Dread Locks Read Online Free Page A

comfortable chair.
    “This is the living room,” she said, and added, “but there’s nothing living in here except for me and you.”
    She led me to a painting on the wall—a Greek temple or something beneath a blazing sky. “As you can see, we pride ourselves on art. Do you like it?”
    I shrugged. “It’s okay.”
    “I painted it.”
    I wasn’t expecting to hear that. “You’re kidding, right?”
    She shook her head. “I’ve been studying art all my life. This is a view of the Parthenon in Athens. I like to paint pictures of places I’ve been.”
    I was still dumbfounded. “So you painted that?”
    “Yeah. A few summers ago.”
    “Wow ... You’re like... Mozart, or something!”
    “Mozart wrote music.”
    “I know that—I just mean you’re a child prodigy, like him. He wrote symphonies when he was a kid.”
    She smirked. “So I guess my painting is better than just ‘okay.’”
    I smiled back.
    Tara went on to show me the rest of her house, from the ballroom to the huge pool—but it was the artwork that stuck in my mind. Some paintings were by masters: Monet, Renoir—but even more had been painted by her, and her sisters.
    “The three of us are always in competition,” she told me. “Actually, I’m glad they’re away—it gives me some time to myself.”
    The more I looked at the paintings, the more impressed I became—but also more troubled. I couldn’t say what was bothering me. There was something mildly unsettling about them. Like they were hung just slightly crooked or something. I kept wanting to stare at them to figure out what it was, but she kept me moving through the house.
    And then there were the statues. There were dozens of them, and they were amazing.
    “Don’t tell me you and your sisters did these, too!”
    She shook her head. “They came from Europe,” she told me. “Most of them, anyway. Some people collect stamps, or coins. My family collects statues.”
    She claimed that they were just your generic statues, and that none of them were sculpted by the masters, but you could have fooled me. I didn’t know much about art. I knew that Rodin was famous for The Thinker, and Michelangelo did that famous statue of David—but the marble and granite statues in Tara’s house, and around the edge of the pool, were every bit as good as those. The rippling muscles, the expressions on their faces.
    When we were done touring the house, she made us banana splits in the kitchen, using fruit from my mom’s fruit basket and the richest, most flavorful vanilla ice cream I had ever tasted.
    I watched her eat, staring at her like she was one of her own paintings. She caught me watching her, and I began to blush. To hide my embarrassment, I showed her how I could balance a spoon on the tip of my nose like a seal, and she laughed.
    “You’re funny, Baby Baer.”
    I tried to think of more ways to make her laugh, until I found myself burping the national anthem—a trick I had learned from Freddy Furbush. I knew I’d feel like an absolute idiot when I got home, but right then, I didn’t care.
    When I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I finished my ice cream, which had long since melted in its little silver bowl. In the silence that followed I thought of something. Something that I had wanted to ask her but hadn’t had the nerve to before, because I was afraid it might make her mad. But once you’ve burped the national anthem, you have the right to ask just about anything.
    “Hey, Tara ... remember that mirror you took from Julie Robinson?”
    “What about it?”
    “Well ... why did you do it?”
    She shrugged. “It was pretty. I wanted to hold it.”
    “But you could have asked....”
    “Hey, I gave it back, didn’t I?”
    “No—you put it in Kyle Firestone’s jacket pocket.”
    “Did I? I hadn’t noticed.”
    I knew she was telling the truth; it really made no difference to her where she had gotten it or where she had left it.
    “It belonged to Julie, not Kyle.