Surface Tension Read Online Free

with Mom. I like to hang around when the women are here sometimes. I like to hear what they talk about when they're alone and they don't know anyone is listening. There are two of them here today: Kay and Bonnie, the wives of Roger and Norm. They're all sitting around in their bathing suits, drinking wine coolers. I'm skipping rocks, perfecting my form for the world rock-skipping championships, which don't exist.
    Mom is talking about the new restaurant that's going to start up right next to O'Malley's. Kay says something about the owner being a drunk. Bonnie says she doesn't think it's a great idea to open a new restaurant right next to one of the best restaurants on the lake. Mom says she thinks O'Malley's is going downhill.
    They'll just sit there and talk all day long. All three of them are elementary school teachers, so they all have that teacherly kind of voice, really clear and a little too loud so you can hear it in the back of the room. I sort of feel like I'mback in third grade, except my teacher is drunk on wine coolers and wearing a bathing suit.
    Bonnie asks Kay about her new school, because I guess she doesn't like it. Kay says, “As soon as we started the ELA, all my time has been taken up with the standardized testing.”
    With my dad and his friends, they're always doing something when they hang out, like golf or poker or watching a football game. They would never just sit around in the sun and talk. I can't even imagine what they'd say.
    I'm half listening to the women while I'm trying to get the exact right rotation on my rocks so they'll skip more times. The rotation of the stone matters as much as the speed, but the angle that the stone hits the water is really the key. It has to be somewhere between parallel and slightly tilted up.
    The conversation the women are having has stopped making sense to me. Something about a church, a minister, and the Bells' cottage.
    I stop skipping rocks for a second and try to hear exactly what they're saying, but Mom notices me eavesdropping and stops the conversation.
    There's a long pause where no one is saying anything. Then Mom says, “Want to see if you can go find a puzzle in the cottage?”
    I could do that, except all the puzzles have missing pieces, but I guess I'll do something else anyway. This is getting boring.
    Kay and Roger brought their daughter, Claire, out to the lake with them. She's my age, but she acts like she's about a hundred years old. We've never really gotten along. She's just so boring. Maybe girls are just different, I don't know.
    When we were kids and I would do something stupid or funny, no matter what it was—even if it was just smashing up broken old bottles in the creek or trying to kill minnows by throwing pebbles as hard as I could into the shallow water— whenever I would do something like that, she would go straight back to her house and tell on me to her parents.
    Not even like running back and crying to them. She'd kind of calmly walk back to her house, so I wouldn't even know there was a problem until the parents came back and said, “Stop killing minnows” or “Stop breaking bottles.”
    I could never figure out why she hung around at all. She was just this mini-parent who would follow me around and wait for me to do something that crossed the line and then go tell on me. She once told on me for saying “Shut up” in her yard. And another time she told on me for crossing the street without permission. What the hell? What business was it of hers?
    She always knew where the line was, but I never did. I never knew where it was or what it looked like. I just did whatever I did until I got in trouble.
    She's inside the cottage. I guess I'll just go annoy her for a while.
    She's lying on the green couch reading a book for school. I sit across from her in the old black leather chair, also known as the Bad Chair. It's the chair I used to have to sit in after Claire told on me, because my parents didn't believe in