City of Boys by Beth Nugent Read Free Book Online

smiles as we go up the stairs to my room.
    —Is that all your mother does? Annie asks.
    —No, I say. —She does a lot of things.
    I try to think of other things my mother does, but the only way I can see her in my mind right now is bent over a puzzle, her head lifting to stare into a world of half-completed words, some needing only a letter or two to make sense.
    Annie looks around at my room, carefully arranged by men whose faces I will never see. —What a boring room, she says.
    She bounces on my bed and leans sideways, staring into the eyes of the doll that rests against the pillow.
    —You still have a doll? she says, and picks it up by its leg. She rubs the doll’s stiff hair between her fingers. —This would go up like hay, she says. —This may even
be
hay.
    She smiles and takes a pack of matches from her pocket.
    —Let’s see.
    —We can’t, I say. —My mother would notice.
    —Right, she says, and laughs. She lights a match, and all I can do is watch as she holds it to the very tip of the doll’s hair. There is no flame, only a crackle, as each hair sort of fizzles crisply down to the plastic head and goes out.
    —Well, Annie says, —that was disappointing.
    The doll’s head looks cooked, and smells worse. I run my hand over the warm bumpy plastic, and Annie looks at me. —Well, she says, —I better go.
    She turns at the door. —See you tomorrow.
    My mother looks up when I join her at the table. —It must be nice to start school with a friend, she says, and looks down to fill in a word. The scratch of the pen across the newsprint is like something sharp moving over the surface of my own skin.
    It takes almost no time for life here to assume the shape of lives we have led elsewhere, except that here Annie is myfriend. We go to school together and we leave school together and all around me new alliances are forming, while Annie and I move above them or past them or through them. The boys who are Tommy’s friends watch Annie with an odd kind of attention. They seem to know something about her—and, because I am her friend, about me- and even when I am away from her, leaning over the water fountain to get a drink, or standing in front of my locker, they look at me with something in their eyes; what it is they know they don’t understand, but it is enough to make them stare.
    I watch the students who would normally be my friends; already they have found each other in the back rows and in the corners of the lunchroom, and I watch them with a kind of longing. I know what we would be talking about, the plans we would make, the television shows we would discuss. When Annie comes down the hall, she cuts through them like a flame and they pull away, but I long to be with them, fading into the green tiles lining the walls. Annie watches me as I follow their progress, and she points out their flaws.
    The only empty table is near Tommy and his friends, and when we sit down they laugh and slap at each other. Just as Annie unwraps her pie, a piece of bread lands on her tray, splattering mustard and little shreds of lettuce. Annie stares at it as she eats her pie, and finally she stands and takes it to the table of boys.
    —Tommy, she says, —I’m going to tell Dad.
    She drops the bread in front of him and his friends all smirk and watch him, waiting. He looks around nervously, at his friends and at me and at Annie; as I watch his face I can tell a thousand words go through his head, but when he finally chooses one, it surprises even him.
    —Cunt, he says, and I can see by the shock on his face thatthis is the first time he has said it. It takes him a moment to adjust, and then he says it again: —Cunt. He smiles and his friends smile and they look at her, then over at me.
    We are surrounded on all sides by innocence, except for this tiny knot of confusion here in the center of the lunchroom. Annie comes back to our table and everything goes on just as it did before, except that the boys have grown bolder and