Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page A

embarrassed.”
    We huddled there in the room where he had left us, not talking, suddenly unsure how to be with each other, how to act. The sun beat down on the boathouse. We were thirsty, but we didn’t dare go up to the house for water. For the rest of the day we listened for his steps, which didn’t come. In the evening, when it began to cool and a slight wind rippled the water, we slept as much from boredom as exhaustion. In the middle of the night, we finally heard his car kicking to life in the driveway.

    The next day, Mr. Lee took away all of Amanda Ruth’s privileges—television, music, weekend outings with friends—and forbade her to socialize with me. We saw one another at school and ate lunch with the same group of kids under the oak tree beside the science building. But she was required to come straight home after seventh period, and the only activities he allowed her to take part in were those involving the youth group at their church. For two summers he sent her to an expensive camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she sang religious songs around a campfire, rode horses, and attended mandatory weekly mixers with the boys from the neighboring camp. At the mixers they were not allowed to dance. Instead they played Scrabble and swung baseball bats at unbreakable piñatas, stuffed themselves with chips and miniature pretzels, Coca-Cola that came not in cans, but in bottles. “It’s like something out of the fifties,” she wrote in one of her letters from camp. “Any minute you expect Richie Cunningham to walk in and fire up the jukebox.”
    The summer after our senior year, things changed. Mr. Lee was having problems with his printing business. He couldn’t afford to send Amanda Ruth to camp and had no time to keep watch over her, a task he entrusted to Mrs. Lee, who refused privately to enforce her husband’s rules. That summer, I spent long weeks with Amanda Ruth at Demopolis River. Her father spent weeknights at their house in Mobile and only came to the river on weekends. Friday mornings we would search the cabin for any evidence I had been there: a pair of my size 6 sandals, articles of clothing left in the laundry, strands of my hair captured in the prongs of her hairbrush. Amanda Ruth’s mother became our ally, participating in those weekly searches to rid the house of me.
    In the woods a couple of hundred yards from the river house, there was a pond beneath the willows where Amanda Ruth and I lounged when the pier became too hot. Tadpoles clustered in the shallows, their tiny bodies shining blue in pools of sunlight. From a distance the disturbances they made on the surface of the water would fool us into thinking it had just begun to rain. Dragonflies dipped and soared on the edges of the pond, sometimes racing by within an inch of our heads, their buzz louder than a bee or yellow jacket, like a zipper being pulled right beside our ears. The dragonflies always played in pairs. They had green bodies with maroon or black wings that lost their color at the outer tip. Sometimes one would light on our towel and lie there so long we thought it must be dying.
    Amanda Ruth was enthralled by the minutia of insect life: the high, tittering racket of the crickets, the lethargy of yellow jackets who fumbled across the window screens; they seemed to always be stumbling, unsure of their direction, yet somehow more dangerous than the bees who plunged their furry heads into the petals of the wildflowers. Once, a yellow jacket lit on the tank top she wore with the bikini bottom of her bathing suit. By the time we got the shirt off her, the yellow jacket had made its way inside and stung her in the small of her back. I made her lie flat on her stomach on a towel while I extracted the tiny stinger with my fingernails. It was the beginning of summer, and we had already spent hours on inflatable rafts, drifting, eyes closed as we talked and planned, falling into the easy friendship we’d shared