The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online

They’d love to! But they’ve all got wives. Damn hypocrites.”
    Ruth was always going on about the Kiwanis or the Rotary or something.
    She was not a joiner.
    We were used to it.
    She drained her beer and stubbed out the cigarette.
    She got up.
    “Finish your drinks, boys,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Meg? Meg Loughlin!”
    She walked into the kitchen and dropped her empty beer can in the garbage pail.
    Down the hall the door to her room opened and Meg stepped out, looking a little wary at first, I thought guessed it was Ruth’s shouting. Then her eyes settled on me and she smiled.
    So that was how they were working it, I thought. Meg and Susan were in Ruth’s old room. It was logical because that was the smaller of the two. But it also meant that either Ruth was bunking on the convertible sofa or with Donny and Woofer and Willie Jr. I wondered what my parents would say to that.
    “I’m taking these boys out for a Mister Softee over at the fair, Meggie. You take care of your sister and keep yourself out of the icebox. Don’t want you getting fat on us.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Ruth turned to me.
    “David,” she said, “you know what you ought to do? You ought to go say hi to Susan. You never met and it’s not polite.”
    “Sure. Okay.”
    Meg led the way down the hallway ahead of me.
    Their door was to the left opposite the bathroom, the boys’ room straight on. I could hear soft radio music coming from behind the door. Tommy Edwards singing “It’s All In the Game.” Meg opened the door and we went inside.
     
    When you’re twelve, little kids are little kids and that’s about it. You’re not even supposed to notice them, really. They’re like bugs or birds or squirrels or somebody’s roving housecat—part of the landscape but so what. Unless of course it’s somebody like Woofer you can’t help but notice.
    I’d have noticed Susan though.
    I knew that the girl on the bed looking up at me from her copy of Screen Stories was nine years old—Meg had told me that—but she looked a whole lot younger. I was glad she had the covers up so I couldn’t see the casts on her hips and legs. She seemed frail enough as it was without my having to think about all those broken bones. I was aware of her wrists, though, and the long thin fingers holding the magazine.
    Is this what an accident does to you? I wondered.
    Except for the bright green eyes it was almost like meeting Meg’s opposite. Where Meg was all health and strength and vitality, this one was a shadow. Her skin so pale under the reading lamp it looked translucent.
    Donny’d said she still took pills every day for fever, antibiotics, and that she wasn’t healing right, that walking was still pretty painful.
    I thought of the Hans Christian Andersen story about the little mermaid whose legs had hurt her too. In the book I had the illustration even looked like Susan. The same long silky blond hair and soft delicate features, the same look of sad longtime vulnerability. Like someone cast ashore.
    “You’re David,” she said.
    I nodded and said hi.
    The green eyes studied me. The eyes were intelligent. Warm too. And now she seemed both younger and older than nine.
    “Meg says you’re nice,” she said.
    Smiled.
    She looked at me a moment more and smiled back at me and then went back to the magazine. On the radio Alan Freed played the Elegants’ “Little Star.”
    Meg stood watching from the doorway. I didn’t know what to say.
    I walked back down the hall. The others were waiting.
    I could feel Ruth’s eyes on me. I looked down at the carpet.
    “There you go,” she said. “Now you know each other.”

Chapter Eight

    Two nights after Karnival a bunch of us slept out together.
    The older guys on the block—Lou Morino, Glen Knott, and Harry Gray—had been in the habit for years now of camping out on warm summer nights at the old water tower in the woods behind the Little League diamond with a couple of six-packs