Adelaide Piper by Beth Webb Hart Read Free Book Online

ya; wouldn’t wanna be ya.”
    I was over this sad Low-Country town that had entrapped me for eighteen years. I knew I’d be back this summer for the debutante teas and luncheons that Mae Mae’s Camellia Club had planned, and I’d be back during the holidays from time to time. But in the end, I had my escape route: college two states away, and, as my uncle Tinka said at our family dinner last Sunday afternoon, “She’d be doggoned if she isn’t going to take it!”
    â€œM-M-Mom,” Lou stammered between her standoff with Dizzy.
    â€œWhatcha need?” Mama whipped her head around, her oversized purse poised to provide Lou with whatever she wanted: baby wipes, bottled water, chewing gum.
    â€œIt’s kind of h-h-o-t,” she said, rubbing her rich brown eyes. Though Lou was crossing the threshold of adolescence, she still had the most beautiful baby face I had ever seen—those chubby red cheeks and long black lashes. A grosgrain bow pulled her thick hair back, and her pretty little forehead glowed like one of those Madame Alexander dolls we all had collected over the years.
    I would miss reading with Lou at night, trying to rehearse how it would go when Mrs. Spicklemeyer, the middle-school English teacher, called her name in the class and the other children snickered to see if she could make it through the next two paragraphs of the textbook.
    I jokingly called Lou’s teacher “Mrs. Despicablemeyer” during our rehearsals, but this got Lou’s tongue so twisted when she attempted to say it that she even laughed at herself.
    I would miss curling up on opposite sides of the den couch with her, watching sitcoms and, occasionally, a teenybopper movie. I’d feel guilty every time a four-letter word made its way across the screen, and I’d say, “Now, Lou, don’t you ever say that, okay?”
    â€œI’ve heard them all from D-Dizzy, a-anyway,” she’d answer, then, “Don’t w-worry, I w-won’t say them, Ad.”
    Now I pulled out my new journal and began to write poetry. This was one way to scratch the itch, and a marvelous method of escape.
    The journal was a graduation present from Shannon Pitts, that former best friend who went born-again Christian on me two summers ago at a Young Life retreat in Colorado. Shannon tenaciously evangelized even our most minor conversations, and it was downright wearisome.
    â€œThank God she chose the women’s college in North Carolina,”
    Jif had said, “so we can have a break from her!” Otherwise, every college question or problem would have been answered by her rote, Holy Roller lingo: “Give it to God . . . Take it to the Cross . . .” What in the world did that mean, anyway?
    And what about this: Shannon talked about Jesus as if He’d just left the room. As if He had been sitting with us, drinking a Co-Cola, and walked to the kitchen to get some tortilla chips! I was bewildered by the nonchalance with which she referred to the Son of God. It was startling, if not irreverent. Who would dare to assume that they knew Him in such an intimate way?
    Goodness knows I wasn’t on a first-name basis with the guy. I’d heard about Him at the High Episcopal church my family attended, with a Communion that was more fashion show than sacred. I could remember praying when I was a young girl. I could even recall a kind of supernatural peace when I lay in bed at night and recounted my day —the things I did right, the things I did wrong, and the things I would try to do right tomorrow. It was my own little litany of repentance, and it brought me a wonderful kind of lightness at the end of each day. But I gave it up somewhere around adolescence when my body changed and my mind raced and the itch gnawed away at me. Instead, I filled myself with schoolwork and poetry and crushes on teachers or upperclassmen who had a little something going on