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

desperately, “I try. I really do, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I just get so mad!”
    “I know, Boo,” he said, “but you’re strong and you have to be patient with people who aren’t.”
    “Grandmother’s strong,” I said. “She doesn’t worry about hurting people’s feelings.”
    Daddy sighed. Adults always sighed that way when youpointed out the obvious and they couldn’t explain it away with Good-Do-Bee logic. He sighed again and said, “You have to be nice, Boo.”
    “I don’t want to be nice!” I shouted, pulling out of his grip. “And stop calling me Boo! My name is Maggie!”
    He just laughed; he always thought it was “cute” when I got mad. “What have you got to be so angry about?” Mother always wanted to know, but I didn’t know any better than she did. It didn’t make any sense. What did I have to be angry about? Nothing. Everything was exactly as it should be. We were the perfect American family, complete with two cars, a dog and 2.5 children, if you counted Ruthie as the .5, since she was half bird anyway.
    Sometimes I thought there’d been a mistake, that somewhere along the line God had got my soul mixed up with some ghetto kid’s, some mean kid who threw rocks at pedestrians from the broken window of her unheated hovel in a burnt-out section of Detroit. Someone who was bad, but who at least had a reason for it. Someone who needed that anger just to survive and fight her way out of the slums. And the soul that belonged to the child my parents were supposed to have living with them in their lovely house on the Lake was trapped in some poor slum kid, kind and loving, the brunt of everyone’s jokes because she was so good and patient and self-sacrificing and not the least bit bitter about taking baths in cold water or fighting rats for space in her bed or having to drop out of school to take care of seven squalling siblings.
    “… why, the shrimp in St. Pete,” Grandmother was saying and Miss Nolan looked up and saw me sneaking into the kitchen, so I had to go into the dining room and be polite.
    “Hi,” I said and they all looked up and nodded while they chewed and chatted, never missing a beat.
    “There’s shrimp in the fridge,” Mother said with forced gaiety. “Help yourself!”
    “Thanks,” I said and stomped back into the kitchen.
    “It’s quite good,” she called. “If I do say so myself!”
    She waited for the Bridge Ladies to shout their confirmation but they kept right on nodding and chewing and picking like a bunch of gaudy puppets and Mother looked through the door, into the kitchen, and smiled sadly at me.
    It made me want to scream, it made me want to shove their plates in their faces, to rub the shrimp in their noses until they gasped and said, “Yes! Yes, it is good!” I wanted to jump up and down on the table until they paid attention. But I knew they wouldn’t. “Maggie, get off,” Mother would say, even though I was doing it for her. “You’re getting sand all over the petits fours!”
    Instead, I said I was sure it was good. “You make the best shrimp salad in the world!” I called, taking the bowl from the refrigerator and scooping some onto a plate, even though I didn’t like anything with mayonnaise on it, not even shrimp. I tasted it as Mother watched hopefully.
    “It’s wonderful!” I shouted. “It’s great!”
    “Why, thank you, dear,” she said and smiled happily and turned her attention back to the Bridge Ladies as I slipped the plate to Goober, who would have praised Mother’s shrimp salad to high heaven, if only she could speak.

“Y OU are not allowed to go into the woods behind the Moores’,” Mother always said but that was exactly where I was going.
    Someone was “doing things” to little girls there. “What things?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say. “Things” had been found in the woods—girls’ underpants, scraps of clothing, mysterious “things” she wouldn’t tell me about, “things” I