Red Glass Read Online Free Page A

a blue headband that pushed back her orangish hair, which showed the gray roots. Then her eyes closed and a smile spread over her face. A woman of leisure. The only thing that set her apart from a lady of questionable taste on a resort vacation was the series of three thick, shiny scars on her left inner arm.
    A relic from the war prison camp, Mom told me. All Dika had said about the camp was that she ate raw onions for three straight months, and that her only possession was a small shard of red glass that she’d salvaged from her bombed-out house. At the camp, she kept it hidden in a pocket, and planned on one day piercing the heart of a guard. She never did, as far as I knew.
    When Mom first announced that her Bosnian war refugee great-aunt was coming to live with us, I’d pictured a skeletal woman in a shawl, deep half-moon shadows beneath haunted eyes. But Dika came with mounds of flesh and cheap jewelry, a wardrobe of tight turquoise shirts, white capri pants, peroxided hair. She inserted herself into our lives loudly. I wasn’t completely convinced she was even our relative.
    I went to the pool with her, dragging my feet. I had nothing better to do. I hardly ever saw my only real friend, Jasmín, anymore. Jasmín was the reason I spoke Spanish. Her parents were Mexican, old friends of Juan. We’d hung out together since elementary school, and she’d stayed friends with me out of habit. Then, in ninth grade, when Jasmín got a scholarship to a private school and started working as a camp counselor in the summers, she might as well have moved to a different planet. She’d drifted away and found replacements for me, but I hadn’t found anyone who came close to replacing her.
    At the pool, I mostly sat in the shade reading and watching Pablo splash around, worrying my skin would break out in a sun rash. Mom blamed my mysterious rashes on the fact that I had been a premature baby. I did feel sometimes that I wasn’t fully formed. Like that Native American story where white people weren’t fully baked in the ovens so their clay never reached the proper brown color. My body was more underbaked than most, and all the Tucson sun did for it was make it pink and bumpy.
    My spirit felt underbaked too. Most people seemed to have a hard outer shell that protected them from mean people, insults, bad memories. I was not one of those people. I wore long sleeves and long skirts, and not just because of the sun. Mom’s friend from Saudi Arabia veiled and draped herself in black, only a slit for her eyes. She told me that her body was sacred and shouldn’t be exposed for all eyes to see. I liked the idea of living behind so much fabric. It would be a comfortable feeling.
    I usually wore a big T-shirt at the pool, taking it off only to dip myself in the water a few times. And this, only after spreading myself with so much sunscreen I left an embarrassing layer of grease on the water.
    “Look at this!” Dika would say when we got in the water. She left a slick film of oil, too. “My poor, poor boyfriend! He must to clean up all this grease!”
    “We shouldn’t even be here, Dika. It’s illegal.”
    “My boyfriend invites us! He is boss of the pool!”
    He wasn’t exactly the boss of the pool. He was the maintenance man.
    One afternoon, a few months after Pablo arrived, we’d been cooling off in the water while Pablo did flips between us. We were arguing, as always, about whether we should be using the pool. The maintenance man, meanwhile, slowly picked out leaves here and there.
    Dika reasoned, “Ah, Sophie! No one uses this pool! We are only ones! Whoever made this pool will be too happy that some people uses it. And that poor pool man. He doesn’t have job if no people uses it!”
    The pool man was a short, stocky man—from Mexico, I assumed. Brown skin, a polite smile. We saw him fixing things sometimes, leaving an apartment with a case of tools. Dika watched him closely whenever he was around. She made a show of