Under the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

fleeting moments that she wanted her mother to be part of, to know. A new photo: Diana, Tara, Marissa, Felicity, and her at a sleepover, all in their pajamas. Another one: her and Marissa in the back of a blue pickup truck. “Look at Diana,” her mom would say. “She’s so cute!”
    â€œI know. She looks like a little bunny or something,” Syreeta said. A third new photo: the boys. “Here, that’s Erik Cash. Remember I told you about him? I want him and Diana to get together.”
    â€œWhat a baby face.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œHe’s got his father’s eyes. His dad looked just like that, exactly.”
    â€œReally?” Syreeta would always listen carefully to her mother’s observations, as she had found her mother’s observations precise, though never judgmental or cruel. It pleased her that her mother liked Warren. “He’s so polite and well spoken,” her mother observed. Syreeta knew Warren wanted to make a good impression, but his politeness was not forced or false. He was besotted with her mother, in an innocent way, and whenever he came to her house, he would be sure to take off his Crip baseball cap and he would never swear. Always, he would always greet her mother warmly, shaking her hand, and asking her about her day, and once she found him sweeping the leaves off the driveway.
    She could understand why Warren always wanted to come over to her place, especially after she saw the trailer where he lived, and his “mean” dad who just seemed “so angry.”
    â€œI just feel really comfortable here,” Warren would say, and Syreeta would nod her head, because that’s what others said as well. Her mother’s competence was comforting, and the house revealed a quiet instinct for order and beauty. They hadn’t always lived so well. When Syreeta was a little girl, after the divorce, she and her mother lived in rentals, in basement rooms. But her mother soon became manager at Pacific Coast Savings and brought them to a better home. Sometimes her mother would hug her out of the blue. “Rita,” she’d say, tousling her hair. And sometimes when they were shopping together in the mall, the salesgirls asked if they were sisters.
    Though she loved her mother, she loved her friends as well. The Five. “There was always us five,” she’d later recall. She could see her life as before and after. Before was the year when she got braces, when she met Warren, when there were always “us five.” She could almost rhyme the names off, for each name was melodic and sweet. Syreeta, Tara, Marissa, Diana, and Felicity. The Five were the prettiest girls at Shoreline, though they did not see themselves as possessed of the greatest beauty or perched atop a hierarchy. (“We were friends with everybody,” they’d insist. “If I can show someone that I’m a good-looking person on the inside, it’s more important than showing it on the outside,” Syreeta would say.) Still, the boys at Shoreline marked them in a certain way. In their yearbooks, around Syreeta and Tara and Marissa and Diana and Felicity, boys drew rays like those that surround children’s drawings of the sun, and above each girl’s photo, they wrote HOTTIE.
    Of the five, there was no leader. When they were all in grade 5, Tara had been the leader of one clique, Syreeta the leader of the other. At some point, Syreeta wasn’t even sure when, the two leaders had formed an alliance, a slightly uneasy friendship. But in the fall, when neighborhood girls were bothering Colin Jones and Warren was looking for a new place to live, Syreeta and Tara were growing suddenly close and loyal. They worked together at Brady’s Fish and Chips after school. Brady’s was owned by Diana’s parents and was in a little strip mall just off the highway, next to a store that sold saris, and a street named Earl Grey. Marissa was