The Speed Queen Read Online Free PDF

to me, I'll have hot sauce under my nails.

7
    What do you mean by evaluated? I was tested in New Mexico when they caught me, but I was never committed or anything. Mr. Jefferies said everybody gets those tests. He said we wouldn't use it as a defense because of the judge.
    There are some people here who think I'm crazy and there are some people here who think I did all of it. A lot of them are the same people. I can see why they'd think that, the way they were all cut up. I heard that Sonic took all their ads off the air right after that.
    I'm not saying that wasn't me, just that I wasn't the only one.

    I wasn't the one who started it and I wasn't the one who planned it in the first place; I was just there. When you're there and it's happening, you don't say, "Wait, this is crazy." It's different just sitting somewhere and thinking about it; you think you'd never do it. Then you're there and you do and there's nothing at all crazy about it.
    Those tests are like lie detectors, you can't trust them. They're easy to trick; you just pretend you're someone else.
    When I was a kid I used to think I was crazy. I thought I was the only one who could talk inside my head. I'd sit inside Jody-Jo's house and talk to myself.
    "Dad put him in a bag," my inside voice said.
    "Mom said he buried him," I said. It was like two people talking.
    "Dig him up and see."
    "With what?" I said.
    Sometimes my inside voice would surprise me and say things I didn't know —like the guy in The Waste Lands. It would say things I know I didn't think.
    "With the pitchfork," it said. "With Mom's garden shears."
    "It was just a story," I said.
    "With your hands."
    "Dad wouldn't do that."
    "You're just afraid to find out."
    But everybody does that. It's not like voices, it's just the way people think. I used to think it made me crazy. No one told me different, and I wasn't going to ask.
    In eighth grade they gave me a test to see what I was best at, one of those ones where you're supposed to describe yourself. You'd say what you'd do if this or that happened to you, like You find out your friend Mary had been spreading lies about you. What do you do? (A) Confront her. (B) Say nothing, and other stuff like that.

    They wanted to see if you'd he a good waitress or something. I was stoned, so I just filled in all the As.
    The next week I got called down to Mrs, Drake, the school counselor. She had posters on her walls of seagulls with poetry on them and ivy plants spilling over her desk. She took her glasses off to talk to me.
    Marjorie," she said, "I was looking over the scores and yours jumped right out at me."
    "I just wrote down all the A's," I said.
    "Now why did you do that?"
    "I don't know," I said.
    "Have you ever had a problem with anger or aggression?"
    "No," I said, hoping she didn't know about my fight on the bus with Shona Potts.
    The week before I'd made fun of Shona's new glasses. Getting off at her stop, Shona pointed at me and said, "See ya tomorrow, Marge the Barge," and everyone laughed. The next morning when she got on, I snuck up the aisle till I was sitting right behind her. Everyone knew what I was going to do. Her hair was held in stiff pigtails by red rubber bands. I rolled my sleeve up and made a fist like my dad taught me, making sure my thumb was outside of my fingers. I reached my elbow back as far as the seat would let me and punched her in the side of the head. Her new glasses flew over the rows. Later they said that Shona would have double vision from it, but at the time I thought I'd let her off easy. I didn't hit her that hard; it didn't even hurt my hand.
    I got suspended but didn't tell my mom. I'd ride the bus in and hang out around the auditorium. For a while no one talked to me. At lunch, people winged their salt packets at me, and once an empty chocolate-milk carton that spotted my blouse. I'd come home and go to my room and sit on my bed with the sun going down. My mom didn't understand what was happening. What kind of