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

doing over there? He’d better not be heading toward my car.”
    “He is,” I said. “And he’s got a severed head in his mouth. He wants you to add it to the collection.” Mr. Finkle glanced sadly toward us, then meandered across the driveway, clasping his prize. “What if it turns out I’m related to a psychopath?” I asked. “Or a serial killer?”
    My mother seemed to consider this possibility. “Do you feel you have psychopathic blood in your veins?”
    I looked down at my forearms, where a couple of bluish veins were visible. “I don’t have the energy to be a murderer,” I said.
    “And you feel queasy at the sight of blood,” my mother added. “Which would be a deterrent.”
    I picked up the witch’s hand again. “I just want to be … interesting,” I said. “And don’t tell me you think I’m interesting. That doesn’t count. You have to be interested in me, because you’re my mother.”
    “What? I’m sorry,” my mother said. “Did you say something? I might have dozed off.”
    “Ha ha,” I said. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m almost an adult.” I paused. “If you died—if you were hit by a bus—would I still have to live with Aunt Beatrice?”
    Aunt Beatrice was my mother’s sister, who lived in Atlanta.
    “I suppose, now that you’re ‘almost an adult,’ you’d have the option of moving in with Liz,” my mother said. “We could talk to her parents.”
    “Okay.” I scratched at the ground with the witch’s fingers. “That would probably be better: you don’t get along all that well with Aunt Beatrice.”
    “I wouldn’t have to get along with her. I’d be squashed by the bus, remember?” She tapped the back of my wrist. “You don’t need to claw at the ground like that.”
    “Oh. Sorry.” I looked at the patch of earth between us: it was nearly bare, with narrow fingermarks streaking the dirt.
    My mother went back to her dandelions. “Is there anything else you want to ask, while we’re having our Serious Adult Conversation?”
    Several questions jostled for position in my brain.
    1) Why did my mother always answer my questions with a question?
    2) Why did I feel like half a person sometimes?
    3) What kind of wacky nine-year-old liked to pretend to be Helen Keller?
    “What other books are we going to read?” I asked. “I mean, in this book club.”
    “We’ll have to choose from Ms. Radcliffe’s list,” my mother said. “Maybe we should stick to books by women. That would narrow it down.”
    The tiny, fictional Ms. Radcliffe who lived in my brain snapped her metal ruler. “Are we almost done out here?” Iasked. Our lawn was small, but we seemed to have weeded only about two percent of it.
    “Five more minutes,” my mother said. “And I think you should give this book club a chance. What terrible things could possibly happen just because a group of mothers and daughters decided to get together to talk about books?”
    “I don’t know yet,” I said.
    Mr. Finkle’s golden hindquarters flashed in the bushes.
    “It’s good to interact with people you wouldn’t ordinarily talk to, and read books you wouldn’t ordinarily read. Be open-minded. Be willing to experiment. That’s my advice.” My mother wiped her forehead and said it was impossible that the entire summer was going to be this hot.
    She was wrong about the heat.
    And she would come to regret her advice to me as well.

3. CHARACTERS: The people in a novel or story. In this essay I guess the main characters are CeeCee and Jill and Wallis and me. And maybe my mother, who would be offended if I left her out .
    U nlike CeeCee, who didn’t seem to enjoy reading, Jill D’Amato was the sort of person you’d expect to find in a book club. At school she was the queen of extra-curriculars: the catcher on the softball team, the assistant editor of the yearbook, a member of Debate Club (I had heard her give