Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth Read Free Book Online Page B

know
I’m not supposed to say it, but I find myself wondering if things
are better now. Only the dead are crowded, and we’re free, the way
I like to be. Again, I don’t know. Maybe people back then liked
being all crowded together. Still, the idea frightened me, and I
liked the way I was living in my world.
    Even though all of us bigger kids were in the same
class, we did go to different teachers for different subjects,
which apparently is how it’s always been. Mr. Caine, Vera’s dad,
taught English. I always liked him. He was quiet and intense, not
easy-going and cheerful like my dad. I thought it was nice how he
was so different from my dad, yet they were such good friends, like
they needed each other for balance or guidance in some strange way.
I hoped I could find a friend like that someday, but only with the
transition to Piano Girl did I begin to have a normal social life,
so I was a little behind on forming friendships with the other
kids.
    Vera and I used to play more when we were little. I
always envied her light brown complexion; her dad was white and her
mom was black, so in the winter, her skin was the color of wheat,
and in the summer it would darken all the way to a walnut brown.
Mine varied between porridge white—all mottled and pasty—and
steamed crawfish pink. And of course, there were all the ugly
freckles across my cheeks and nose. But the two-year age difference
now seemed more of an obstacle between us than when we were
younger.
    She still believed boys were gross and smelled bad.
That summer when I was twelve, I could begin to see how they were
strangely interesting, even compelling, though I still wasn’t sold
on the idea of having them or their smell around all the time, or
too near. Sexuality was something my mom had explained to me
soberly and clinically, and something about which the kids at
school constantly tittered, lewdly and ignorantly. But either way,
it was something I understood only vaguely and abstractly. For that
year, I was content and intrigued to observe boys from a slight
distance, but I knew things were different now than they had been
when I was younger.
    Of course, none of those vague feelings that boys
might not be smelly little toads applied to my younger brother,
Roger, even though, overall, we had the kind of playful competition
and bickering that siblings always have, with no real harsh
feelings between us. He had always been the extrovert I never could
be, and the cheerful, boisterous personality of my dad was much
less appealing or even bearable in the smaller package of my little
brother.
    Tall for his age and athletic, he barely tolerated
the piano lessons to placate our mom. For me, the piano had been
part of salvaging my social life. For him, it was an impediment,
though even back then I knew he was being an unusually good sport
to go along with it for our mom’s sake. A lot of kids wouldn’t
have, or would have complained even more bitterly and frequently.
Of course, Dad had something to do with keeping the complaining to
a minimum, as he didn’t take much off us two kids. He kept us in
line, and made us as strong as we needed to be in this world.
    But Mr. Caine and Milton both made us strong, too,
even if their methods and the strength they built were wholly
different and even hard to pinpoint or describe. As I had tried to
articulate it to my dad, and as I have since come to understand it
better, his was the strength of certainty, of facts, of tools and
guns; theirs was the strength of curiosity, doubt, mystery, and
awe. I was lucky that I thrived on both, and by my twelfth year, I
sought them out like they were food or water. A book felt as right
in my hand as a pistol; the anxiety and frustration fed by some of
the books Mr. Caine assigned were as satisfying to me as the
pistol’s report and the clang of the frying pan as I punched
another round into it. I was lucky, even if that luck and the
gratitude for it only dawned on me gradually as the