Adelaide Piper by Beth Webb Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

upstairs.
    Nonetheless, it was nice of Shannon to notice how I spent my time these days—writing. No one else seemed to. I’d spent this last summer once again at the Governor’s School at the College of Charleston, where my favorite professor, Penelope Russo, gave me fresh insight into my craft. I had learned from Penelope (she let us call her by her first name) that poems didn’t have to rhyme or have punctuation and that short stories could transport you anyplace in the world: the streets of Harlem, a café in a Paris alleyway, or even a foxhole in Vietnam, where my own daddy lost his arm and two friends when a well-aimed grenade was hurled their direction.
    Penelope Russo had taught me more than just the art of writing— she had taught me how to look within my heart and examine the itch. How to pin it under a microscope and probe at it with the point of a pencil. And for me to name what I longed for on paper provided some relief, and for that I was immeasurably grateful.
    I scribbled down a poem as the wagon steamed up the foothills of the Blue Ridge, looking up every few minutes to see if I could lay eyes on the “You are now leaving South Carolina” sign.
    Good-bye Williamstown.
    Farewell gloom
    in the window
    of a mill village
    home.
    Every mile
    toward Virginia
    takes me closer
    to what has to be
    my destiny.
    Thank God they let us retake those SATs because of the noise of the elementary-school carnival last autumn, I thought. On the second try, I had purchased those Kaplan books and stared at vocabulary words and algebra problems until I could hardly see straight. I raised my score 240 points, which opened a spot with a minor scholarship for me at NBU, the small and prestigious liberal arts college “nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” as the brochure boasted. Now I was bound for an institution that judges, senators, and Pulitzer prize–winning authors were proud to call their alma mater.
    I’d had to do some fancy footwork to convince my parents that this was a better opportunity than the full scholarship I received to the University of South Carolina. I can remember walking the magnolia-lined brick path up to Papa Great and Mae Mae’s front door for a change, to sit down in their living room and ask if they would further convince my parents by splitting the remainder of the tuition bill of my academic dream. Thankfully, the old pig considered it a good investment in family relations (i.e., another way to keep Daddy happy and working at the mill), and so they agreed to contribute. Sometimes I felt a tinge of guilt knowing this would hem Daddy in to his mill job another four years, but I was in claw-my-way-out mode, and nothing short of an act of God could stop me.
    The Governor’s School, fashion magazines, and MTV—these were my only vistas into what lay beyond Williamstown. I was a bug in a jar, and I was counting on NBU to take the lid off so I could fly. I could hardly wait to register for classes, to smell the insides of the hardbound books that would expand my horizons.
    And there was more that I would experience, I was sure. I might even fall in love in college with a bright and cultured Mr. Right. That’s how my parents met, in fact. My mama, a socialite from Charleston, yearning for a slice of what she called the “All-American Life” (which I had come to realize was just an amalgamation of Southern culture and small-town charm), had fallen in love with Zane Piper, the star tailback of the University of South Carolina football team, their sophomore year. (He was a kind of legend, even today, because the Gamecocks have not had as good a season since his class graduated more than twenty years ago. Sometimes people came right up to him on the streets and said, “You were the one who gave us the taste of victory, Zane.” Or they honked and yelled, “Go, Gamecocks!” from their cars when he jogged along the interstate, his