The Little Woods by McCormick Templeman Read Free Book Online Page A

novels.”
    “Detective novels,” she said as if she were explaining the color wheel to a slow child.
    “Yeah.” I shrugged again. “I guess so. So what do
you
do, then?”
    “I’m an artist. I make art. Some might even call me an art star.”
    “Really?”
    “No.” She removed a jar of expensive-looking marmalade from the fridge and unscrewed the cap. She almost dipped her finger into the orange goo but at the last second wrinkled her nose and looked around for a spoon, which she located in a drawer near the pantry. “Maybe someday. Right now I mostly take photographs and do things to them.”
    “Like what?”
    “Do you know anything about cameras?”
    “No.”
    “Then it wouldn’t make sense and I don’t have time to explain it,” she said, chewing on the end of the spoon, which had previously contained a little dollop of marmalade. I laughed again, but she just stared at me. “I’m going to take pictures of you sometime. I was going to use Helen but she’s too peachy. I want something a little dark, a little ghastly, you know?”
    “I’m not too peachy; I’m just not a nudist,” Helen said behind me.
    “I didn’t hear you come in,” Chelsea said.
    “You know me.
On little cat feet
.”
    The two girls hugged like porcelain dolls.
    “How’s school?” Chelsea drawled.
    “Horrible.”
    “Serves you right for being too dumb to get into Exeter.”
    “We didn’t apply,” Helen mouthed at me, shaking her head.
    “Let’s go outside and have a cigarette. My brother sent me some Gauloises from France. He’s such a candyass.”
    Forgetting about me, the two of them swayed out the screen door, and I realized that Chelsea Vetiver hadn’t been smoking. She was just the kind of girl who always seemed to be holding a cigarette.
    Dinner was pizza eaten standing up around the kitchen counter, Magda staring at me as if I were a virulent strain of encroaching fungus, Richard dashing into the room now and then to grab a slice and make a mildly funny joke and then dashing off again to take care of some amorphous kind of business in his home office.
    “He’s an investment banker,” Noel whispered as if that meant he cured cancer, and I nodded and tried to seem impressed. The girls would perk up whenever he entered, and seemed to deflate in his absence.
    Freddy and Pigeon showed up just as I had solved an argument over who should have the last piece of pizza by taking it for myself. They looked flushed, like maybe they’d been drinking with dinner, and they carried grocery bags, one of which seemed to be clink-clinking with wine bottles.
    I avoided drunken teenagers, Danny and his Strawberry Hill Boone’s excepted, because where there were drunken teenagers, there tended to be an inordinate amount of groping and puking. It was clear, though, that things would be different at the Slaters’. I had the impression alcohol was condoned, encouraged even, by the parents who practically extolled the virtues of adolescent drinking—stopping just short of using the phrase
on the Continent
. Everyone adjourned to the loggia, and Helen’s parents poured us each a modest amount of red wine. I waved mine off.
    “Antibiotics,” I said.
    “So, girls, what’s all the gossip?” Magda asked, staring over her wineglass.
    “Well,” said Freddy, leaning back and giving her wine a little swirl, “I’m starting to think being president is no fun. I want a dictatorship.”
    “Next on to the White House, am I right, Miss Bingham?” Richard laughed and poured himself a plentiful glass of red.
    “God willing.”
    “That’s the spirit,” Richard said, taking a seat across fromme. He had sharp, clean good looks that he’d passed down to his daughters and a set to his jaw that made him seem jaunty and fun. Guys like him always creeped me out.
    “We’re all holding out hope,” Noel said, sipping lightly.
    “And how are your parents, dear? Still spending a lot of time on the Continent?”
    There we go
. Where was