Pretty Birds Read Online Free Page B

dangerous corner. All the girls had heard terrifying stories over the past few days. A man in Kovacici had come home after a round of beer and schnapps and thrown a stone wrapped in a burning towel into his neighbor’s bedroom. A woman had been found dead on the Ali Pasha Bridge, her tongue cut out (actually, a newspaper noted drily, cut
in half
). Such butchery was clearly the work of amateurs and, therefore, more worrying.
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    IRENA CAME TO the mirror at the same time as Amela Divacs, the team’s other forward. They did not know what to say, but they did not swerve away from each other. Amela smiled slightly as she combed through her long, pale, damp hair, and finally said, “They are both stupid sows.”
    â€œI didn’t know which to root for,” said Irena, whose short chestnut hair had already dried in place.
    â€œDanica is sinking her free throws,” said Amela, who smiled and turned back to her locker before she caught herself. “But I wouldn’t, you know, choose her for any other reason.”
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    IRENA AND AMELA were partners on the court, and lived in the same housing block in Grbavica. They had played together for two years, after Amela’s family had moved from the older area of Skenderija. Amela could pick out the top of Irena’s head above a thicket of players, and loft a pass at just the best height for Irena to pluck it away from those around her. Irena could see Amela’s long whip of yellow hair lash between two players’ shoulders, and she would bounce the ball where Amela could jab out with an arm and take it in her stride. They were comrades, to be sure, and friends in most of the important ways: the foremost was basketball. Their camaraderie was rarely tested by envy.
    Irena was a better shooter, that was for sure. This didn’t bother Amela, who was shorter and prettier, at least in the swelling assessment of teenage boys. Yet the older boys in their housing block who had gone off to the army or university regarded Irena as sexier.
    When the boys came home on weekend passes, they played basketball with Irena, Amela, and sometimes another teammate, Nermina Suljevic. Irena’s pet parrot, Pretty Bird, was the game’s unofficial official-in-charge; the gray bird said, “Bbb-oing!” in imitation of the sound a ball would make ringing against the court’s orange iron hoop. The young men liked to play just under that hoop, hoping for Amela to leap up for a rebound and come down jiggling. They liked to watch Irena from behind as she dribbled the ball downcourt. They would try to press against her backside when they faced the basket. Irena had come close to slapping a couple of boys for their brazenness. Instead, she exploited their distraction to steal the ball.
    Both girls had been stamped as athletes from an early age. They had won badges, ribbons, and medallions, which their parents had long ago piled in drawers as so much clutter. Both girls were used to being watched by strangers, and used to looking at each other as competitors and teammates.
    Amela was smart—the more serious student of the two—but she wasn’t an intellectual. Away from class, she mostly read captions under the pictures in Western fashion and pop magazines.
    Irena was blasé about schoolwork. She would wait until the morning of a test to learn what she needed and nothing more, which was hardly the way she trained for basketball. Yet few of Irena’s teachers were disappointed. Her mind had depth. She would give herself over completely to a book, a song, or a magazine, absorbing a sports or music monthly from the letters in front to the personal ads on the last pages.
    Irena and Amela knew they were the best two players on their team, and two of the three prettiest (the third, Jagoda Marinkovic-Cerovic, was a redhead, and beyond comparison—some boys were simply fools about