The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m supposed to. All I can think is that I have to get home before something happens, although I have no idea what that something might be.
    I drive fast with my foot hard on the accelerator and my hands tight at the wheel. Mama sits in the passenger seat next to me, holding cards in her hands. She says, So much pain that girl has. Why don’t you take away the pain?
    I blink, and Mama’s gone. In my head I tell her, I’ll make more moon pies, Mama, I promise I will . But I am no good with promises, and she knows that.
    Greg the Boy is up when I get home. For a minute I want to take him in my arms the way I did when he was small and his freckles were still cute. We used to play connect the dots on his arm. Now we’d need to draw a highway map.
    He says, Ma, where are all the fucking pies?
    I stand there looking at this boy, this son of mine, who pulls at his groin and fails biology. I think somedaywhen I’m gone he’ll imagine me in his car with him, and he’ll think about the smell of my pies. I wonder if that’s all he’ll remember, his mother who made moon pies. That can’t be all. There must be more.
    He rattles around in the refrigerator. It’s late, and I’m so tired.
    Again he says, Who took all the fucking pies?
    I stand there in the kitchen, looking at this boy of mine. If I close my eyes, I can hear the girl’s breath whistling behind me when I ran out to the car. It was like a song.
    I say, Never mind the pies, it’s time for you to go to bed .
    For once the boy listens. He ambles out in that way he has, head hanging low, his feet seeming to float.
    Alone in the kitchen, I whisper that I’m the one who took the pies. The pies are mine. And there will be more.

Caroline
    Â 
    Epidermis .
    Pigment .
    Melanin .
    Every time Mr. Davis teaches something new, I can’t think about the words on the next test, all I can think about are cells. If I could cut my body open like a frog, I wonder how many cells would be inside. I wonder if I could count them all, and if I could, how long it would take. I imagine it would take my whole life, that I could probably spend all my remaining days counting and never finish. It would be a goal though, something to strive for, and I need goals, that much I know. Maybe if I spent all my time counting my cells, I wouldn’t be thinking of Ethan’s brain filled with all those mixed-up synapses, or Greg’s brain filled with endorphins. Instead I could think about the difference between voluntary and involuntary impulses, and whatwould happen if the involuntary part of my brain just stopped firing neurons. I’d stop breathing, like the blue girl at the lake. I’m not even sure I really saw her anymore. Was she really blue, or did my brain etch a picture into my memory, making me think I saw her? Really, what guarantee do we have that we’re going to keep breathing from minute to minute? How do any of us know whether at any second—like right here, right now—we won’t just stop?
    My obsession with my brain has gotten worse. Every night, and sometimes during the day, especially during biology, I keep thinking about my brain. When Mama talked to me over her pies, I’d wonder if she knew I was thinking about my brain instead of listening to her. I did try to listen as she talked about her mother, my grandmother from Russia, and sometimes I’d think about asking for a taste of the chocolate or the vanilla-scented filling, but then I’d start thinking about my brain sending its hunger messages to my stomach, and I would will it to stop. I imagined my thoughts swimming along the convolutions. I thought I could feel my neurons firing like gunshots.
    At night in bed, I keep thinking, What if something happened to my basal ganglia? What if my cerebellum stopped functioning? What if the neurotransmitters dried up? What if the pathway between my spinal cord and cerebral cortex got clogged?