The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis Read Free Book Online

which words to use, how to give meaning to a pause.
    Then a man took her.
    A man took her before I learned any of these things. He took her and kept her for a while, put things inside of her. Of course the obvious thing, but also some others, like he was curious if they’d fit. Then he got bored. Then he got creative.
    Then my sister was gone and I thought: I understand about boys now.
    And she was right. Everything did change. I look at them differently and I assess their bodies and watch their eyes and weigh their words.
    But not in the way she meant.
    I remember the night Anna left, a casual see you later tossed over her shoulder as I sat in the living room with a book. I grunted in response, having told her a million times before not to talk to me when I was reading. She usually kept chattering until I’d raise my eyes and say, “I’m trying to read,” to which she’d mock sympathy and say, “Oh, honey, I thought you knew how. This is so sad.”
    It was a tired joke, one she used every time but somehow made me smile anyway. She didn’t trot it out that night, instead making for the back door like she couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, which I totally understood. She and Mom had had it out earlier, a real rip-roarer that had centered over whether or not I should go to a month-long poetry camp. Mom was all for it, seeing an opportunity to get me far away from her under the guise of good parenting.
    Anna said I shouldn’t go, that sending me out into the world alone was like letting a wolf loose, and her, my keeper, nowhere near. I was mad at her when she left, even though a part of me knew she was right.
    Then she was gone, and I unlocked the cage myself.
    The first time that I acted on my rage it could have gone very badly, but fate played along with me and I had my way. I’ve learned things since then, watched videos with instructors who teach you where to punch, what to pull, things that pop. I’m living my life waiting for the man who comes for me like one did for Anna, with hungry eyes behind the wheel and rope in the trunk.
    I’m ready.
    But I don’t know how much longer I can wait.

12. PEEKAY
    When I get to school on Friday morning there’s a cop car in the lot, which results in a lot of people hitting the brakes so that they’re actually going twenty in the school zone and more than a few pretending to clean bags of chips and scratch-off lottery cards out of their passenger seats and casually walking to the Dumpster as if there isn’t pot in the gas-station bag they’re carrying. I cram a couple of empty beer bottles under my driver’s seat with my heel while pretending to check my phone for texts after I park.
    Sara meets me in the hall with a simple, “What the fuck?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I say. I haven’t actually seen the cop anywhere, even though half the student body found areason to walk past the fishbowl of the office and glance in to see if anybody was standing there in cuffs. The secretary spots me and waves me in, making my heart go up so far into my throat my eyes probably bulge a bit.
    â€œWhat’s up, Karen?” I ask, trying to ignore Sara miming at me through the window to run for it. The secretary goes to my church so I’m allowed to call her by her first name, which I admit I kind of lean on for a second, like maybe if I’m really nice to her she’ll hide me under her desk when the cop comes to quiz me about where I was and what I was doing last night. Answer: at Sara’s, pretty sloshed.
    â€œHey, sweetie pie,” she says. “The copier at the church is broken again so I ran off the bulletins here. Could you get these to your dad?”
    My mouth twitches when she holds up her own bag from the gas station, straining against the huge stack of paper inside. “Don’t tell anybody,” she stage-whispers at me when I take it. “Technically I’m