me after class. “Now I feel like a creep.”
    â€œThat’s because you are a creep,” Jason said.
    The three of us joked around all the time, but it wasn’t like we didn’t know we felt things.
    In Honors Physical Science, third period, when we were supposed to be talking about the periodic table, we talked about global warminginstead—what the phrase meant and what some scientists said had caused it and what people on the other side of the argument said. Ms. Hanson said that she believed global warming was what was happening to the Earth, although it was impossible to prove, and that most scientists believed it, and Harmony Cecil said that the Earth was getting too small for the kinds of people who lived on it.
    â€œWhat does that mean?” somebody in the back row said.
    â€œGreedy people don’t give a shit about whether the Earth is polluted,” Harmony told him.
    â€œDoes that sentence need a four-letter word?” Ms. Hanson said.
    â€œI think it does,” I said, and Harmony smiled at me.
    She sat in the window aisle in a blue shirt and a jean skirt, with a cuff bracelet on her wrist. She was wearing sandals and she slipped her feet out of them. Her toenails were painted a pinkish color. Her legs were bare and her skin was gold and smooth. I couldn’t concentrate on what was happening to the Earth. I couldn’t care about it. It was like Harmony was the wind pushing every other thought aside.
    S EVENTH PERIOD WAS cancelled that