Summer People by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page A

for a long while on the wooden bench by his empty locker, too mortified to wander the school’s hallways for help, too ashamed to contact his father, before he thought to call Arch, collect, at his office. Arch came all the way out to Queens with a gym bag and Marcus got dressed in Arch’s sweats. The very same Princeton sweatshirt that Winnie was wearing. If Arch had asked a single question, Marcus probably would have broken down. But Arch just offered him the gym bag and said,
Put these on and let’s get you home.
    Winnie, it seemed, was trying to get his attention. “Marcus?” she said.
    “Huh?”
    “Now can I ask you something?”
    “What?” he said, warily.
    “Why do you lie out in the sun when you’re already black?” She giggled.
    Marcus tried to relax. If she was going to wear the damn sweatshirt all summer, there was nothing he could do about it except let it be a reminder of how far he’d come. How he didn’t let other people get to him anymore. How he’d shown the jackasses on the swim team something by placing second in every single meet all season. Placing second
on purpose
so his name wouldn’t make it into any headlines. “Black people get tans, too, you know. Look.” He lowered the waistband of his shorts a fraction of an inch so that Winnie could see his tan line. “In winter I get kind of ashy. Besides, I like the feel of the sun on my skin.”
    “Me, too,” Winnie said. She pushed up her sleeves and rolled up the bottom of her sweatshirt so that her stomach showed. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s better.” She picked up the bottle of baby oil and squirted some on her stomach and rubbed it in with slow, downward strokes that made Marcus think she was trying to be all sexy for him. The poor child, as his mother used to say.
    Winnie had a crush on him. Anyone could see it. The past two nights she’d enticed Marcus into playing board games after dinner. Marcus asked if there were anything to do in town, and Beth offered to drive them in for an ice cream or the movies, but there were only two movie theaters showing one movie apiece that all of them had already seen, and Winnie turned down the ice cream without a reason. Not going into town left them with what Marcus’s mother used to call Nothing to Do but Stand on Your Head and Spit in Your Shoe Syndrome. So Winnie pulled a stack of board games out of a closet. The boxes of the games were disintegrating and some games were missing pieces and dice, and the bank in Monopoly only had three one-dollar bills but Winnie cut some more out of blank typing paper. They made do. Marcus and Winnie spent two long evenings building pretend real estate fortunes and getting out of jail free.
    It was as different from his life in Queens as anything could be. Winnie kept apologizing because
There’s practically nothing to do here at night, not until I get my license, anyway.
She had some notion that Marcus went out every night at home, clubbing, or hanging out on the streets. But in fact, at home, Marcus stayed off the streets. He couldn’t afford to get into any trouble, and the best way to stay out of it was to stay home. Last summer, he’d worked all day on the maintenance crew at Queens College—mowing lawns, trimming hedges, recindering the running track—and by the time he got home, his ass was kicked. He ate dinner with his family and then either watched TV or went over to Vanessa Lydecker’s apartment and drank a beer with Vanessa’s brother and fooled around with Vanessa in her bedroom.
    Before the murders, Marcus’s family was nothing special. His father worked at the printing press for the
New York Times
as a supervisor, and his mother, with one year of Ivy League education and three years of city college, was a reading specialist who split her time between I.S. 224 and P.S. 136. She tutored kids on weekends for extra money, which she tucked into Marcus’s college account. And then, on October seventh, Constance murdered her