Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Read Free Book Online Page A

havin’ a ringtail fit ’cause she gone.”
    My mouth turned so far down it hurt my chin. “Eulogenie doesn’t get her every minute.”
    Alvadene said, “She got to come on. Eulogenie won’t stop crying.”
    “I’ll be goin’ now,” Claudie said in a whispery voice.
    Auntie was on her feet. “I’ll just wrap up some chops for your mama,” she said, and she dumped the last two onto a square of waxed paper.
    So softly I could barely hear, Claudie thanked Auntie for having her.
    Only I could make a bad thing worse. When Claudie banged out the door and went off with her sister, I mumbled, “Y’all know her mama won’t ever see those chops. Not with those nasty little boys on the place.”
    Auntie said in a tight voice, “Clea June, go outside and fetch me a green willow switch.”
    I wandered around beneath the dripping tree and stared at the bent and broken twigs. It was a pure wonder I didn’t come out regularly, gather them all up, and chuck them in the river. But I knew, by now, that Auntie was just as likely to snatch up a fly-swatter, and that was worse.
    I waited for her upstairs on my bed. From my attic window in the back of the house, I could see the top of the willow, the row of tall oaks, and the slow-running river with its green inlets. Something rustled in a mossy oak, and I imagined it was birds, flying off to huddle on their nests, in their own high attics. I bet they wouldn’t spend their birthday night tossing with their legs on fire.
    When Auntie came heaving and grunting up two flights of stairs, I sat in misery and already-pain where I knew welts would soon rise on my calves. The springs groaned when she sat down beside me. I hunched over, the switch drooping between my knees.
    “Clea,” Auntie said, “I can’t think what you’ve gone and done to that girl, made her feel like she’s got nothin’. Saying her family’d be better off dead. What possessed you?”
    She didn’t wait for an answer. “Every day, you are no more than her. When you act like that, it makes you less.”
    She was expecting me to agree, but I couldn’t. For a while tonight I’d been happy. So—when we were most joyful, we ought not to speak? Why, then, had God given me a voice? When I grew up and had kids of my own, I would put corks in their mouths, or at least teach them to suck on their thumbs.
    “Well,” said Auntie. “I’m disappointed through and through. You go on over there and apologize, understand?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” This was far worse than switching—I had Auntie’s hurt to mix in with my own.
    She went off down the stairs, and I sat and thought on how this could not possibly be all my fault. Claudie eating with her fingers had started it. I went to the window, lifted the sash, and threw the stick out as far as I could.
    The crickets came out and began to chirrup. I went down the wet drainpipe and on over to the Maytubbys’. I asked if I could talk to Claudie. “I want to say sorry and ask her if she’s still my friend.”
    “Best you go on home,” Alvadene said, turning away. “She don’t want no part of you.”

9
    A fter what seemed like a hundred years, it was August.
    I’d questioned the effectiveness of school from the start. When word came down that Miss Izzie Thorne from Birmingham, Alabama, would teach Years One and Two, Uncle Cunny and Auntie exchanged a look I couldn’t read.
    I worried that there would be something terrible about having Miss Thorne for a teacher, but at least I would have the twins nearby. Claudie was speaking to me, more or less.
    “We goin’ to first grade,” she said proudly as the time got closer. They were older than me, though not any bigger.
    “I thought you all did first grade last year.”
    “We did. An’ the year before that. Me and Eulogenie, we gonna keep on till we get it right.”
    I’d worked with Uncle Cunny till I could add three columns and multiply like nobody’s business, but Auntie predicted the sky would cloud over when