Addie on the Inside Read Online Free Page A

once threw
garbage out of kitchen windows, never
minding who they might hit in the street
below, the empty, stinking bucket still
theirs.

I Hate Love
    Skeezie bops his head to some song
only he hears (there hasn’t been a
jukebox in years), says, “I’m with you
on this one, Addison. Love sucks.”
    Bobby licks hot fudge from his lower
lip, says you have to work on a
relationship, makes me think he’s
been watching too much TV.
    Joe reaches for my hand across
the table, says, “It’s not like you two
are what you’d call stable. You’ve
broken up, like, what? Six times?”
    â€œOnly five,” I mutter, thinking about
our latest fight and how I have no
appetite. I tap the table with my spoon.
My ice cream melts. I don’t care.

Hiss and Spit
    I’m waiting for Grandma to finish scrubbing the lasagna pan,
my towel at the ready, when one of the cats—Kennedy, I suspect—
hisses loudly in the living room. This is followed by an even
louder hiss, a howl that threatens to become an aria, and
a four-letter word from my dad that he saves for occasions
like this. Grandma laughs and hands me the pan. “Sounds
like your grandpa and me in the early years.” “You fought?”
“Oh, honey, he could hiss and I could spit to put those cats
in there to shame. But over time we changed, mellowed
as most people do. Do you and your young man fight?”
“To put those cats in there to shame,” I answer. Grandma
laughs again. “Well, I’m not saying it’s right, but I’m guessing
it’s only wrong if you bring out the claws. That is something
your grandpa and I never did.” Later, when the cats are curled
into each other on their pillow and Johnson is licking the top
of Kennedy’s head, I see Grandma look up from her book
and nod. “That’s right,” she murmurs. “That’s right.”

What We Don’t Know
    KABUL, Afghanistan – Forced marriages involving girls have been part of the social compacts between tribes and families for centuries. Beating, torture, and trafficking of women remain common and are broadly accepted.
    â€”
The New York Times
    Grandma and I sit reading the
New York Times
,
dusting the pages with powdered sugar from the
jelly doughnuts we have smuggled into the House of
Healthful Eating. We exchange conspiratorial
winks as Grandma says, “What they don’t know
won’t hurt them.”
    My mother is out. My father is, in his words,
puttering. I lick powder from my fingers, turn
a page, reach for my mug of coffee, extra light
with lots of sugar. And then I see the photo
of Nadia with her staring eyes and her bandaged
nose. I tell myself not to read the story, but
of course I do.
    In Afghanistan there is a girl named Nadia—
only seventeen, not that much older than me—
who had her nose and an ear cut off while she slept.
Her husband was settling a dispute.
    Girls as young as six are forced into marriages,
sold for a few hundred dollars to pay off the debts
of their drug-addicted fathers. And their mothers
have no power to change how it goes. They too
have been beaten and raped, sold and traded like
disposable goods, owned by men, while the only thing
they own is their misery, which some trade for
a bottle of rat poison.
    The girls at my school talk about makeup and manicures,
clear skin and straight hair, diets and the perfect
nose. Nadia has had six operations and needs more,
just to have a nose through which she can breathe.
    And what do I talk about if not clear skin and straight hair?
I talk about Nadia and about Mariam, married at eleven
to a man thirty years older than she, and beaten
for being unable to bear him a child.
    I talk about the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye.
I talk about
Sold
by Patricia McCormick.
I talk about suffering and how I don’t know
anything about it.
    I think I suffer when other girls say cruel things
about me behind my back. I think I suffer