The Outsider Read Online Free

clothes and began cleaning up. She wanted nothing more than to sink down on her bed to rest, but she couldn’t. The school bell would ring soon, and she had to be ready to teach her small charges.
    Gabrielle was only nineteen, but she had an ease for learning. Her earliest memory was of her grandmother holding a sack and pointing out the word flour to her. Her father and grandmother had run a store then. Gabrielle smiled at the memory of that happy time. She had followed her father around and even found the customers what they needed when he was busy.
    Her grandmother had said she was ahead of her years, a special child who should be nurtured and taught everything until her curiosity was finally satiated. So her grandmother had taught her, her father had laughed with her, and even her mother, if she hadn’t been happy, neither had she been especially unhappy.
    Then the baby brother had died moments after coming into the world. Her beloved grandmother succumbed to a fever a few months later, and everything changed. Her father would disappear for days at a time. When he did come home, he smelled of strong drink and was full of talk of a new life, a better life across the mountains. Her mother cried and yelled and threw pots, but in the end she had little choice but to follow her husband to a place called Kentucky.
    In Kentucky, Gabrielle had found a new teacher in her mother’s uncle who had helped them get settled in the frontier state. Uncle Jonas, a respected lawyer and judge in the state, had never married and had little patience with children, but when he saw the quickness of Gabrielle’s mind, he undertook the task of filling it with the proper education in spite of the fact he thought such knowledge would surely be wasted on a female.
    After only one summer in Kentucky, Gabrielle’s father had gone away again. Before the snows of winter came, they received word of his death on a Mississippi riverboat. She and her mother had no choice but to move in with Uncle Jonas. He was a cold, strict taskmaster who scorned even the smallest mistake, so Gabrielle did her best to be perfect.
    Thus when she and her mother had joined the Believers, Gabrielle at thirteen was already better educated than most of the adults in the church family. Now as Gabrielle twisted her hair into a knot to stick up under her clean cap, she thought about the last time she’d seen Uncle Jonas. When they’d gone into his study to tell him they were leaving, he had turned from his desk and stared at her mother.
    “I always knew you were a weak-willed, foolish woman, Martha,” he’d said with no feeling at all to his voice. “Else you would have never married such a ne’er-do-well as Alec Hope.” He turned back to the books in front of him. “Go then and cloister yourself among these peculiar people with their shaking dances and odd tenets if that be your desire. Outside of childbearing, what use are women to the world anyway?”
    Gabrielle wondered again as she had then if her mother had really believed as the Shakers did or if she had simply been desperate to get away from Uncle Jonas, for if he was cold to Gabrielle, he was a tyrant to her mother. Whatever the reason for their coming into the community of Believers, her mother embraced the Believers’ way fully and had found a measure of happiness she’d never known anywhere else.
    And Gabrielle was satisfied with her life at Harmony Hill as well. The move had been good for both of them. Gabrielle had molded her life in accordance with the rules and found it easy to love her brethren and sisters as the elders and eldresses taught. She especially loved teaching the little girls, some she’d had in class now for three years.
    She looked in the small mirror as she adjusted her scarf clumsily with her bandaged hand. Nay, she had never doubted her life as a Believer. She met her eyes in the mirror and knew there was no reason to lie to herself. Instead she could only wonder why there were