Harry Sue by Sue Stauffacher Read Free Book Online

were fish and new to the system, Homer was thirteen and he'd been in the joint for two years and change already. He knew what it meant to do time. And he understood why I had to do it, too.
    It was Homer who got me started with my notepad, just a small seventy-nine-cent pad of lined paper with a spiral binding at the top. Besides my toothbrush and an old paperback copy of
The Wizard of Oz
that Mrs. Mead had scored for me at a garage sale, it was my only personal. It had to be small, due to the fact that Granny regularly tossed out the little room I slept in at the top of the stairs, looking for I don't know what. Usually, I left it in the tree house for safekeeping.
    Homer said I should collect evidence, like a scientist, to figure out just where my mom was and to prove she was doing her best to find me. There wasn't a lot in my notebook, but there was enough.
    One time, for instance, I heard Granny say, “No, I will not accept … not from that party!” And then the phone was slammed down. Beau says only way a con or conette can call out from prison is collect. Said it might very well have been Mary Bell looking to connect.Or another thing I put in my notepad was the day I ear hustled on Sink and Dip as they talked about a lady who'd been by the house while I was at school.
    “Said she was just a friend, looking in on her. Since when does Harry Sue have friends with dragon tattoos?”
    What I held out for was something real: an envelope with a stamp, maybe a colored square one postmarked just before my birthday. My pudding heart hoped that if Mary Bell couldn't connect with her baby girl by telephone, she would still try to write me some letters.
    I admit that what I had in my notepad didn't add up to much. But like Homer says, “Even crumbs look good to a starving man, Harry Sue.”
    I let him say things like that because, in a very deep way, Homer knew just exactly what I was going through. He still had a mom to fuss over him, but other than that, Homer had lost just about everything else that mattered.

Chapter 7
    Planning his tree house was about the only thing that kept Homer alive in the year following his accident. You can bet it was a pretty big design challenge. He needed a fully equipped hospital bed complete with an emergency alert system and a control panel for all the functions. Since Homer was alone most of the time, he had to be the one to operate it. All he had was a head and shoulders, a chin, and a tongue.
    Every morning when the weather was fine, Mrs. Dinkins or Beau or some other home health aide from the county would lower the bed on a hydraulic lift and strap Homer in. They'd pin the emergency alert button onto his T-shirt so he could just reach it if he stuck out his jaw. If you want toknow what I mean, stick your bottom lip out as far as you can until your bottom teeth are in front of your top lip. Then push your chin down. That far away was where they put the alert button. Otherwise, Homer would set it off when he coughed or yawned.
    With the flip of a switch, that bed was raised up, up, up, until it clicked into place in Homer's tree house. It looked just like a tree house, too, except for the bed. Mrs. Dinkins wanted to decorate, use a ladder to climb up there and put some calendar pictures on the wall from her Heavenly Highways AAA calendar. Glossy places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park, but Homer would have none of it. Busters, monkeys, T-Jones, rats—none of that in Homer's tree house. That's why he made it so if you couldn't climb the rope, you couldn't visit.
    It's a wonder Mrs. Dinkins didn't build herself a home gym and start yokin' up, but even she has a teaspoon full of sense.
    The bed was directly under the picture window, the one I was regularly recruited to keep free of bird poop and wet leaves and even the occasional flattened spider or nestling. Homer thought of the window as the viewing deck of a spaceship and he didn't appreciate me, his captain at arms, letting