Whistling In the Dark by Lesley Kagen Read Free Book Online Page A

voice you could never imagine would come out of someone so small. “You goombah!”
    It went library quiet ’cept for the drip drip of the kitchen sink and a faraway lawn mower. And then from outta nowhere, Troo looked up from her plate and started singing, “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera.”
    All eyes went to Nana Fazio with the belt in her hand. They were all probably thinking like I was that Troo had just taken her life into her hands. Nana leaned down real close to Troo and I thought she was gonna put the hex on her or smack her like she had Johnny, but instead, she looked at Troo with her black olive eyes and said, “You, you kid, you lika Doris Day?”
    Troo cleared her throat and said, “Actually, I think Doris Day is the best thing since sliced bread.”
    Nana slowly, slowly smiled. Now I knew where Fast Susie’s pointed eyeteeth came from. “Me, too,” she said. “I lika Doris Day, too. You and your sorella can eata here whenever you wanna, as much as you wanna.” Nana reached across me and dug the big silver spoon into the white bowl and slapped three juicy meatballs onto my plate.
    What a genius my sister was!
     
    Troo wanted to sleep over in the Fazios’ attic that night and I couldn’t disagree with her. The last time we went home, the door was locked. Besides that, Troo and me both knew if Nell caught us she would force us to have one of those Toni perms that we both thought made you look like you just got off the boat.
    Red light, green light was called off because it looked like it was gonna rain again, so we spent most of the night listening to Fast Susie tell us stories in the attic that had no light except for a dirty bare bulb way high up in the ceiling.
    Fast Susie was sitting cross-legged on the stained gray mattress, facing me and Troo. “So then, after the grave robbers dig up those dead bodies, they take them over to Dr. Frankenstein’s castle in a little three-wheeled wooden cart.” She was using this voice she had that was husky. “And it begins to rain and the grave-robbin’ men are ugly and skinny and cough all the time and are drunk with dirty hair.”
    Thunder rolled past the attic window and made it shake, and then a few seconds later there was pitchfork lightning that I could see perfectly, and it reminded me of our farm.
    I looked over at Troo. She was rubbing the arm that had gotten broken in the crash and was hanging on to Fast Susie’s every word.
    “And then Dr. Frankenstein puts the body on this black table in his lavatory and he gets a saw to cut the bodies aaall up!”
    The lightning flashed again and lit up the whole attic, which was full of boxes and suitcases and the thing I was keeping my eye on. This body that had no arms or legs and was standing over in the corner next to the window. Fast Susie said that Nana used it to make clothes on.
    “And then”—Fast Susie made her voice drippy with creepy—“and then, Dr. Frankenstein sewed all these dead body pieces together and made this monster. . . .” She waved her arms around. “And Dr. Frankenstein put this monster down on this other table and hooked all these gadgets up to him and then lightning hit the castle and electricity came into the gadgets and went into the monster and Dr. Frankenstein yelled out, ‘It’s alive. It’s alive!’ ” Fast Susie jumped up and started walking around with her arms stiff in front of her and chased me and Troo, who screamed, and I did, too, until somebody yelled up from downstairs, “Shut the hell up, we’re tryin’ to sleep down here.”
    After the Frankenstein story, Fast Susie showed us her bosoms and told us we would both get them too and, holy smoke, would the boys ever like us a lot! She said we could touch them if we wanted to. I didn’t. Later Troo told me they felt like a water balloon but warmer.
    When the rain started pelting the window, I tried to fall asleep, but that attic heat felt like a