The Wonder Bread Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

lifted the bag and looked at the perfectly formed color circles on the vanilla-white plastic. Wonder was spelled in big, ruler-sharp, thick letters. The bag didn’t hang like a loaf of bread—there was weight, pull, a slightly rounded sag at the bottom. At that moment, Allie realized exactly what she had done. Her heart drum-rolled and her hand began to sweat so much she had to place the bag on her lap before it slipped loose.
    Allie dropped her head back against the seat and shut her eyes. She could feel her ears. They were weighted, filled with sizzling blood. For a second, Allie feared her ears might start slipping down her cheeks, gliding the length of her neck. Then the BART train went suddenly silent. Or maybe Allie had lost her hearing. She pulled her head up and looked around.
    “My wife won’t let me buy Wonder Bread,” the man said. (Relief! She could hear!) “Claims it’s as good for you as a doughnut.”
    “My mother never bought it either,” Allie said. Penny had never bought any food. Frank brought food home from his restaurant, or the family would go there and eat. Expensive gourmet hamburgers, French dip, onion soup au gratin, rice pilaf or fries. Allie had probably eaten enough salt to preserve herself. Upon her death, salt would take over and she’d become a giant piece of jerky.
    The man lifted his hand. His lips parted slightly. Allie felt certain she knew he would speak soon. He was going to ask for a piece of bread.
    The train pulled in to the North Berkeley station. Allie went to the doors and stood inches away from them. She felt as if her body might burst out and break the glass if the doors didn’t open soon.
    “You don’t want to leave me a piece of Wonder Bread for my ride home?” the man asked, just as Allie had predicted.
    “Sorry.” Allie wished there were bread in the bag. Things would be so much easier if she had simply stolen a loaf of Wonder. The doors whooshed open and Allie stepped onto the platform. She jogged up the steps and out of the station, and then she was running again.
    Beth’s apartment was on the second floor of a Spanish-style building, El Conquistador, which had a red-tiled roof, a sun-flooded tiled courtyard, and arched exterior walkways. Each upper-level apartment had a small half-circle balcony enclosed with a curved wrought-iron rail. El Conquistador even had one of the few parking garages in the city of Berkeley. If the building were a woman, it would be Princess Grace: calm, reserved, unpretentiously beautiful.
    Allie ran up El Conquistador’s painted-tile front steps, then down the exterior hallway. She knocked on the wooden-plank door to Beth’s apartment.
    Beth opened the door with her bare foot, her big toe pressing down on the cedilla-shaped handle. She was on the kitchen phone—the cord was stretched as far as it could go. Allie stared at Beth’s foot. The toe turned into a hammer. Allie blinked and it was a toe again.
    “Oh my god!” Beth said. “She just walked in the door!”
    Allie’s pulse throbbed in her feet—it felt like her toes were pushing out into giant sausages. She didn’t speak. Her palm was growing more and more slick around the neck of the Wonder Bread bag.
    “It’s Jonas,” Beth said. She backed up into the open kitchen counter so that the phone cord wasn’t stretched, and held out the phone toward Allie.
    “Tell him I don’t want it all. Only what he owes me.” Allie spoke quickly, so quickly she wasn’t even sure she was speaking English.
    Beth put the phone back against her ear. “Jonas heard you,” she said, to Allie. “He said your future lover Vice Versa is on his way over to meet you.” Beth placed the phone against her chest. “Like, you’re going to go out with a guy named Vice Versa?”
    Allie backed away toward the door, the bread bag still clasped in her hand. She knew that she should drop it there and run, but something—the coke she’d just done, her sense that Jonas owed her, her shame