Love All: A Novel by Callie Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

like a tropical bird.
    As soon as Mr. Robin started the lesson, I stopped listening. I was jittery; I wanted something, but I didn’t know what. Not to be stuck in pre-calc, not to be trapped at home. Even the nunnery that morning had felt foreign-ish. A week ago, Nonz was alive and Sam hadn’t heard of Megan of Myrtle Beach. I wondered what Poppy was doing with the run of our house. Maybe getting into my journal, although he wouldn’t understand a word of it: too many slitters and Code Reds. Dad had offered to take an extra day off from work to meet with the realtor, and now he was over at 122 Chestnut polishing and waxing and getting it ready to put on the market. There were a hundred things I’d forgotten to request from that house—Nonz’s curlers, Poppy’s boar-hair shaving brush, the bobby-pin box I’d used for collecting stray toenail clippings when I was a kid—and for the rest of math class I pictured Dad tossing out Nonz and Poppy’s things as fast as I could dream them up.
    When the bell rang I slammed my notebook shut and filed into the hallway ahead of Carl.
    “Chuckie?” he called, catching up.
    I looked over Carl’s head to where Teddy was leaning with his back against the wall, his arms around Kim Twining.
    “Who the fuck’s ‘Chuckie’?” I asked.
    “It’s a slitter for OP.”
    “Since when?”
    “That’s what we called it in Myrtle.”
    I was already sick as shit of hearing about Myrtle. “You can’t have a slitter for a slitter,” I said. “And chuckie’s a terrible slitter.”
    Carl shrugged. “Is Poppy really living with you?”
    “Right across the hall.”
    “What’s he going to do all day?”
    “Watch TV. Think up ways to annoy my mom.”
    “I like Anne,” said Carl.
    Carl liked my mother because she bought anything anyone wanted at the grocery store, as long as it was on her list. You could put a bald eagle on that list and she’d surely come home with one. Meanwhile Carl’s mom could hardly remember a gallon of milk.
    “Yeah, well, your Fruit Roll-Ups came in, you’ll be glad to know. But poor Poppy went without grapefruit for the first time in his life.”
    “Tell him to put it on the list.”
    Carl peeled off for the science wing, leaving me in the hallway with my brother. Sometimes I cut through the library just to avoid Teddy. At school, he had a way of speaking to me without actually seeing me, calling out, “Hey, sis,” while searching wildly for his friends to witness this act of brotherly love.
    “Jules,” Teddy said now, saluting me like a total tardmore. His entourage orbited, then moved off down the hall like a solar system, my brother the sun.
    Second period Sam and I had gym class. I hadn’t participated in PE since September, when a note from our school nurse had entitled me to sit out the girls’ lacrosse unit due to a contusion on my shin. “It’s always something with you,” Miss Horchow had said, filing my note in her attendance binder. Chest pains, growing pains, muscle spasms, cramps. I’d found a medical dictionary in the reference section of our school library and had symptoms to spare.
    Now I dropped my math notebook on the bleachers and settled in while the girls went outside for Frisbee golf and the boys suited up for dodgeball in the gymnasium. If my parents had known about this arrangement they would’ve ended it, so at the dinner table at night I described my PE units in great detail, telling them about Hope Crowley cross-country skiing into a tree and Barbara Kowski backswinging her indoor hockey stick into Angela Mink’s nose. Who cared that I made it all up? Gym grades didn’t factor into our GPAs, and an F in PE seemed a fair price to pay for more time with Sam.
    There was no question Sam could’ve been a super-pop like Teddy, but either he didn’t care or he didn’t see it. He was smarter than most of the super-pops but not quite a striver; he played soccer in the fall and tennis in the spring, but he wasn’t a