Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink Read Online Free Page B

fall on, a box of tacks?”
    “Luce? You okay?”
    Lucy did groan then. Dad stood in the front doorway, looking frustrated because he couldn’t see what was going on. Everything would have been fine if Aunt Karen had been late like she usually was. And if she didn’t stick her stumpy little nose into other people’s business.
    “What’s going on?” Dad said.
    “She hurt herself.” Aunt Karen sounded as if she were announcing that Lucy had just robbed a bank. “I don’t know if she’s going to need stitches or not.”
    “Stitches?”
    Dad’s voice sharpened to a point. Lucy gritted her teeth.
    “I’m fine, Dad,” she said between them.
    “She is not ‘fine’.” Aunt Karen came to Lucy and hooked her arm around her back, already pushing her toward the front door. “Her face looks like somebody shot her twelve times with a B.B. gun — ”
    “It does not!”
    “Have you looked in a mirror?”
    “Lucy, what happened?” Dad said.
    Lucy wrenched herself away from Aunt Karen and took the front walk in two long steps to get to Dad.
    “I just fell off my bike, okay?” she said. “I’m fine — it doesn’t even hurt.”
    She tried to edge around her father, but he stopped her with his arm and pulled her to stand in front of him. Before he could get his hands to her face, Aunt Karen charged up to them, voice still in supervisor mode.
    “First of all, she doesn’t even have a coat on,” she said, “so I suggest we go inside before we add pneumonia to the mix.”
    Aunt Karen turned Dad around with one hand and pushed Lucy inside with the other. Lucy kept going, straight through the entryway toward the hall, until Dad said, “Lucy” — in that way that stopped time, forward motion, and Lucy’s heart.
    She froze.
    “What happened to your jacket? I know you put it on before you left.”
    “How would you know?” Aunt Karen said. She clicked the door shut behind her. “I bet you don’t know half the stuff she gets away with.”
    At the same instant that Lucy added yet another item to the move-to-Australia list, she remembered something else.
    “My jacket is right here,” she said. She crossed the entryway toward her aunt. “I’m carrying it — see?” she said, and she thrust it, Mudge and all, straight into Aunt Karen’s arms.
    A gray-striped head popped from the denim folds and pointed its toothy side at Aunt Karen’s face. Mudge let out a yowl that sounded exactly like, “I hate you!” and Lucy vowed to make that two cans of tuna.
    Aunt Karen matched him with a yowl of her own. Flinging her arms out in at least two directions, she stepped back, collided with the table by the door, and set a basket sailing. Candy fanned across the floor, which sent Mudge into a frenzy. He turned in frantic circles, sliding on plastic-wrapped canes and finally leaping between Aunt Karen’s legs. She didn’t stop screaming or f lapping Lucy’s jacket until Mudge was behind the totem pole in the corner. Lucy made a dash through the hallway and dove into the bathroom.
    But she didn’t quite get the door closed before Aunt Karen was leaning on it.
    “No, you don’t,” she said. “Let me in, Lucy.”
    Only because Dad echoed with, “Let her look at you, Luce,” did Lucy back away from the door and allow Aunt Karen to fall into the bathroom. She tripped over the basket of towels and stumbled against the sink — and Lucy plastered a hand against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. When she drew it back, it was speckled in blood that sobered her up like a splash of cold water.
    “Yeah,” Aunt Karen said. “Look.”
    She took Lucy by the shoulders and turned her to face the tile-framed mirror. Lucy had to admit she did look like she’d fallen on a box of tacks — very large tacks.
    “I don’t even want to know what happened,” Aunt Karen said.
    “I do,” Dad said from outside the door.
    Lucy sighed at the bedraggled picture of herself in the mirror.
    “I fell on my bike trying to get away