Autobiography of Us by Aria Beth Sloss Read Free Book Online Page B

truth was that my hands had begun to shake in that way they had at the dentist’s or one of the schoolwide spelling bees Windridge held every fall. I pressed the tumbler of juice to my forehead: The cool glass felt marvelous. To my father’s offer of a piece of toast, I said, no, thank you. Too jittery to eat, I said.
    “Look,” I said, holding up my hands, and the three of us watched my fingers tremble.
    * * *
    I must have blamed my fatigue for how newly strange Alex appeared to me when she pulled up outside my house a little before noon. She wore her hair curled at the ends so it flipped up around her shoulders, her cheeks pink across the tops as though she’d been sitting in the sun.
    “Look at you,” she said. She was grinning as she reached over the gearshift to throw her arms around me, and I thought for a moment in a great rush of relief that everything would be fine. “Look at us, the dashing coeds.”
    “You look terrific.”
    “This?” She touched her hair. “I figured it was time for a change.” She watched me lift my suitcase into the backseat. “Don’t tell me that’s all you’re bringing. For Pete’s sake, Beau had to go by the dorm earlier and drop off my trunk and about a million books—he was livid, I tell you. Absolutely livid.”
    I slid into the passenger seat. “I’m leaving my sweaters and things at home until it cools off a bit,” I lied.
    She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
    Together, we turned and waved to my mother where she stood in the doorway, watching. “Goodbye!” we called. “Goodbye!”
    She stood up on her toes to wave. “Goodbye,” she called. “Bon voyage!”
    I caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror as we pulled away from the curb, her arm still raised, the blue of her housecoat cheerful. We’d made plans to have my father pick me up that Sunday and bring me home for dinner. The university campus was just a few miles from our house, and of course I could spend the night in my own room whenever I liked. Still, it was one of those moments that gives weight to the smallest particulars. I have never, as you know, been a great fan of change, and everything seemed fraught with my leaving: the scent of our neighbor’s clematis through the open windows, the sun heating the car door under my arm to near unbearable, a dragonfly that veered drunkenly through my window and out the other side as we turned the far corner onto Rio Grande, the sound of my mother’s bon voyage! ringing in my ears long after she’d disappeared from sight. It came as a shock to realize I had never spent more than a night away from my parents before. Strange to think they would not be just down the hall that night when I went to bed, that my father would not be at the table when I came down in the morning, reading the paper and cutting his toast into neat triangles, that my mother would not be there when I came home every day, sitting in the living room with her sewing or standing bent over the banister, oiling it until it gleamed , her hands cool as she brushed the hair back from my face, offering lemonade, a glass of iced tea, a bowl of fruit.
    I don’t believe Alex noticed a thing. She was in high spirits as we drove: The program had been a scream, she announced. Really , if I could have seen the theater they got to perform in, I would have flipped, she said. Absolutely flat-out flipped. Some of the other actors hadn’t been half bad, but the real excitement had been that they’d had an entire cast and crew for the stage machinery and a separate crew for lighting, not to mention a few girls for costumes and another few for makeup. Very official, she said. And did I want to know the best part? An agent had approached her after one of the last performances and given her his card.
    “It was my Desdemona that did it. Alas the heavy day! Et cetera. The director had me do the whole thing a touch treacly for my taste, but he called it brilliant. The agent, I mean.” She flicked her