What She Saw... Read Online Free PDF

tape contemplating the silence of that little stone house on the morning after the storm, they’d known something was terribly wrong. The curtains were drawn, and they’d correctly associated drawn curtains with hearses and funeral homes. At the time, however, they were more excited than they were frightened by the idea of untimely death. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with them. Then they grew up a little and realized it did.
    Then they were terrified every time they walked by that house, that real-life haunted house, and never more so than they were that evening, alone after dark en route to their very first roller-disco party.
    BUT THEIR TERROR only grew realer when they pushed open the Recreation Center’s steel door. Milling about the trophy-lined corridor were a collection of Whitehead High students who appeared closer in age to the girls’ parents than to Phoebe and Brenda. Not that they appeared to have much else in common with their Bible-and-Berlioz-obsessed elders. They were wearing sleeveless mesh football jerseys and faded blue jeans with frayed bottoms. And they were chewing on toothpicks and shoving one another and laughing about the “back entrance.” (As far as Phoebe knew, the recacenter didn’t have one.) But it was too late to turn back, so Phoebe and Brenda got in line to rent skates, a task they accomplished with the week’s accumulated milk money. Ten minutes later, their fingers damp with nervous excitement, they laced them up and rolled out onto the all-purpose athletic court.
    A strobe light had been attached to the ceiling, and the floor was flickering blue, red, and green. And the music was so loud they had to yell, “What?” at each other over and over again. And everywhere they looked there were feet flying, and heads bobbing, and girls wiping out, only to be scooped up off the shiny blond-wood floor by their pale, pimply, vaguely sinister-looking boyfriends. Under the scoreboard, a guy in a Tom Petty T-shirt was French-kissing a pretty blonde in designer jeans and a turquoise velour V-neck sweater. It was a good while before Phoebe and Brenda spotted Stinky. He was standing by the sidelines trying to trip passing skaters. He didn’t even have skates on. He was wearing black-and-white Adidas soccer cleats and a Stones T-shirt depicting a giant red tongue. Phoebe and Brenda skated right by him before coming to a grinding halt at the corner of the bleachers.
    He took his time ambling over to where they stood. “You girls dancing or what?” That was his opening line.
    And it was a pretty stupid one, Phoebe thought. So she said, “Do we look like we’re dancing?”
    Brenda giggled.
    Stinky announced to no one in particular, “I’m gettin’ a soda.”
    â€œWhat kind are you getting me?” asked Phoebe.
    â€œI’m not going back out there,” said Brenda, shaking her head.
    â€œI’ll be right back,” Phoebe assured her best friend, but it wasn’t her best friend she was thinking about just then.
    At Stinky’s lead, she rolled off the court and back down the trophy-lined corridor. The burnouts were still there, but they’d mostly relocated to the windowsills. “Check it out,” slurred one gangly figure overhead, his long legs swinging beneath him like Tarzan’s vines, his face reduced to two nostrils in the tightened hood of his gray sweatshirt. “It’s Stinky Fuckin’ Mancuso.”
    â€œDude,” said Stinky. “It’s so fuckin’ hot in there.”
    Then he reached inside the soda machine and scored himself a Coke and Phoebe a Tab.
    â€œThanks,” she mouthed in disbelief. That he knew how to get free sodas.
    That he knew these quasi adults!
    â€œLet’s go outside,” said Stinky.
    Phoebe thought of Brenda, waiting for her on the court. Then she thought of Leonard and Roberta, waiting for her at home. It wasn’t precisely