Mermaid in Chelsea Creek Read Online Free

park across the way. Thusly proven a liar, Andrea reserved the right to never believe another word her daughter said.
    But another thing kept Sophie vulnerable to her mother’s suspicion—she felt guilty. She knew the pass-out game wasn’t pot or pills or any other drug—nothing that sat with a stink on her skin or gave her bloodshot eyes—but her mother wouldn’t like her doing it, and would maybe even lump it with pot and pills, vices worse than cigarettes, even. Sophie had never tried a drug, but she bet the pass-out game made her as high and hallucinatory as any of them. She cast her eyes down at the busted linoleum floor so that her mother wouldn’t read the conflict in her face, but she had.
    â€œWell, you’re up to something,” Andrea said finally. “Making out with boys?”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œYou’d better not be.” The way Andrea grouped making out with boys with cigarettes, pot, and pills confirmed to Sophie a suspicion of her own: that kissing boys was something fairly gross that nonetheless made you feel temporarily magical. If there were boys around worth kissing she might’ve braved it, but the boys of Chelsea were in much the same state of disrepair as the city itself.
    â€œLaurie LeClair came in today,” Andrea said abruptly, and Sophie was glad to feel her mother’s judgment move away from her and onto another.
    â€œReally?” she asked. “What for?”
    Laurie LeClair was a local legend. A few years ahead of Sophie at Our Lady of the Assumption, the girl had been unremarkable until she hit eighth grade. It was then that her transformation began,sudden and flamboyant. Her hair, formerly a mousy brown, was stripped to a nearly reflective platinum blonde. Her eyes, small and blue, became smaller and bluer as she circled them with an inch of muddy liner. The jewelry she layered onto her Catholic school uniform looked like it could double as weapons. Her face bloomed with streaks of harsh color, as did her throat, the skin there marked with what looked like bruises. Many girls had seen Sister Margaret, the principal, looming over Laurie in the ladies’ room, her hands planted on her polyester hips, the porcelain sink running with motley rivers of washed-away makeup as Laurie scrubbed her face with a handful of rough, brown paper towels. Laurie’s jewelry was confiscated, and if the nun could have confiscated the hair from Laurie’s head she would have. It sat there, fried flat to her skull, the darkness at the crown growing in faster than Laurie could bleach it away. A rumor went around that she even had tattoos—lousy homemade ones her boyfriend gave her with a needle and ink. The rumor said that he stabbed his name into her skin, or his initials, or their initials side by side, like a declaration of love carved in wet cement. A rumor said it was on her butt, or high, high up on the back of her thigh, or on the inside of her thigh, a place so tender Sophie winced at the thought. But before any of these rumors could be proven true or false, Laurie was gone. She’d gotten “in trouble.” Sophie wondered what such trouble could be. Did she cheat on a test, or steal something from the school? Did she write on the bathroom walls, or get caught shoplifting at the mall? Did she call Sister Margaret a bitch, or did she get ina fistfight with another student? No. “Trouble,” Sophie learned, was a word for “pregnant.”
    Removed from the school, Laurie LeClair’s legend swelled. Instead of ceasing, the rumors grew more lurid. Laurie had lots of boyfriends, and let them all tattoo their initials onto her; her legs a kaleidoscope alphabet, inky letters bleeding into each other beneath her skin. It was said that from far away she looked like she was wearing dark lace stockings. Laurie had a drug habit—it was cocaine, no, heroin, no, it was cocaine and heroin and she gave it to herself with