Crooked Read Online Free Page B

but talked to almost no one. She was smart, pretty, and remote. Rumors flew.
She doesn’t date because she already has a boyfriend who goes to Jemison High.
Or:
Her parents are deaf-mutes, that’s why she never talks.
As the van passed her by, Amos sneaked a glance back. Anne Barrineau, as always, was looking straight ahead, smiling.
    Amos sat back in his seat and watched the stores pass: Pringle’s Drugstore, where Bruce Crookshank had dared him to buy a pack of condoms; Doug May Sporting Goods, where he’d used his yard money for a Rawlins John Olerud–model firstbaseman’s glove; Carat’s Clothes for Men, where just two months ago, Amos’s mother had taken him for a suit to be baptized in, which was the strangest of the numerous strange ideas his mother had been coming up with lately.
    Lately.
    What was lately?
Lately,
he decided, was ever since his father had been going to that doctor. But whatever the doctor had been doing or saying to his father was some kind of big-deal secret. If Amos was home with his mother when his father came back from the doctor, his father would give a thumbs-up sign and say, “Tip-top. A-okay.” And sometimes his mother and father would stop talking when Amos came into the room or make up new, cheery things to talk about, which got on Amos’s nerves. He wasn’t eight years old, he wasn’t their delicate retardate child, so why couldn’t they just keep on talking?
    When his father turned the rusted-out Econoline onto Adams Avenue and there was no longer much to look at, Amos still slouched down, staring out.
    â€œPretty girl, don’t you think?” his father said in that over-gentle voice he used when he was trying to get Amos to say things he didn’t feel like saying.
    â€œWho?” Amos said.
    â€œMiss Wilson,” his father said.
    Amos didn’t say anything.
    â€œThe girl who was flirting with you.”
    â€œNobody was flirting with me,” Amos said in a sulky voice. “Maybe she was flirting with you,” he said.
    â€œWell, now,” his father said amiably. “That kind of shines a whole new light on things, doesn’t it? This pretty thirteen-year-old flirting with a forty-two-year-old bald man.”
    â€œShe’s fourteen,” Amos said. His skin was prickly with sudden heat.
    â€œAnd how did you come by that information?” his father said, still smiling.
    â€œBecause she’s in the ninth grade,” he said, and stared out the window. He realized with regret that he’d opened the door to even more questioning from his father, but none came. Finally Amos turned to look at him, and what he saw was startling. There was a strange, contorted look on his father’s face until he saw Amos looking, and then his father made a tightly constrained smile.
    â€œTums time,” he said, and reached across Amos to the glove compartment, where, to Amos’s surprise, there was a big twenty-four-count box of Tums tubes. His father unwound the wrapping from four tablets and began to chew them. For five or six blocks his expression didn’t change, and then the strange distorted face relaxed and became his father’s face again. When finally his father talked, his voice was relaxed, too. “Guess I ate one too many flapjacks for breakfast,” he said.
    Amos nodded, but it wasn’t like his father had eaten a mountain of pancakes or anything. In fact, he hardly remembered his father eating anything at all.
    A pickup truck splashed by to their right, spattering Amos’s window with dirty water. “Moron,” Amos said under his breath to the other driver. He waited. Sometimes his father, when provoked, would use one of his favorite dopey words.
Jackanapes,
or something like that. But today it was like his father didn’t even notice. He just drove along in his own little world. Finally, about three blocks from home, he broke the