The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read Online Free PDF

She’s …”
    “What?” I dumped the lemonade —plop —into the plastic pitcher.
    “I’m trying to think of the word,” Jill said. “ Ominous ? I’ve been doing flash cards, getting ready for the PSAT. Are you going to sign up for the SAT prep class this fall?”
    “I don’t think you can use ominous for people,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
    “It makes sense for CeeCee,” Jill said.
    The doorbell rang.
    “Adrienne, would you get that?” my mother called.
    “Hang on,” I yelled. I mixed the lemonade with water.
    Jill lingered next to me at the sink. “Why do you think CeeCee was hanging out with you at the pool?”
    “It was only for a couple of hours,” I said. Was the idea of someone spending time with me suspicious?
    The doorbell rang again: ba-DANG-ba-DUM . “Adrienne?” my mother called.
    “Go ahead. It’s probably her,” Jill said. “My theory? CeeCee thinks you’re going to be easy to push around.”
    Because my mother didn’t believe in using the air conditioner even though we had one, the first meeting of the Mother-Daughter Literary Punishment Group was heldout on the porch. Our house was small: two narrow bedrooms, a kitchen, a TV room/den, and a long book-filled hallway my mother referred to as “the cattle chute.” The screen porch, surrounded by lilacs that shaded and perfumed it, was the only space we had for “entertaining.” It stuck out from the back of our little blue house like an after thought.
    Jill’s mother, Glory, who had a bubbly, exaggerated way of speaking, was effervescing about the snacks my mother had assembled: a plate of celery and carrots, some warped-looking breadsticks, and a sagging block of cheese that smelled like the inside of a sweat-stained shoe.
    “We’re waiting for two more people,” my mother said. She asked if anyone had read anything interesting lately.
    Jill had just read The Lovely Bones . Her mother had read something frightening (she couldn’t remember the title) by Stephen King. CeeCee’s mother, Dana, who looked like an older and more expensive version of CeeCee, was halfway through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species —because that was what CeeCee had told her the book club had decided to read.
    My mother said that no matter which books we chose, she could probably find copies for us at the community college library because of her job.
    I put Ms. Radcliffe’s list on the table, next to the cheese. Judging from the number of books she listed as “college preparatory—highly recommended,” she was going to work us hard all year. Still, I thought, she would have to be better than Mrs. Dierks, the other English 11 teacher. Mrs.Dierks was famous for keeping a cot and a pillow in her classroom, because (she claimed) her students’ opinions exhausted her to the point where she had to lie down.
    The first embarrassing moment of the book club: my mother felt inspired to make a speech about my literary habits. “Adrienne doesn’t read fast,” she said. “But she truly immerses herself in a book.”
    “That’s right. I read deep,” I said. Then I looked at my mother. Please don’t tell them about Helen Keller .
    “CeeCee used to read almost every day when she was younger.” CeeCee’s mother, a collection of thick gold bracelets clinking gracefully around one of her wrists, reached for my copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” “I used to take her to the library once a week and get her a big stack of books. But even in elementary school her social life began to take the place of reading. I suppose that happens.”
    CeeCee had been adjusting the speed on a portable fan with her toes. But as soon as her mother spoke, she went still, as if a tiny electric current had run up her spine. “I hate it when you do that,” she said.
    Jill’s mother smiled and said she hadn’t heard of some of the books on the list. Where was Little Women ? Where were Sounder and Where the Red Fern Grows ?
    “You hate it when I do