Safe Harbor by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online

up pretty well.”
    “Embarrassing?” Kip exclaimed, leading Shelley
up the stairs. “What was embarrassing about it?”
    “Oh, come on. There he was, being evaluated by
not just your parents but you, your grandmother, your aunt and
uncle, friends from Grove Point—”
    “Hey, if he wants to date Diana he’s got to pay
the price.”
    They had reached Kip’s bedroom. In summers
past, Shelley had spent many rainy afternoons in this room. It was
almost as large as the entire two-bedroom second floor of the
Ballard cottage, and perfectly adequate for hanging out in. But
although it was already the third week of July, this was the first
time she’d been inside Kip’s bedroom that summer.
    She wasn’t sure why that was. Part of her
suspected it was because this summer she and Kip were fifteen, and
that made everything different. Boys’ bedrooms suddenly took on a
new meaning.
    Not much in the room had changed since last
year. The bed was made—but sloppily, with the spread uneven and the
sheet under it wrinkled. The hardwood floor was clear—but only
because a variety of junk was heaped haphazardly on the bookshelves
and the top of the dresser. The oval braided rugs lay on either
side of the bed, and the red-white-and-blue kite Kip and Shelley
had launched every year on the Fourth of July was rolled and
propped against a corner of the window seat overlooking the side
yard. The only alteration Shelley noticed was that Kip had removed
the poster of the solar system which used to adorn one wall, and
hung in its place a framed parchment map of Block Island with
pen-and-ink sketches of clipper ships sailing around it.
    “I was reading,”
he told her, rummaging through the clutter on his dresser top for
something that would serve as a book mark. He settled on a scrap of
paper covered with gin rummy scores, stuffed it into the copy
of The Catcher in the Rye lying face down on his bed, and put the book on
the night table.
    “I read The Catcher in the Rye in English this year,” Shelley remarked, lifting the dark red
paperback from the night table and flipping through the pages to
see how far Kip had gotten into the story.
    “We were supposed to read it,” he told her,
“but I got stuck in Mr. Goober’s class—”
    “Mr. Goober ?”
    “Well, his real
name is Mr. Goebler, but everyone calls him the Goob. He said he
wasn’t going to teach Catcher because it was a dirty book. He made us
read The Turn of the Screw instead. You ever read anything by Henry
James?”
    Shelley shook her head.
    “He sucks eggs,”
Kip said. “Anyway, first thing I did was take the T into Boston and
buy a copy of Catcher . I figured, if the Goob thought it was dirty, it was
something I wanted to read. So far it’s great.”
    “You think so?”
    “You didn’t like it?”
    Shelley
shrugged. “I thought it was okay. I know it’s supposed to be this
classic and everything, but...” She gazed thoughtfully at the book,
tracing the stiff edge of the cover with her fingertip. “Well, it’s
just...it’s about a boy. I mean, everything we read in school is
always about boys coming of age. We read Huck Finn and The Red Badge of Courage and Billy Budd , and they’re
all about boys. Boys growing up, boys facing crises, boys becoming
men and all that. We never read anything about
girls.”
    “Maybe nobody’s written a good book about
girls.”
    She gave him a
withering look. “You want to read a good book about a girl coming
of age? To Kill a
Mockingbird . The best book I’ve ever
read,” she told him. “It won a Pulitzer Prize, it was made into a
movie, it’s a great book. I don’t know why they don’t teach it in
school. They should. I’m really sick of reading about boys coming
of age all the time.”
    Kip frowned. It dawned on her that he was a boy
coming of age; maybe he took her comments as a personal insult. “On
behalf of boys all over the world,” he said sarcastically, “I
apologize for inspiring such boring