The Reading Lessons Read Online Free Page A

shoe.
    “Hmm,” Lucinda said, wrapping her finger with the chain of the tiger tooth necklace her daddy had recently brought her from India. “Where are the forbidden caresses?”
    “Archer kissed her shoe ,” Hadley said. “I would never kiss a lady’s crummy old shoe. He must really like her a lot to do that.”
    Lucinda looked at him as if he had two heads. Then she grinned. “Hadley Crump, you dirty boy! For a downstairs domestic, you’re really rather brilliant.”
    Encouraged by his brilliance, Hadley began staying up late, searching for the right thing to bring to Club. His mama gave him a stack of recipe cards that had been stained when the kitchen ceiling sprung a leak. Hadley would fill the cards with the lines he copied for Lucinda. 
    From the kitchen of:
    La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita-Dante
    By Victor Marie Hugo
    When he came to himself, he flung himself on the bed, rolling on it and pressing frenzied kisses on the pillow, which still bore the imprint of her head. Here he lay for some minutes, motionless as the dead, then rose, panting, crazed, and fell to beating his head against the wall with the appalling regularity of the stroke of a clock and the resolution of a man determined to break his skull.
    It was glorious! Better still, Lucinda wasn’t the least afraid to read whole stunning paragraphs on the topic of marital relations. She seemed to enjoy it. If Hadley should have to say something embarrassing like bust or naked, he would clam up or stutter or say it real soft. Not Lucinda. Once, he whispered the words long milky thigh into her ear rather than suffering through the twitchy trial of saying them out loud. But Lucinda didn’t balk at thighs or nakedness. Hadley began to think that there was nothing the girl wouldn’t say. It became his life’s goal to test this theory. He studied her reaction to each dirty word like a scientist studies bacteria. Slang or profane, cuss or sacrilege, Lucinda’s boldness was awe-inspiring.
    Even after her leg healed, Lucinda allowed Hadley to continue meeting with her under the pretext of reading lessons. It was not unusual that he would find a slip of violet paper on a dirty plate with something Lucinda had copied for him. He came to look forward to Lucinda’s notes almost as much as the club meetings. 
    “You’re just another charity,” Loomis said of the lessons . “When rich people spend time with people like us they call it civic duty.” 
    Hadley wanted to whip out one of Lucinda’s notes and read it to Loomis in the worst possible way. Instead, he blurted out something entirely different. “I know what the ‘m’ stands for.”
    Loomis gave him a dubious look and picked at a scab on his forehead. “Hell you do.”
    Hadley had asked Lucinda about her “m” one afternoon while debating a vexing line from their current V.I.L.E. selection in which Gringoire says of Esmeralda; “She is a salamander, she is a nymph, she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean Mount!”  
    Hadley thought a bacchante must be some sort of ancient flower. “He’s saying she’s beautiful. Like a flower,” Hadley said. Flowers were the most beautiful things in the world, but Lucinda was certain that the Menelean Mount was a volcano she’d once read about in a school book. 
    “Gringoire is enchanted, yes, but it’s fiercer than that. Bacchante is the fire that rains down from the heavens when the inside of the world erupts. Esmeralda is no flower.” 
    Lucinda wore a bracelet with three gold charms shaped like a small “m”, a big “L”, and a little “b.” Hadley watched them jangle when she touched her hair. Seeing the little “m,” he forgot all about bacchantes and Menelean Mounts . He swept the charm into his palm. “What does this stand for, Lucinda?” 
    Lucinda took hold of his pointer finger and touched it to the gold letter. She whispered the secret word against his cheek, “Maribel.” 
    Ever since that day, Hadley had been