The Ghosts of Now Read Online Free

teach Jeremy in the bathtub. And the time I wanted to visit Grandma; so I packed my favorite doll and a jar of peanut butter, took Jeremy by the hand and set out on a journey that ended at the police station, where we got cherry lollipops. Maybe because Del’s got such an easy way about him, maybe because he never seems to be pretending like most people do, I feel comfortable with him. I think I’m beginning to trust him.
    He asks me for a date for Saturday night. “You need to learn country-western dancing,” he says. “And I’m the one who can teach you.”
    “How about disco?” I ask. “Can you dance disco?”
    He shrugs. “Sure. But it’s nicer up close.”
    I find out that Jeremy was right about Boyd being popular. He’s one of the class officers and a good student, and he keeps that charm going strong. Even the teachers like him.
    “Hi, Angie,” he beams at me as we pass in the hallway.
    I mumble something, a little embarrassed that I don’t like him. I seem to be the only one who distrusts that charm, and maybe I’m wrong.
    A couple of the girls in my classes begin to talk to me. Both of them have fathers with oil companies, but they’ve moved here years ago and feel so comfortably settled that they can talk about Fairlie like smug mothers reciting the adorable faults of their children.
    “Wait till you find yourself in a sandstorm,” one of them says. “It’s awful. It blows through the cracks in the windows and gets on everything.”
    “Even in your teeth,” the other says, her braces flashing. “And it howls—the wind that is.”
    “When are the sandstorms?”
    “The wind will start soon. I know it always blows down our Christmas decorations every year.”
    “But the sand blows in the spring. And it goes on and on until you want to scream.”
    Later I ask Del about it.
    “Just parts of Oklahoma wanting to come down to Texas,” he says. “It’s not as bad as it used to be before there was so much planted. The early farmers had it bad.”
    It isn’t that great now, I think, and I wonder why anyone wanted to try to grow things in hard, dry, desert country like this. Not a lake or a river as far as the horizon. The town’s an oasis, with spreading gray-leafed oaks like giant straws, sucking up moisture from deep below the dusty surface of the earth.
    I’m paired with Debbie Hughes for a few moments during basketball practice in P.E. We’ve passed each other dozens of times in the halls and going in and out of classes, but this is the first time she’s actually looked at me. It’s an appraisal. She’s sizing me up as though I were competition. Surely, not for Debbie Hughes. We’re not even in the same world.
    She drives a pale blue foreign car, and I’ve never seen her alone in it. I’ve never seen her alone anywhere.Even when she sweeps down the school hallways, she’s in the middle of giggles and gush.
    A whistle blows, a ball comes fast, and that’s it. Not a word spoken. In a few minutes she’s back with her own group. I don’t care about Debbie. I don’t care about any of them. I only care about Meredith and USC and the life I’m going to have next year.
    Mom joins a study club and signs up for season tickets to the community theater. She goes to a couple of luncheons at the country club and once can’t make it to dinner. “Tell your father I may have a virus,” she mumbles and skips the coffee to sleep it off.
    I don’t think Dad’s dense. I think he has too much on his mind to notice things he ought to notice. He works long hours, brings home stacks of papers to read, and occasionally grumbles to Mom about problems with his job.
    “There’s a lot of antagonism against the oil people in certain quarters here,” he says to Mom. “It occasionally adds unnecessary problems.”
    Mom just shrugs and says, “Cash in hand is always the bottom line, isn’t it?”
    “I wouldn’t want someone else to be getting the mineral profits from my land. I know how those