Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page A

all.
    â€œYou’re going to wear out your eyes reading all the time,” I told her.
    â€œRight, Bar.”
    â€œDon’t you never go out of here?”
    â€œAfter dark.”
    â€œThat ain’t no good for you. What you been eating?”
    She didn’t answer me. She wasn’t paying no attention.
    â€œI know you been eating junk. Here, I brought you some bananas. Have a banana.”
    â€œBar,” she says, “let me alone.”
    â€œYou’re alone too damn much.”
    â€œBarry,” she yells at me, “you don’t understand! I’ve got it almost figured out, how I’m going to—” Then she stops short and clams up.
    â€œGoing to what?”
    She won’t tell me.
    It was a nice night out for tardos and puke-faces, nice and dark. “Buy you a Coke?” I says.
    She just shakes her head. I didn’t really expect no different. She didn’t hardly ever go out no more. So I says goodnight and left her alone.
    Couple days later, all of a sudden she came to see me out at work. We was pouring a new concrete porch for a house where the old wooden porch got rotten. Construction was real slow in Hoadley, and I’d started working part time at the funeral home, but this day I was working with my uncle. He didn’t mind when Joanie come to see me, though.
    â€œBar,” she says, “I got to borrow five hundred dollars.”
    â€œWhat for?” She’d quit pot a couple years back, about the same time she quit school, said she didn’t need it no more, so I wasn’t worried about that. I just wanted to know what for.
    She didn’t say. She just says, “I’ll pay you back.”
    She would, too. I knowed that. She’d borrowed lunch money from me all through school. Her mom didn’t give her no allowance, so if she didn’t get no babysitting job she didn’t have no lunch money. And she didn’t babysit that often because her face scared the kids. But she always managed to pay me back somehow. She shoveled snow, scrubbed floors, stuff like that. My mom and other people would give her clothes. She always looked like hell in all them dumb old clothes.
    â€œCan’t you get no money saved up now?” I says. Her room couldn’t be costing her that much.
    â€œIt’s my mo-ther.” She said it like that, mo -ther. “Every time I get a little bit stashed away, she comes around and claims she’s got no food in the house, she’s hungry.”
    â€œSo don’t give her nothing,” I says. “You don’t owe her nothing.”
    â€œI know! I hate her!” Joanie stamped. “But I can’t—seem to—help it.…”
    She stopped with a kind of sniffle. I stood with my mouth open, because I couldn’t remember that I’d ever seed her cry, not with all the mean things people had said to her when I was around, and now she was going to cry about her mother? But she didn’t cry. She stiffened up and looked at me straight.
    â€œCan you loan me that much money?” she says to me.
    â€œSure I can.” I was living at home yet, didn’t have no expenses to speak of except my car, I got plenty of money. Well, not plenty, but enough. “But it ain’t for your mother, is it?”
    â€œNo,” she says, and she never did tell me what it was for.
    I went to the bank after work and come by Joanie’s place and give her the money. “One more thing,” she says. “Can I borrow your welder’s mask?”
    â€œSure.” I didn’t use it no more. I was going to be working full time at the funeral home soon. Reason I didn’t ask her what she wanted the welder’s mask for, I knowed she’d always liked it. She used to play with it and put it on sometimes and say she ought to wear it on the street, people would stare at her less. I just figured she was going somewhere she wanted to hide her face.
    I keep a