Orphea Proud Read Online Free Page A

color of a cliff or gray the color of an ocean in a storm, depending on what mood she was in. People were always staring at her;her face was a gorgeous puzzle. She was adopted, mixed with Korean and something else that she couldn’t quite figure out.
    “My birth mother didn’t know my birth father’s history,” she told me. “She just knew that he was half Korean. So, I could be mixed with practically anything. My dad says who cares what the recipe is, just bottle it.” Her gray eyes lit up. Lissa’s dad adored her. I could barely remember my dad. Of course Nadine loomed large. Those big kisses, those swooping hugs. Ruby couldn’t compete. Swooping a kid up into her arms just wasn’t her style. To give her credit, she tried hard to take care of me. The meals she made were painstaking, a real labor of love considering that on most evenings she went to some kind of class, and that she ate so little herself. But when I ate with her before Rupert came home, I always felt like I was ruining something. I have terrible table manners—I slurp.
    Anybody in the audience a slurper?
    Well, you know what I mean; it’s a way of eating that once you start you just can’t break. Probably because it makes eating more fun. I find that if I make a little noise when I eat, the food tastes better.
    When Ruby ate, she was silent. You couldn’t even hear her chewing. Needless to say we weren’t the ideal match at the supper table. There she’d sit carefully nibbling some curry or other that she’d spent at least an hour on, while I uncontrollably slurped. She flinched with my every forkful. When we had soup, things really got bad.
    “Orphea, please make less noise. This isn’t a barnyard.”
    Or else she’d say something less direct like: “What are little girls made of?”
    That was my cue to close my mouth when I chewed.
    “Sugar and spice and everything nice,” she’d answer for me.
    I’d stop slurping and take very small sips of my soup. That’s what “everything nice” meant—small sips. But it was no use; two minutes later, I’d slurp. She was such a good cook, all I could think of was tasting. Forget the manners.
    Pretty soon, Ruby didn’t sit down with me. She waited to eat something quick with Rupert. So unless I was at Lissa’s, I dined alone, slurping everything from French toast to mashed potatoes.
    My table manners were only one of the things about me that Ruby found irritating. You can’t blame her, I guess. She didn’t ask to be my new mother.
    Lissa’s parents, on the other hand, had picked her out. She was adopted. And she was an expert at doing just the right thing. Her mom would order outfits for her out of clothes catalogs without even asking Lissa’s opinion—some ghastly checked shorts ensemble, for instance—and Lissa would
oooh
and
ahh
as if she adored it. Then she’d actually put the thing on and wear it to school.
    “Why don’t you ask your mom to let you pick out your own clothes?”
    “That would ruin her fun.”
    “What about your fun? That outfit is geeky.”
    “Who cares?” That was courageous, believe me. In the place we went to school, people were scrutinized down to the toenail. If you lacked the right handbag, you could be ostracized; forget about growing your armpits, which is something I was secretly into. But Lissa would wear these Mom-picked outfits and hold her head high. The funny thing is that she could pull it off, because she was so gorgeous. But in her entire sixteen years, Lissa never once said no to her parents, about anything. I know that for a fact. Could be because of Annie, her older sister. Annie was her mom and dad’s biological child. At the age of fifteen, she stole one of the family televisions to pawn for a bus ticket. The police had to bring her back. Lissa told me about a fight at dinner one evening, when her sister threw a fork at their dad and nearly put his eye out. Shortly after that, Annie ran away again, leaving behind all her stuff, and