Chicken Read Online Free Page A

badness is an extremely limp biscuit. I’m half a second from making a mad dash for the door when Sunny busts out laughing.
    â€˜Ah hope to God you don’t try that mess in public, cuz that’s a good way to git yourself bitchslapped, son.’ Sunny howls, one of those wake-up-the-neighbors bellylaughs that shakes a foundation, and of course that makes me laugh. Then the both of us are cackling like a couple of hyenas on laughing gas, and it feels like warm waves of sunshine rippling in an Indian-summer afternoon.
    Sunny tells me he can fellate me better than any woman ever could. And the way he says it, it seems like it might be true. He tells me he loves boys, has loved boys since he was a boy himself. Countless women have tried to convert him. They always tell him he just never met the right girl. But he likes boys. Always has. Always will. ‘Unless Ah git hit by lightnin’, or Jesus saves my ass, and don’t think He ain’t tried.’
    I tell Sunny I don’t want him to fellate me. I ask him if I can stay there without the fellatio. He says I can. I ask him if he’s gonna tryfellating me while I’m asleep. He asks me if I want him fellating me while I’m asleep. I assure him that I don’t. He tells me if that’s the case, there will be no fellatio.
    Into the night I lie with one eye open on the bony carcass of his sofa, listening for the sound of Sunny coming to splay me open as I doze in fits and starts.
    When I wake up in the morning, panic swarms. Where am I? Boarding school? No. My dad’s house in Dallas? My mom and her lover’s house? No. No. Desperately I try reviving my brain while I figure out my longitude and latitude.
    A snore roars from the bedroom. Snore. Sunny. I’m at Sunny’s. He hasn’t molested me. My ass sighs. I breathe. Not easy. But at least I breathe.
    For the time being.
    Â Â Â 
    Holding the phone, I want to pick one of the millions of thoughts racing through my brain in the single second my mother tells me she does not want me.
    â€˜Can’t I come up and live with you? … How can you do this to me? … What’s going on here? … Whataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutme?’
    But I can’t ask.
    â€˜Whatever—’ I manage to mumble. It’s becoming my dysfunctional mantra.
    Then I hang up. The hole in my bucket is getting bigger. I’m off to Hollywood.
    Â Â Â 
    I register for classes: Existentialism, humanities, poetry, math for poets. A couple of fellow Immaculate Heart College dudes let me rent their living room, and I convert it into my boudoir by making walls out of some nasty roadkill carpet I find on the street.
    Turns out IHC’s run by radical nuns. I like the nuns. Even though they’re Catholic and I’m not, they seem to hate the Churchalmost as much as I do. Later they’ll get excommunicated, or made redundant, or whatever it’s called when the pope kicks an order of nuns out of his church.
    I fry boocoo buckets of chicken, and eat them by the stomachful. I don’t talk to my mom. I want to, but there’s a collection of stumps where I’ve been clearcut from her forest. I try to get money from my father. He seems uninterested. In me, or the idea of me having any of his money. So I pretend I’m uninterested in him. Seems to work better that way. I’m too lost in the Sea of Silence to tell anybody about my ass.
    Sunny’s much more loving to me than my mom or my dad. Of course, he does want to have sex with me. And in fairness to my folks, my dad’s just been dumped for a lesbian and my mom’s just been made a social outcast for becoming one.
    I’ve been working at Hollywood Fried Chicken a few weeks now. It’s closing time. I’ve shined the deep fryers so I can see myself in them. I don’t like the way I look. Sunny walks over and stares right into me for a long time. Makes me