Good Kids: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

news.” But it was too late. She signaled forgiveness with a wave and spun into the crowd marching through the green double doors.
    We were in almost the same location that afternoon, just after the final bell, when she appeared at my side. Her eyes were red, her face was calm.
    “Come with me,” she said. “We’re going to the Thing in the Woods.”
    The Thing in the Woods was a rusted wheel that must have once belonged to a landscaping vehicle. It sat in a fairy ring of mashed cigarettes and glittering bottle glass. Residual snow lay in patches on the brown grass, like mold on bread.
    Khadijah drew two sheets of paper, the same graph paper her mother had used for the illustrated time line, from a pocket of her three-ring binder. I considered for a second whether the chart could have been a forgery of Khadijah’s, but I knew thather draftsmanship was not as delicate as Nancy’s; the person who could make those inky kittens dart and swipe would not have drawn as geologic a pineapple as Khadijah’s. Khadijah’s handwriting, too, was different from the handwriting on her mother’s time line, larger, loopier, more arabesque.
    She’d written: “I, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, will never cheat on anyone. If I’m in a relationship and I want to be with someone else, I will either wait and see if it changes or I will break up with the person I’m with before I do anything. I will not be an asshole and just cheat on them. If I think about doing it, I will remember this moment, now.” The other sheet of graph paper had the same vow written on it, only with my name at the beginning instead of hers.
    She took the sheet with her name, knelt in the grass, and held it to the side of the rusted wheel. She took a blue ballpoint pen from her pocket and signed. Watching me closely, she offered the pen.
    I knelt beside her in the grass. I pressed the paper against the rough surface of the wheel and put down my name in stilted, overly slanted cursive, the first time I signed my name rather than wrote it. Facing each other on our knees, we shook hands.
    “Here’s my question,” I said, dusting off my shins as we walked away. “If they’re into each other, if they make each other so happy, why don’t they get divorced and be with each other? People don’t hold it against you if you get divorced in Wattsbury.”
    She folded the sheets of graph paper, creased the fold, and handed me mine. “Because we exist.”

3.
They Just Try to Make Things Prettier
    I n the days after the vow at the Thing in the Woods, I thought of the darkness under the table at Gaia, with the light that snuck under the kente cloths. I wanted more of Khadijah. I especially wanted more of Khadijah in hiding places. But I thought it might be better to wait to initiate further contact until after I had made myself less ugly. I ran every night, and lifted my father’s boxed, multivolume Churchill biography over my head, watching my insect forearms in the mirror, waiting for them to change.
    I monitored Khadijah in class. We had other star students, but Khadijah was a person conditioned exclusively for school, for this activity and no other. When she raised herself from her desk and took the floor to deliver a presentation, she came into an intellectual inheritance. She became a person who was not who she usually was. She became, I now understood, her mother.
    She must have given her speech about ancient writing to Nancy several times, rehearsed it to excess, before she gave it to our class.
    “Before the development of the alphabet,” she almost shouted, in Nancy’s clear, high voice, “a particular logogram had to depict a particular object, a particular object always signified the same concept. Alphabets enabled the meaning of characters to shift, depending on context.” She seemed to have memorized every sentence, every syntactical gambit.
    It was unusual for a tenth grader at Wattsbury Regional to speak like this. Most academic parents nodded to the