Stupid Fast Read Online Free Page B

above the couch had been replaced by a bunch of scary wood masks. Boo! I mean scary. Booo! So I stood out there gawking and terrified, thinking about all the pictures of the Venezuelan mountains that used to be there and what Gus must be seeing, which I wouldn’t know because he couldn’t get Skype to work on the computer he had in Caracas, and I already mentioned that his emails were so short at that time (they got longer by the time I didn’t want to read them)—when all of a sudden, the front door swung open and this black girl about my age was standing there in her white nightie or whatever, staring at me.
    My jaw dropped. My eyeballs popped out of my head in total cartoon style. ( Boing-oing-oing —that’s the sound of my eyeballs popping.)
    Okay, all over town, there are a lot of people who aren’t exactly appropriately dressed when you’re opening doors at the butt crack of dawn. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Schroeder. I can see your wang.” Yeek. This girl, though, was much better to look at.
    So when she opened the door? She and me, me and the black girl, we stared at each other, open-mouthed, silent: she at the door, me in the bushes in front of the picture window where I’d had my nose pressed to the glass; both of us poised to flee because I probably looked like a criminal and she was beautiful and not Gus. I couldn’t breathe. Finally, she said, all out of breath, “What do you want?”
    “Paperboy,” I said.
    “What?” she asked, standing straight, her fear receding.
    “Paper,” I said, tossing the newspaper I had in my hand onto the step in front of her. I nodded at her. She looked down at the paper, then back up at me. I couldn’t breathe.
    So I totally kicked it, quick twitch. I leapt to my bike and got the holy hell out of there. I looked over my shoulder as I pedaled away. She stood there staring at me, her mouth open.
    God. Dork. And, oh, yes, I’d sprung like a hunted, retarded, highly athletic gazelle. Or donkey. Hee-haw! Idiot.
    To show that I was not, even then, completely lacking an understanding of social appropriateness, I’ll say this: Immediately ( immediately ), my escape caused in me a feeling of deep humiliation and remorse. The humiliation was so deep, I felt sick—sick of myself. I kept repeating Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. in my head. “Why are you such an idiot?”
    Have you ever noticed you can’t get away from yourself? There is no way to get away from oneself. You’re always there with you. And remember, I have a voice in my head that never shuts up. I delivered the papers to the rest of the houses hearing myself calling me an idiot in my head the whole way. Then I biked up to the nursing home hearing my own jerky voice say “Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.” And by the time I got to the nursing home, I was so sick of being me that it was a relief to enter into it, into the prison, where I could hide from the shame of the real world. The inmates don’t know or care. Maybe I could stay? Maybe I could get a room, watch TV, get fed Jell-O and oatmeal? Get sponge baths? Disappear?
    Wrong. Not disappear because I would know where I am and be with me. And my voice would call me idiot, and I couldn’t enjoy watching game shows and soap operas while lying in my robe because my voice would be talking to me. Plus, I am not an old lady in my underpants. I am me, and the rest of my terrible life would still be in front of me. I delivered papers still hearing the voice in my head talking. Why are you such an idiot?
    There is no getting away from yourself, so it’s highly important to get one’s brain under control. That’s a fact.
    When I pulled up the drive to our house after the route, Jerri was out in the garden digging up weeds. I threw down my Schwinn Varsity, a bike I inherited from my dad (one of only a couple things Jerri let me keep—this almost makes me cry, even now, because of what I did to it later), a bike he loved and I loved, tossed my paperboy bag aside, and then stomped