The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker by Kat Spears Read Free Book Online Page A

this stereotype. “Told me I should stay away from you.” After saying this she carefully studied my face, staring at me in a way I would soon learn to dread, her wonder and judgment evident, though her actual thoughts were hidden. “Is it true?”
    â€œIs what true?” I asked, so disarmed by her stare that I had already forgotten her words.
    â€œAre you trouble?” she asked.
    Trying to recover some lost ground I said, matching her earnest tone, “In my experience, girls whose dads are cops are the biggest whores. Are you a whore?”
    Actually, I had no personal experience with girls of just about any kind, least of all the daughters of police officers. But I was new in town. People only knew what I told them, or, in the case of Principal Sherman, what was in my school records.
    â€œYou sure don’t talk like your dad’s a preacher,” Delilah said, unfazed by my rudeness. “Does your dad know you use words like that?” She was one of those people who expressed irony in a sincere tone, making it wrong either way you interpreted it.
    â€œThey say whore in the Bible all the time,” I said as I sat back on one heel and squinted up at her.
    Her eyes widened a bit as she cracked her gum and pushed her hair back from her face. “I’m from a town of twelve thousand people in America’s heartland. You think I don’t know my Bible?”
    I snorted out a laugh and let the subject drop. Remembering my conversation with the Misses Wingfield I said, “The word around town is that insanity runs in your family. On your mother’s side. That true?”
    Delilah stiffened and her eyes went hard, and I thought I had made her mad enough to set her off, but after a few seconds she relaxed back into her confident slouch.
    â€œIt usually skips a generation,” she said. “My grandmother was crazy.”
    â€œCrazy how?”
    â€œShe thought she was the illegitimate child of Robert E. Lee.”
    â€œHow do you know she wasn’t?” I asked.
    Delilah gave me a wilting stare to articulate my stupidity before answering. “He died fifty years before she was born.” And then, after a beat of silence, added, “I googled it.”
    â€œWell, you would have to, wouldn’t you?” I asked.
    â€œAnyway,” she said, dismissing my comment with a wave, “the Wingfield sisters are a couple of old maids who love to gossip about everyone in town. They’re nosy busybodies.”
    â€œI thought they were nice,” I said with a shrug. “They were the only ones with anything interesting to say at Doris’s party.”
    â€œYour stepmother is a disaster. At least my grandmother was legitimately crazy. Doris is just a snob and a backbiter. She’s single-handedly setting back the feminist movement by several decades.”
    â€œSo what do people do in this town anyway? Besides gossip.”
    â€œYou mean people our age?” she asked.
    â€œYeah.”
    She shrugged. “The kids with money go down to the lake, ride their WaveRunners, and go waterskiing. They party down there by the lake. The rest of us mostly smoke a lot of weed and eat Hot Pockets.” She paused to consider what other pastimes were immediately obvious but soon gave up the thought with a shrug and a grim, downward twist of her lips.
    â€œReally?” I asked with some surprise. “You guys get weed here?”
    Another wilting stare, as if I was possibly the dumbest person she had ever met. “We live in a farming community. Where do you think weed comes from?”
    I took the question as rhetorical and didn’t answer her, wondering at the time why it was physically impossible to stop a blush.
    â€œNice shirt,” she said, suddenly changing tack. “Is that a hand-me-down from your dad?”
    â€œMy dad has terrible taste in music,” I said, refusing to let her win this round, “and The Smiths