The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read Online Free Page A

best friends for six years. She had earned my eternal affection at the end of fourth grade by intercepting a series of scribbled insults directed toward me by Billy Secor. She had opened the crumpled sheet of paper and read it, then put the entire thing in her mouth and chewed and swallowed it, saying only that Billy had spelled retarded “redarded.”
    “People my age don’t have ‘social circles.’ ” I sat up, hauling my leg behind me like a suitcase. “And I don’t want to have ‘story time’ with these other girls. I barely know them.”
    “You’ll get to know them,” my mother said. “That’s what happens when you spend time with people. It’s good to be social.”
    “Hm,” I said. I watched as the neighbors’ cat, Mr. Finkle, his orange belly nearly touching the ground, carried a chipmunk along the sidewalk in his yellow teeth. The chipmunk was obviously dead, and Mr. Finkle, swaying side to side, somehow managed to look mournful about it. He ambled slowly across the sidewalk, our local Charon, a furry ferryboat king.
    “Are you weeding or daydreaming over there?” my mother asked.
    I pulled up a cluster of creeping Charlie as thick as a bath mat and threw it, Frisbee-style, into the bucket. I felt sticky and restless. There is something absent in me , I thought. Something incomplete . Even my mother couldn’t describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.
    “Do you think it screwed me up that I never met my father?” I asked.
    My mother stopped weeding and turned to face me. “Where did that come from? Do you think you’re screwed up?”
    “Not necessarily,” I said. A beetle crawled toward me, its blue-gray body like a metal toy lost in the grass. “But maybe that’s why I’m not describable. I never met my father but I might take after him. Maybe it’s his fault that I’m clumsy and average and boring and bland.”
    “I didn’t realize that you were clumsy and average and boring and bland,” my mother said.
    Mr. Finkle tenderly positioned the departed chipmunk on a bed of grass in the shade of the house. His usual pattern was to devour the body, then deposit the head—withits terrified milky-white eyeballs—next to the driver’s-side door of my mother’s car.
    “Do you think I’d have turned out different if I had two parents?” I asked.
    “Of course you would have. And you’d have turned out different ly if you had three parents. Is there a reason you’re bringing this up? Something you want to ask?”
    We hadn’t talked about my nonexistent father for a while. My mother had always been honest about him. If he’d known about me, she always said, he would have loved me. But my mother had no idea where he lived and didn’t know his last name. When I got older and asked her more specific questions, she told me that her (very brief) relationship with my father was “consensual”—but that he wasn’t a boyfriend. She also assured me that I wasn’t an “accident.” She was twenty-eight when I was born. “And if I had decided I didn’t want a baby, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.
    I cleaned some dirt from my fingernails. My mother’s policy about father-related questions was clear and consistent: she would answer any question at all, at any time—but she would not over answer. I suspected she had taken this question-and-answer idea from a parenting book.
    “It’s not like I spend a lot of time thinking about him,” I said.
    My mother was waiting, but I wasn’t sure what to ask her. When I was little, I mainly wanted to know what my father looked like. Given my own indefinite shape, I wanted to know if he was fat. (She said he wasn’t.) For a while I pictured him as Professor Bhaer from Little Women : aroundish, full-bearded man whose pockets had holes in them. Later, I imagined him as Herman E. Calloway from Bud, Not Buddy , and then as Sergeant Flannigan from Mrs. Mike .
    My mother shaded her eyes. “What’s that cat