The Raising Read Online Free PDF

was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not “recuperating” in the hospital, as his parents had said.
    So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave—a flat, shining stone engraved with “Baby Girl Edwards,” and a date that meant nothing to Perry—and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.
    And the scent of her hair—that red tangle of curls—like warm earth.
    “I love you, Mom,” Perry said before hanging up.
    “I love you , Perry,” his mother said.
    “Tell Dad I love him.”
    “He loves you, too.”
    A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig’s snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students passed him on the way—strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame glasses, Perry recognized from a class, although he couldn’t remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.
    The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?
    And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Saturday now that Perry was gone.
    He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry’s parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.
    And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick façades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam’s, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.
    Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental crap. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.
    A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn’t even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.
    And then he saw who it was.
    The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.
    Nicole Werner.
    She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, “Hi!” in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.
    “Hi,” Perry said back, sounding like a party pooper in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no shirt, standing a few feet in front of her.
    “I came by to see, you know, how it’s going,” she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. “You know, see if you’d want to set up a study time . . .”
    “Oh. Yeah,” Perry said. He’d forgotten. They’d talked about this back in Bad Axe—after they’d both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she’d been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They’d