Sister Mischief by Laura Goode Read Free Book Online Page A

atoms play with others. Write this down, please, you’ll need it for Thursday’s quiz. Or don’t. Fail the quiz. I don’t care. Valence electrons orbit the nucleus on the outermost electron shell of the atom. They determine how stable or reactive the atom is. A high number of valence electrons makes a stable atom, and a low number makes the atom likely to react, or bond, with other atoms. 16
     
    16.
I have very few valence electrons,
I scribble in my notebook.
I think my nucleus is showing.
     
    “While there are five primary types of atomic bonding,” Mankles continues blandly, “the two we’ll cover today are covalent and ionic bonding. In the covalent bond, a reactive atom, one with a small number of valence electrons, shares valence electrons with a nearby atom. In an ionic bond, a reactive atom steals valence electrons from another atom. This is caused by electrostatic attraction.”
     
    I reach over and scribble in Rowie’s notebook. 17 She muffles a giggle like a wind chime, and I feel distracted. Trying to get her laugh unstuck from my ringing ears, I decide it’s safe now to take out my book and read under the table. Rowie can teach me chemistry later, and better than Mankles will now. I’m rereading Anne Frank; I love her. When I was eight, I started a journal just so I could call her Kitty, and began it by cataloging the entire contents of our kitchen cupboards in an attempt to imitate Anne’s record of the annex’s food supply, but I had to stop when I found a dusty box of matzoh and burst into tears. It’s Mom’s copy of the diary I have. I don’t have much of hers, but there are still a ton of books she left behind in our house. I read the notes in the margins, or underlined passages, and I scrutinize them for evidence of her intent to abandon me, for a flight plan.
     
    17.
Let’s get ionic.
     
    Her last letter, from almost a year ago, drops out of the back cover as I turn the page. She sends me a letter every birthday from a kibbutz she lives on in Israel. It’s virtually the only contact we have, a yearly reminder that we’re both still alive, even if we don’t really know each other. Pops didn’t understand, and I certainly didn’t understand,
why
she left — I guess she had some kind of breakdown. The letters I get from her are more like lists.
     
    1. Esme Ruth.
     
    2. Today you are sixteen, or maybe you are already sixteen and the mail is late.
     
    3. Today I woke up at five and did my chores, and it felt as though you were there next to me, folding the other end of the sheet, picking fruit.
     
    4. You were born in a blizzard.
     
    5. I’d imagine you are angry with me. I’m so sorry. Not because you’re angry, but for my giving you a reason to be angry.
     
    6. When you were three, you stuck a Raisinette so far up your nose, we had to take you to the emergency room.
     
    7. Someday we’ll have a long conversation over a bottle of wine and you might begin to understand.
     
    I tuck the letter away and return to the book. I’m at January 6, 1944. A Thursday. Anne’s been in hiding for about a year and a half. She’s writing about her mother, about her exasperation with her mother and her sister. She loves her father, like I do. She has a mother and a sister, but I don’t. She’s thinking about her body, like I am, and she’s embarrassed about it, which I guess I am, sometimes. Isn’t everyone? I’m just coming to the passage that made everyone snicker when we read it in eighth-grade Language Arts, the passage I remember best of Anne’s definitive edition, the restored version with all the sex and nasty observations her father once extracted, the passage that still rings like a bell inside my hollow places:
     
    Unconsciously, I had these feelings even before I came here. Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me and which I’d never seen. I asked her whether, as