The Reading Lessons Read Online Free Page B

murmuring it to himself. Lucinda Maribel Browning—Nymph. Salamander. Igniter of all heavenly fire! 
    Loomis stared at him expectantly, but Hadley didn’t want to share Lucinda’s middle name. 
    At Maple Lawn, he’d once missed dinner for saying Penrod’s name by accident. “House boys are not to act familiar with Tweebs,” Sargent had scolded. 
    Lucinda let him hold her charm in the cup of his hand. She breathed Maribel-shaped breaths against his cheek. Somehow, he feared that if Loomis learned what the letter stood for, he would feel that hot tickle of pleasure against his own cheek, and Hadley had no desire to share such pleasures with Loomis, the hoeboy. 
    “It stands for her middle name,” he said.
    “Good guess, moron,” Loomis snorted.
    “It’s a secret,” Hadley said, his ears heating up. Outside of Lucinda’s daddy, he felt sure he was the only one in all of Lucinda’s Empire who knew the secret meaning of her “m.”
    Loomis didn’t have a clue. He didn’t understand what it was like to sleep with dirty books in your bed. Every night, Hadley nodded off with names like Mr. Thwackum and Hester Prynne still shaping his lips. His ribs were poked by pointy buckram corners, causing him to dream of pitchforks and fingernails. Mornings, he woke with gilt-pocked cheeks, and his torch rolled off across the floor, its dim beam trained on an empty wall. This was his world.
    For all his years, Hadley had been plagued by the notion that his life had yet to begin. Everything he’d ever done was just part of a boring prologue. Real life was still a page or two away, but it was coming. He could feel it! Every time he took up one side of a book, and she took up the other—he could feel it.
    All that was missing now was some sort proof to validate that he’d arrived. A person with a real life had stuff to show for it. They had clutter they wished they could pitch or burn, but they didn’t pitch it, and they didn’t burn it because, in the end, it was everything. It meant too much. When a person with a real life passed on, no one else had any use for their junk or even knew what it all meant. If Hadley died, there would be no evidence to show that he’d had a life at all. That was how he knew that he’d not really been born yet.
    Slip the loop off the acorn button on Mama’s sewing box, and you would find so much proof, whole hours would be lost just sorting through it all. Even the smell spoke of living galore. The felt lining was rubbed thin and stamped with the earthy scents of collected feathers and dried petals and the tang of old coins. It smelled like Mama’s pearly hand lotion. It smelled like withered paper. 
    In a compartment meant for sewing needles was an embroidered handkerchief folded in fourths. A lock of hair, nine baby teeth, and a tarnished silver spoon were wrapped up inside like a present. A pair of gloves occupied a little button drawer, the soft fingers coiled into tight musty fists. And in a bigger drawer that was long and slender and molded to the shape of scissors, there were two pocket bibles, one black and one white, a photograph of Grammy Talitha as a fat tintype baby, and a water-stained brochure for P. Dewrights Cemetery Plots & Ornamental Urns . Mama kept a few regular things in the box too, like a chain of safety pins and a spool of white thread, but those were purely disposable. What made Mama drag that old sewing box through the years was a Sunday School medal, a pineapple doily, and a curl of Hadley’s hair. Hadley himself had an old tackle box that he tossed junk in, but he it didn’t seem like the same thing. A boy didn’t keep a squirrel bone for any better reason than the fact that he was a boy. 
    Things were changing though. Hadley was beginning to gather proof of a life he might soon have. Shortly after the reading lessons began, it became necessary to slash the mattress of his cot. When no one was looking, he stuffed purple notes into the