Little Blue Lies Read Online Free Page B

off at this, but right now I am far, far too mortified, and so is she.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she says, biting her knuckle. “I was just trying to relieve . . . You look so . . .”
    â€œI’m fine, Mom,” I say, launching into what looks like my pacing pattern but is in fact a roundabout dash for the door.
    â€œYes,” she says. “That’s better anyway. A good brisk walk, that will sort you out.”
    Sort me out. By the time I pull the front door closed behind me, I am already almost to the point where I canlaugh. But that’s probably more from the relief of escape than anything else.
    My mother always has my best interest at heart, but we both really need to get out of the house more.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    I am standing at the Blues’ door again, with the rolled-up portrait of Caligula O’Brien in my hands.
    â€œI thought I threw you out on your ear,” Ronny says, both smiling and snarling. He likes to be displeased.
    It’s one of the reasons he and I are such a great match.
    â€œI brought a present for my girlfriend,” I say.
    â€œO,” I hear Maxie call from off in the distance. “What are you do in’? I told you I’d let you know. You tryin’ to get the man to punch you in the head?”
    â€œOne,” Ronny says, holding up his thumb, “she ain’t here. Like I already told you. Two,” he says, adding the pinky finger for styling purposes, “she ain’t your girlfriend. And three”—he adds the ring finger, and now I am certain he practices this—“are you tryin’ to get me to punch you in the head?”
    The rain has stopped, but the air is still so heavy with warm damp that it hardly matters, and it doesn’t seem like I’ll be invited inside anytime soon. I kick anxiously at the concrete two-step of the Blues’ stoop, and I persevere.
    â€œI’m not trying to get you to do anything of the kind, Ronny, I assure you, but something’s wrong here, I can feel it,and if I have to take a punch in the head to find out what’s going on with Junie, then I am prepared to—”
    Bam.
    Right in the side of the head. Ronny’s unfeasibly big fist with its twelve or thirteen gnarled and calloused knuckles crashes down on me, and I crash right down, on the step, on the sidewalk, on my ass. I feel splits in the structure of my skull, almost making that crackly splintering noise a tree makes when it falls.
    But it’s only pain.
    He stands over me, fists on his hips, lips pursed, growling. Despite what has happened he is somehow the one furious.
    â€œYou think you can come here and tell me there is something wrong in my own household, and that you are here to straighten it out?”
    The left side of my head is a busy little airport of pain planes coming and going, fast and noisy and relentless. If it were balanced, even—if both sides of me felt the same—that would be better, but this is making me want to flop sideways and smother it all out.
    â€œYeah,” I say, perhaps out of sarcasm, or perhaps in an attempt to get him to put me out of my misery, “that’s what I think.”
    He comes down the two slick concrete steps to the slick sidewalk, where I manage to kind of balance awkwardly onone hip and an elbow. He crouches, in his shiny gray shorts, crouches like a catcher, and what I catch is the scent of Satan in his crotch, a sulfuric ammonia eau de cologne that makes me say “Oh” and cover my nose the way I should probably be covering up my face against the beating coming my way.
    â€œDo you know who I am?” he hisses.
    I nod, keeping it simple in case it’s a trick question.
    â€œDo you know who I work for?”
    Now I see where he’s going, and he doesn’t work for the guy. He toadies. He’s a toad, even among toads, as his own daughter told me on many a shame-filled