The Sky Below Read Online Free Page B

When I was spying and sneaking around it, the entire place took on a glow. I took on a glow. I could see that I was getting taller in other people’s mirrors, house after house.
    Meanwhile, my mother and Caroline were slowly becoming part of the same army, the Braid Brigade: one red, one black. The two of them marched around the motel like sentries. Caroline kept the books. You’d think my mother would have been flattened, like an origami bird on the highway, but instead she got tight and wiry. She began having long conversations on the phone with Aunt Sheila, jotting things down. The woman who had been so dreamy and impractical in our other life, before, never stopped moving now, like the dancer in
The Red Shoes.
She learned to play bridge, and began playing with a bridge club in town. She must have started in the hopes that she’d meet a new man that way, but instead she just got incredibly good at bridge. She sued my father for child support, though she wasn’t sure where he lived. She licked the stamps and slapped them down, wrote FIRST CLASS on every envelope and sent them to the address in San Diego.
    She drank black coffee all day. I’d see her, with her straight spine and her small feet, standing on the Sunburst balcony, drinking black coffee and closing her eyes in the sun. She refused to protect her fine skin, letting it crumple like a piece of paper in some invisible hand. It was her revenge on my father, I think. Part of her revenge. Her love. We didn’t make the City anymore, or anything else. There didn’t seem to be time. We were always busy. My mother and Caroline took turns telling me what to do, which was fine with me. I had no intention of claiming that place; being the hired help was great. I never let
myself into any of the motel rooms to steal a look or a trinket, because by definition anyone staying at the Sunburst was beneath my contempt. I wouldn’t do them the honor of breaking in.
    No. I was after something else. As I said, at first I didn’t take anything. I wandered around, free: no one could stop me from going anywhere, from looking at anything, from touching anything. I opened drawers and medicine cabinets, I ate things from out of other people’s fridges and kitchen cabinets. I would eat one or two Fudgsicles or Pop Tarts so when the people in the house next opened the box, they’d think,
Weren’t there more in here before? Trevor, did you get into these before dinner?
I ate sugar from out of sugar bowls with my hands. I stood inside people’s showers and looked at all their soap and shampoo. I could hop out a door so quickly and silently that if you walked in the room just after I’d been there, you wouldn’t suspect anything more than that a stray breeze had blown in the window. People going into their own houses are mostly pretty loud and insensitive, especially in Brewster. They don’t think of who else might have been there. They don’t imagine anything. But standing in their houses, I imagined them, in detail. I thought that sometime maybe I’d just stay in one of the houses, be there when they got home as if I belonged there, sitting on the sofa with the family dog, eating a Fudgsicle. All the dogs always liked me; I never got bitten once.
    I grew, and grew. The other kids stopped beating me up; it was as if they knew that I had changed, that I got up to something bad outside of school. I think I had acquired an aura. Some of the girls at school said to the girls who could be counted on to whisper it to me that I was foxy. They invited me to make-out parties. Some of these girls’ houses, of course, I already knew. I had rummaged through their kitchen cabinets, their record collections, lain down on their beds. It made me feel sweeter toward them; I got a reputation for being a
really good kisser. I knew that some of the girls would have liked to go steady with me, but I wouldn’t let them, which got me