Good Kids: A Novel Read Online Free

things other people liked, like Schindler’s List and Mel Gibson’s version of Hamlet . I slipped the postcard through the gills of Khadijah’s locker.
    It materialized in my own locker the next day. A message was written on it in a large, loopy script that must have been Khadijah’s: “Found in my mom’s office @ work.” A twice-folded sheet of graph paper was attached with an apple green paper clip.
    I’d deduced that Nancy Dunn was an art historian of some talent from the fact that my father deigned to kiss her, but I was still awed by what I saw. On the graph paper was a time line,untitled, drawn with a fine, black pen, ferociously graceful, the cursive you’d think would flow from one of Nancy’s dark hands, with their skeletal fingers. It might as well have traced the development of pottery in Mesopotamia, or perspective in European painting. But its subject was a series of local outings.
    At the beginning, on the left edge of the black horizontal line, there was a perfect miniature architectural drawing of a greenhouse. Beneath it, a caption: “Botanic Garden of Smith College.” The next item, two inches to the right, was a little millstone, filled in with black and perfectly round. Beneath the millstone, in the same indestructible, filament-thin block letters of the caption previous: “Book Mill Used Books, Montague, MA.” Next was the Sunderland Pet Shelter, illustrated with a litter of lithe kittens, who bared claws at each other in Darwinian conflict as they tumbled across the bottom of the page; then, a movie screen that emitted thick, black rays of light and displayed a title I didn’t understand: La règle du jeu . It was at the terminus of the line that Nancy had drawn a picture of the Emily Dickinson Homestead, its balcony framed by identical trees.
    Outside the social studies classroom, I caught Khadijah’s shoulder. For a moment, our eyes met and we passed something back and forth, a mix of elation and panic. Then we remembered we were surrounded by our peers and assumed postures of ironic detachment and bemusement.
    “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I’m still not persuaded. But thank you.”
    “Neither am I,” said Khadijah. “So.” We turned in opposite directions and walked away, backpacks bouncing, stupidly fast.
    The time line became the keystone of our investigation. It turned otherwise innocuous objects into proof; it was what allowed us to settle the matter in our minds.
    “Dad,” Rachel called from the kitchen that evening, “are we getting a sweet-natured, mixed-breed sheepdog whose behavior shows very mild signs of puppyhood trauma, but who will blossom under the care of a firm but gentle master?”
    “Who wouldn’t blossom under one of those, honey?” Myfather swiped the Sunderland Pet Shelter flyer from her hands. “Daddy was using that as a bookmark. Why did you take it from Daddy’s book? You should try to keep a respectful distance from your daddy’s things. My own daddy, good Irishman, would have gone somewhat apoplectic if you had appropriated a bookmark like that.”
    “I just wanted to see if the book had Holocaust pictures.” She was at the peak of a one-sided carnage phase.
    “Your old dad went to Sunderland for a bike ride and stopped to look at the dogs. You know how much I’d love to get you one, but we have to consider your mother’s allergies.”
    At school the next morning, I ran to Khadijah as she hopped off the bus. “My dad took home a picture of a dog from the shelter,” I said. “You were right. It’s a definite thing.”
    What we’d been doing had come to resemble a game so closely that I was surprised when Khadijah’s face collapsed and she covered her eyes with her hands. When she withdrew them, she was twitching. Her brow wrinkled. Her mouth puckered. Her cheeks assumed an alien roundness. She was trying to hold it together, like she had a broken wrist.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say it like it was good