You by Charles Benoit Read Free Book Online

figure it out, and you’d help her, too, it would be—
    â€œWell,” she says as she punches your chest, “I said, do you think I should?”
    You don’t have a clue what she’s talking about. You take a deep breath. “It depends,” you say after a long, thoughtful-looking pause. “Is that what you really want?”
    It’s the kind of question your mother throws at you all the time, the kind that’s supposed to keep you talking but that you always answer with the same shrug.
    She looks up at you and smiles. “You’re right. I don’t know. I really don’t know, you know?”
    You still don’t know, but you smile and you give her a quick hug, and she starts talking again, but you’re busy thinking about how cool it would be to really get to know her.
    Â 
    â€œ I ’m done yelling at you, Kyle. I’m done hounding you about things you should do. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m done.”
    It’s your mom, and you understand what she’s saying. You understood her the first time she said it, two years ago, and you understood her every time she said it since. And, like all the other times, you really wish she meant it.
    Life would be so much easier if they just left you alone, let you do what you wanted. You wouldn’t cause them any grief, you’d take care of yourself and make your own food and get yourself where you needed to go. But no, she doesn’t mean it and even as she’s telling you that she’s done lecturing at you about how you need to grow up and learn to be responsible, she’s circling around and lecturing at you about how you need to grow up and learn to be responsible.
    â€œYou’re going to be sixteen soon, Kyle. Sixteen . Do you know what that means?”
    What does it mean? You can get a job, but you could’ve done that at fifteen with a waiver on your working permit. You could get your driver’s license,but your father has made it clear that you can’t even get your permit until you get a job and have five hundred bucks in the bank to cover the jump in his insurance premium. You can’t vote until you’re eighteen, not that you care, and you can’t buy beer until you’re twenty-one, something you’re beginning to care more and more about. And you have to be seventeen to legally drop out of school. You’re not going to, but it’s nice to know you have options. You remember reading somewhere that in some state in the South you can get married at sixteen without your parents’ permission, so there’s always that.
    â€œI never see you hanging around with Rick or Dan anymore. You were friends for years. You should give them a call.”
    So they can tell you all about how wonderful it is at Odyssey? So they can ask you questions about Midlands and then glance at each other with that look while you’re answering, like you’re confirmingall the things they heard about the dump? So they can tell you how they’re going into AP classes next year? So you can sit around and talk about the good old days, back before you were a loser? So you can feel even worse about yourself?
    â€œOr that pretty black girl. You know. What was her name?”
    Denica. You met her in sixth grade. Back then she used to catch a special bus to the high school every day just to take eleventh-grade math. She was smart and had this funny laugh and she always smelled like cocoa butter. She was the first girl you ever kissed and you remember that she wore bubblegum-flavored lip gloss. Your mom always calls her That Pretty Black Girl, as if that’s all that mattered about her.
    â€œShe was nice.”
    Yes, she was.
    â€œYou should call her.”
    Ah, but you did call her, didn’t you? Back inninth grade. You talked for twenty minutes. Then you heard her mom in the background ask her a question and she said, “some boy,” and her mom