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

stump keeping time with his good arm.)
    But I certainly wouldn’t let romance knock me off track, as it had Georgianne Mayfield. Poor Georgianne, the honest winner of that valedictorian race of the Williamstown class of 1989, was about to give birth to her first child. She had been accepted at Princeton and Wellesley and even offered a full scholarship to Davidson, an above-average college in the right direction, but before she could make up her mind, she started feeling queasy in the morning and had to face the fact that her future would take a dramatically different turn.
    It was Peach Hickman who had sucked my dear friend back into Williamstown with his good looks and his fifty-yard-line seats at the University of South Carolina football games. He was a junior at Carolina, but he came home every weekend, and Georgianne had thought it was so romantic the way he would pick her up on game days with a picnic basket filled with his mama’s pickled okra and pimento cheese sandwiches. I tailgated with them on occasion in the corporate field where his daddy’s tractor company was a sponsor. I did a lot of thumb twiddling and daydreaming as Peach and Georgianne threw the football back and forth and snuggled beneath the blankets when the temperature dropped.
    Now Georgianne wouldn’t be a scholar or a debutante. She’d married Peach Hickman just three weeks ago. Jif, Shannon, and I threw a bridal shower for her at the country club, and I cried tears of grief over her future with every Pyrex dish and cookbook that she unwrapped. I made such a scene that Georgianne pulled me into the powder room for a reprimand: “This is not a funeral, Adelaide. It’s not even an original story, Miss Smarty-Pants Poet. You ought to know that much.
    Now, buck up and give me a little support here!”
    I nodded to appease her, but to me Georgianne was living the worst nightmare I could ever imagine. I did not know how I would survive the stifling life of casseroles and dirty diapers that awaited her.
    Maybe it was a good thing that no boy at Williamstown High had ever asked me out.
    Nobody in my class ever talked about sex. And no one’s parents ever talked about it, and the school never talked about it, and neither did the church. So we were all clueless as to what it was all about and how a tragedy like this could sneak up on you unawares. I put it together—the mechanics of what actually happened between a man and a woman—in eighth grade after watching a Little House on the Prairie episode in which one of the town’s girls was attacked by a man in a clown mask. It came to me like a great revelation at the end of the show, and I went and told Dizzy about how it must work. But, of course, she already knew all about it from a classmate named Angel who had spelled it out to her the summer before.
    Not me. I would not succumb to this fate. In fact, if an NBU guy got the hots for me (and let me tell you, one had better !) I would keep him at arm’s length until I knew where I wanted to go. I’d worked too hard to get caught in that old trap.
    Yes, I was up for adventure, I longed for romance, and I wanted desperately to know the meaning behind the collage of terminology that spilled out of Penelope Russo’s mouth: words like postmodern , deconstructionists , existentialism , or names like Kafka, Beckett, and Proust. I had to study Shakespeare—anyone who seemed remotely cultured was always quoting him. I had to read Virginia Woolf—heck, there was a whole play written about her! I had read it at Governor’s School but had no idea what it was about.
    What I did know was that there were mysteries all around me— and more than this, there were moments of downright splendor. Like when my daddy took me fishing in the Santee River by the old rice fields, and the sun set behind the cypress swamp, leaving a backdrop of red and orange, and the gnarled limbs of the oak trees reached up to the