The Girl Next Door Read Online Free

ain’t he,”
    “So how do you like it?” I asked him.
    “Like what?”
    “Having Meg and her sister around?”
    He shrugged. “Don’t know. They just got here.” He took a swig of Coke, belched, and smiled.
    “That Meg’s pretty cute, though, ain’t she? Shit! My cousin!”
    I didn’t want to comment, though I agreed with him.
    “ Second cousin, though, you know? Makes a difference. Blood or something. I dunno. Before, we never saw ’em.”
    “Never?”
    “My mom says once. I was too young to remember.”
    “What’s her sister like?”
    “Susan? Like nothing. Just a little kid. What is she, eleven or something?”
    “Woofer’s only ten.”
    “Yeah, right. And what’s Woofer?”
    You couldn’t argue there.
    “Got messed up bad in that accident, though.”
    “Susan?”
    He nodded and pointed to my waist. “Yeah. Broke everything from there on down, my mom says. Every bone you got. Hips, legs, everything.”
    “Jeez.”
    “She still don’t walk too good. She’s all casted up. Got those—what do you call ‘em?—metal things, sticks, that strap on to your arms and you grab ’em, haul yourself along. Kids with polio wear ’em. I forget what they’re called. Like crutches.”
    “Jeez. Is she going to walk again?”
    “She walks.”
    “I mean like regular.”
    “I dunno.”
    We finished our Cokes. We were almost at the top of the hill. It was almost time for me to leave him there. That or suffer Eddie.
    “They both died, y’know,” he said.
    Just like that.
    I knew who he meant, of course, but for a moment I just couldn’t get my mind to wrap around it. Not right away. It was much too weird a concept.
    Parents didn’t just die . Not on my street. And certainly not in car accidents. That kind of thing happened elsewhere, in places more dangerous than Laurel Avenue. They happened in movies or in books. You heard about it on Walter Cronkite.
    Laurel Avenue was a dead end street. You walked down the middle of it.
    But I knew he wasn’t lying. I remembered Meg not wanting to talk about the accident or the scars and me pushing.
    I knew he wasn’t lying but it was hard to handle.
    We just kept walking together, me not saying anything, just looking at him and not really seeing him either.
    Seeing Meg.
    It was a very special moment.
    I know Meg attained a certain glamour for me then.
    Suddenly it was not just that she was pretty or smart or able to handle herself crossing the brook—she was almost unreal. Like no one I’d ever met or was likely to meet outside of books or the matinee. Like she was fiction, some sort of heroine.
    I pictured her back by the Rock and now I saw this person who was really brave lying next to me. I saw horror. Suffering, survival, disaster.
    Tragedy.
    All this in an instant.
    Probably I had my mouth open. I guess Donny thought I didn’t know what he was talking about.
    “Meg’s parents , numbnuts. Both of ‘em. My mom says they must have died instantly. That they didn’t know what hit ’em.” He snorted. “Fact is, what hit ’em was a Chrysler.”
    And it may have been his rich bad taste that pulled me back to normal.
    “I saw the scar on her arm,” I told him.
    “Yeah, I saw it, too. Neat, huh? You should see Susan’s though. Scars all over the place. Gross. My mom says she’s lucky to be alive.”
    “She probably is.”
    “Anyhow that’s how come we’ve got ’em. There isn’t anybody else. It’s us or some orphanage somewhere.” He smiled. “Lucky them, huh?”
    And then he said something that came back to me later. At the time I guessed it was true enough, but for some reason I remembered it. I remembered it well.
    He said it just as we got to Eddie’s house.
     
    I see myself standing in the middle of the road about to turn and go back down the hill again, go off by myself somewhere, not wanting any part of Eddie—at least not that day.
    I see Donny turning to throw the words over his shoulder on his way across the lawn to the porch.