The Right Thing Read Online Free Page A

usually did. After dessert, my parents slipped off into the warm August evening like released exotic birds, and our maid, Methyl Ivory, let me put off bedtime half an hour. I think she meant to make it up to me somehow—my mother’s being out so much—but even I knew that her staying at home was a hopeless proposition since my mother would’ve cut her own leg off rather than miss an engagement. Her bridge club, cocktail soirees, costume parties, Ladies’ League charity teas—it didn’t matter. The newly prosperous, social-diamond life of a small-town doctor’s wife was the manifestation of a dream that had sustained her for more years than I’d been alive.
    The next afternoon, my mother was at yet another bridge party and I was in the backyard. It was the end of summer vacation, and the last scorching days of August were cooking down to Labor Day and the start of school. I was spending my life outside, for the most part, having caused a fair amount of trouble that summer. I was forbidden my preferred associates—Joel Donahoe, the boy from next door, and the rest of the Bad Kids on the block—and my mother had relegated my playdates to the company of well-behaved children like prissy Lisa Treeby, or Julie Posey, or even Laddie Buchanan, who still used floaties even though he was already eight and peed in the pool. In any case, Joel Donahoe was rumored to have been sent to a work farm for boys in Pelahatchie, and the Bad Kids had been down at the old garage by the railroad tracks on the other side of Fortification Street all that summer. So in lieu of better options, I kept to the yard, waiting for school to begin in two weeks, a high-water mark of how low my spirits had sunk.
    That afternoon I was moping around the backyard, smacking the blowsy heads off the rosebushes with one of my daddy’s golf clubs. Soon I would be reduced to playing with a bunch of sissies. I was in a bad way.
    â€œHidey!”
    This shout came from the Allens’ backyard, from a long ways past the boxwood maze, from the very edge of our lawn. Startled from a wistful reverie wherein my mother might come home today with a pony for me in the Buick’s back seat, I turned to see who was calling. Behind the Paige wire fence waved what looked like a miniature mop draped in a slick pink shower curtain. The afternoon sun glittered on a sparkly something snagged in the mop’s strings.
    â€œYoo-hoo.”
    Company! I barreled past the boxwood maze down to the fence to see what was what. Close up, the mop turned into a girl about two inches shorter than I and therefore a midget, wearing a rhinestone crown and a long gown, the grass-stained hem a carnation-pink puddle around her dirty bare feet. This must be a kid from the rental house.
    â€œHey,” I said. “How old are you?”
    â€œSeven.”
    â€œMe too.” I curled my fingers in the fence’s mesh and poked my nose into Mrs. Allen’s backyard to get a good look at this new girl on the block. She was thin as a ligustrum switch, with white-lashed, watery-blue eyes that blinked a lot, as though it had been a long time since they’d seen daylight. Her mouth seemed awfully wide in that narrow freckled face, the kind of face my mother always attributed to poor nutrition and worse genetics. Her teeth were a tannish color.
    I introduced myself. “I’m Annie Banks.”
    â€œI’m Starr Dukes,” the new girl said. “I got two r ’s in my name.” She pointed at the tiara snagged in her limp yellow curls. “I’m Little Miss Princess Anne Look-Alike for 1963.”
    â€œYou are not.” I was instantly on fire with envy and certain it was a lie. The universal Fairmont Street dare phrase was ready on my tongue. “Prove it,” I added, folding my arms across my chest.
    â€œI got a crown, don’t I?”
    I had to admit it was so.
    â€œAnd can’t you tell this is a pageant