A Perfect Life Read Online Free Page A

enough for you?”
    â€œWeird enough?” He leaned toward me. I smelled a familiar smell, the same piney shampoo my sister, Laurel, used. His lips brushed my cheek—just below the spot where I had washed off Flora’s blood. “Jane, darlin’,” he said, “if you’re going to be my new little sister, which, from what my mother just hinted, I’m pretty sure you will be, then you’d better get a whole lot weirder, real fast.”

3
    I unlocked my bike from the anchor in front of Tommie’s and lifted it into the back of Willie’s Jeep, which was old but immaculate. He tipped the valet with the offhand manner of a man lending a friend a dollar. A Jeep was its own affectation, I thought, but not as ostentatious as a sports car would have been. After all, he had to drive something.
    We left the lot, then the pier. He didn’t glance in my direction, and I wondered if I had offended him. But the longer I watched, the more I came to think that here was a man who could do only one thing at one time. Right now he was driving. He moved his head back and forth, monitoring each gauge and listening so intently to the engine he seemed to shift gears without using the clutch. I couldn’t remember when I had last done one thing at one time. Even as a child, I had kept a book on my lap and read it while the teacher lectured up front. I chose friends for this same quality, this impatience with the limits of what a person could accomplish in a normal life. My first lover enjoyed teaching me about biology almost as much as he enjoyed teaching me about sex. Do you know, Jane, hehad asked, guiding my hand up his leg, if you stretched out the seminiferous tubules in a man’s testes, they would be sixteen hundred feet long ?
    Willie drove so slowly it took me a while to realize he had stopped in the middle of the bridge. Cars rushed up behind and, honking, surged past.
    â€œLook at it all,” he said, motioning back toward Boston. “How often do I get to see this? I never smell the sea.” He inhaled so deeply I could feel the sky drained of air. “Go on. Try it. You haven’t taken one good breath since we met. You pant, you know? Like this?” He panted like a puppy, his fleshy tongue hanging out.
    I hated when people told me I was too serious. Besides, telling someone to relax is the least effective way of ensuring she will. I told him if he hadn’t stopped in the middle of the bridge, I might be more mellow.
    â€œJust look back,” he said. “You won’t get turned to salt.”
    To humor him, I glanced at the row of brownstones bordering Storrow Drive, and the skyscrapers behind them, glittering against the sky. Maybe he had a point. What could be more spectacular than the Boston skyline at night? And Willie . . . there was something of that outsize quality about him, too. Maybe, if our parents got married, I would be able to lean on him a little, instead of always taking care of everyone else.
    It was a great view, I admitted. But maybe we could go now, before someone plowed into us?
    â€œTrust me,” he said. “I’m a very careful driver.” And really, he was. He turned on his blinker and resumed inching across the bridge. We reached the opposite shore. We weren’t farfrom my lab, but we needed twenty minutes to find a spot to park. Until the late seventies, the area behind MIT had been a wasteland. Now, in the early eighties, offices and labs were springing up like wild, mutant flora. The streets were pocked by craters. Entire blocks were cordoned off.
    Willie whistled through his teeth. “How can they put up these suckers so fast? I was in town a few months ago and none of this was here.”
    Everyone thought this. Skyscraper skeletons grew concrete skins overnight. Only for me did the changes come too slowly. When my second-grade teacher had asked us what we would want to be if we couldn’t be ourselves, one of