Not the End of the World by Rebecca Stowe Read Free Book Online

palace while her parents flew off to the Orient for some diplomatic mission, leaving her behind with no one but the evil aunt.
    Of course, we weren’t really rich, not like the Sisks. We had a nice house on a nice street in a nice neighborhood, we had nice furniture and nice cars and nice doodads all over the place, and Daddy had the candy factory, but it wasn’t as if he were Mr. Mars.
    “What have you got to complain about?” Cotton Mather demanded. “You’ve got it easy.” It was true. I thought about the migrant farmworkers who came to North Bay to pick cucumbers for the pickle factory, living in those horrible shacks, and I’d hate myself for being so ungrateful. They hada terrible life and even the kids had to work, dragging boxes out into the field to fill them with cucumbers. How could I be boo-hooing about my own life when I thought about them?
    Donald’s door was unlocked and I quickly crept in, making sure not to touch any of his things. He laid traps all over his room, to see if people were spying on him—pieces of paper laying in a certain way in a drawer and his covers tucked in carefully so he could tell if anyone had been looking between his mattresses for his stupid nudie magazines.
    I slipped into the kitchen, motioning to Goober to be quiet. She was unbelievably smart; she not only understood everything I said to her, she could also sense what I was feeling, and she’d always leap into my lap and lick my face whenever I was sad, just to show that she, at least, loved me.
    The Bridge Ladies were gabbing so loud I thought they wouldn’t notice me. They were all sitting there, talking at once, with no one listening to anyone else. I wondered if they noticed, but if they did, they didn’t seem to care—they just joined in, dancing around one another but never taking a partner. Miss Nolan was talking about nine irons and Mrs. Tucker was talking about wanting to get her hands on the Bicker house, now that old Earl was dead, surely Helen wouldn’t keep that mausoleum for herself, and Grandmother was talking about the difficulty of getting decent seafood in North Bay. “Now in St. Pete …” she was saying. If she liked St. Pete so much, why didn’t she stay there all year instead of coming up here to torment us the whole summer?
    “Why doesn’t she stay down there?” I asked Daddy every June, when Mother would starting turning into a robot, running around and moving all of Ruthie’s stuff out of her room so Grandmother could have it. “Why does she have to live with us?”
    Daddy shook his head and said it wasn’t nice of me to resent Grandmother; she was an old woman and she should be with her family. Mother was her only child and we were her only grandchildren.
    “But she hates us!” I protested. “And she especially hates me!” Daddy said no, Grandmother didn’t hate me, she was just an old woman and she didn’t like much of anything any more.
    “But she insults me all the time,” I complained. “She’s always telling me how terrible I am.”
    “Blood is thicker than water,” Daddy said, but so what?
    “Why can’t Mother go down there?” I wondered and Daddy got all stern and even before he said anything I was ashamed. Perhaps Grandmother was right, there probably was something evil about a girl who would gladly send her own mother off to Florida. “And take Ruthie with you,” I would have said, if I could, if Daddy wouldn’t hate me for it.
    “I’m sorry,” I said before he had a chance to scold me. “I don’t mean it.”
    He pulled me over to the arm of his big velvet chair and tussled my hair in that condescending way I hated. “I know you didn’t, Boo,” he said, “but you have to think about what you say. You hurt your mother’s feelings.”
    Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hurt her feelings, I hurt Ruthie’s feelings, it was all I ever did. There was something horrible about a girl like me, something horrible and cruel and evil.
    “I’m sorry,” I cried