The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon Read Free Book Online

next to Doreen, looking across the rows to see Kate pacing back and forth, smoking. Sheknew Kate would watch over her tonight, which left her free to sleep and dream and wake. It would be the same fitful night as any other—but on this night, she would not be afraid.
    In her first dream, she hears sounds from the boys’ side. They start nice and then get frightening, with one word rising above all the shouts and groans. She plucks that one word—no—and practices speaking it in bed, and soon that word is her own.
    The dream turns like a page in her drawing pad, and now she is in a dream where that one word is all she has. The door opens and she backs away and the bucket falls. “No, no, no, no!”
    She woke with a start.
Where—what—
Oh, yes, it all washed back inside her. As if she needed proof, there was Kate, on a chair in the doorway, staring at her cigarette.
    Back into dreams. Lynnie is in the laundry, and a dryer breaks down, so she wheels a bin of clothes outside. There she stands before the clothesline, inhaling grass and trees, freshly plowed fields. A spring breeze lifts her shirt, reminding her that something is happening inside her body, something that came into her on a night she could not “No” away but is starting to understand. As she pins laundry to the line, she hears a motor puttering and, above that sound, hands clapping. She looks around. A tractor is drawing near, and on its seat is a colored man in a straw hat. She has seen him doing handyman chores, bringing corn to the kitchen. Once she saw him digging a grave. Now he is sitting high, smiling, tapping the seat beside him.
    Girls and boys are not allowed near each other at the School, at least not when anyone is watching. She looks around. No one is watching.
    The man makes signs with his hands. She understands he means,
Come up here.
She sets her bowl of clothespins on the ground. He reaches down and hoists her up. She sits beside him,and he fishes in his pocket and pulls out one white feather, two, three. He collects them into a bouquet and hands them to her. She wonders how his wrist would feel against her lips.
    She woke. Kate was standing again. This time Suzette was nearby.
    “But are you going to put it on her chart?” Suzette was whispering.
    “Of course I will. She had a
baby
.”
    “I wouldn’t.”
    “A
baby
. And it’s somewhere out there. And someone in here is responsible.”
    “That’s my point. You want to stir things up like that?”
    Kate said nothing.
    “You know what they’ll do to you?”
    “What about
her
?”
    “They get over it. It happens to them all the time.”
    “To the point of
pregnancy
?”
    Suzette said, “You know there’s that doctor in Harrisburg who gets rid of it.”
    “No one caught this one. It got to full term, from what I can tell.”
    “I bet it was Forty-two’s.”
    “It wasn’t.”
    “How do you know? It’s not like he was sterilized. I’ll tell you, those places with the sterilization programs had the right idea. It saved a lot of worry. Too bad no one has them anymore.”
    “I know when they began spending time together, and the math says it wasn’t him.”
    “Well, what does it matter.”
    “What does it matter? Someone in here did it, that’s what. And then—my God, those two delivered a baby by themselves.”
    “What I mean is, what does it matter who the father is. So it’s not Forty-two; it’s another resident. So what. You know what will happen if they find that baby.”
    “I know.” Kate’s voice was very sad.
    “So why report it? Besides, what if word gets out that a resident
escaped
and
had a baby
? They’d have Collins’s head and everyone else’s. Where would we work then? What kind of jobs are there around here for folks that never finished high school? Or whose ex doesn’t pay child support like yours? The whole town’ll go down the tubes. You want that on your head?”
    “I’m not talking economics. I’m talking morality. We can’t leave