Under the Bridge Read Online Free PDF

the smallest of the group. She was born in December, born later, and was barely five feet tall, barely one hundred pounds. Hersmallness suited her, for she giggled constantly and was neither rude nor hard, just possessed of a childlike giddiness. Warren nicknamed her “the little munchkin.”
    Marissa had cried the night Warren asked Syreeta out. (“She just started bawling her face off because she had such a crush on Warren.”) Now Marissa was going out with the basketball player Dimitri. She still loved Warren, but “like a big brother.” Felicity was the “rowdy” one. Tara had the assured manner of the leader, for she was very tall, and like a
Seventeen
cover girl, with lovely bright eyes and straight blonde hair. The Five were together for sleepovers, shopping on Saturdays, reading fashion magazines. What were their interests? “Laughing,” Syreeta would later say. “I was always interested in just laughing and having fun.”
    Her real dad wasn’t around much because he lived up in Squamish and really didn’t have much to do with her life. When she was a little girl, they had spent more time together. He used to ask her to sit in the front seat when he drove his truck at the Monster Races. When she started talking of a boyfriend, he seemed to change toward her and became unnecessarily stern and wary. As in the time he saw the red marks on her neck left there by kisses from Warren. Her father said: “You tell that boy to watch out, or I’ll skin him like a raccoon.”
    She told Warren this, and Warren looked quite frightened, and then slowly appreciated the humor of it, because she was laughing and she wished she could be a mimic, and imitate her gruff and burly father, saying: “I’ll skin him like a raccoon.”
    Gregory Green, her stepfather, wasn’t around so much because he was a logger, and so he was in the forests for weeks at a time. But when he came back from the forests, her mother would sing to herself and wear her nicest dress, with a silk belt around the waist, and white flowers on the burgundy.
    Warren was always over for dinner, and after they’d eaten, he would sit out on the porch with Gregory Green. Syreeta noticed the way Warren’s face just lit up when Gregory asked him to come out on the porch, and she knew he wasn’t used to spending time with an older man who was good-natured and not so angry all the time. Gregory kicked his feet up onto the porch railing, and Warren did the same. Gregory lit a cigarette by flicking a match on his zipper, and Warren did the same. Warren smiled at Gregory, hopefully, and then said, “Well, I guess I should go help Wendy with the dishes.”
    â€œOh, let the women do the dishes,” Gregory said. “That’s what women are for.”
    Warren was kind of surprised to hear that, but it made him feel good, a little, like when a rapper asserted his challenge to a foe. Warren stayed on the porch and did not move when Syreeta’s mom came out with one hand on her hip, the other on a dishrag. Although he didn’t
really
have a crush on Syreeta’s mom, Warren, nonetheless, thought she was beautiful and glamorous and out of reach and shimmering. Standing there, long legged, her black hair loose on her shoulders, she said, not cruelly, but surely, as if there were to be no dispute—“If you want to eat another meal here, Greg, don’t talk like that in my house.”
    When she was back inside, Warren thought Gregory might offer up a retort, but he only looked a little stunned and chagrined. Warren couldn’t help but smile. He thought to himself,
So that’s where Syreeta gets her spark.
(Syreeta’s “cheeky,” he often said, admiringly.)
    But later, when she would reflect upon the girl she’d been, Syreeta wouldn’t describe herself as cheeky or sassy or bold. Harsh words would soon be used about her, published in newspapers