Me and Fat Glenda Read Online Free Page A

be the house.
    The fat girl remained standing in the doorway, but I could tell from the way she didn’t seem much interested in looking around that she’d been in the house before.
    â€œIt would be great to have somebody like you move into the neighborhood,” she said slowly, eyeing me in a funny way. “But you wouldn’t be thinking of moving in here , would you?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound cool about it all. “It’s possible.”
    The girl exploded into a burst of laughter, although something about that laugh had a nasty ring to it, too.
    â€œListen,” she said, sidling up to me in a confidential manner. “Nobody would move in here. This place is a dump. The last people that lived here were so awful they got run out of town.”
    â€œWhy?”
    She grinned and tossed her head. “Never mind. I don’t tell neighborhood gossip.”
    â€œThen you shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.”
    â€œListen,” the fat girl said, breathing heavily as she got even closer and went into a husky whisper. “The only kind of people who would ever rent or buy this place now is coloreds. That’s why my mother and these other neighbors have this committee. Get it?”
    I got it all right. But all I could see as I nodded dumbly was Inez’ face when she heard about this. Mom would be livid. She might even throw things. There were some things she could get pretty sore about and one of them was prejudice.
    For a minute I was tempted to tell the fat girl that my Mom was part American Indian and, therefore, so was I. And that was “colored,” wasn’t it? But I decided not to say anything about it just then.
    â€œLook,” I told her. “It’s up to my folks, whatever my Mom and Pop decide. They might just take the place. They’ve got their reasons.” Then I decided to get even with her for what she said earlier. “I can’t say anymore,though. I don’t tell family secrets.”
    She looked a little stunned but I could tell she caught on. For a second or two we just stood there glaring at one another.
    Then, all of a sudden, she broke out into a big picture-window smile. “Well,” she said, real warmly, “if you do move in here, I just know we’d be friends, huh? And I guess your folks would fix up the place so nobody’d ever even recognize it after a month or two.” She paused. “Oh, I s’pose I should introduce myself. I’m Glenda. Who are you?
    And that—as I guess you guessed already—is how I met Fat Glenda.

3
    That very same afternoon Drew and Inez and I drove to downtown Havenhurst to look up Mr. Calvin Creasey and see about renting the house. Of course, before that we had to drive back to “the box,” as Inez called the apartment, and pick her up and take her to see the house.
    At first she couldn’t believe it. But after we got there and I crawled in the living-room window again and unlocked the front door, Mom was really excited. She rushed all over the place from the basement to the third-floor attic.
    â€œYou know,” she said in a confidential whisper to Pop and me, after she calmed down a little, “it’s spooky, absolutely spooky, to find a place as perfect as this.”
    Of course, anybody else’s mother would have screamed at how awful the kitchen was and would have had a fit about the rusty plumbing and the cracked tile in the bathroom. There were plenty of rooms, though. About ten or eleven, I guess, if you counted all the little funny-shaped ones, including the round one that wasshaped like a sharpened pencil point and stuck up at the top of the house.
    After Mom finished looking around, Pop took her outside and showed her the yard and outlined some of his plans for where he would reassemble the two most important junk sculptures he had transported from California, and where he would pile