Throw Like A Girl Read Online Free

stairs.
    Iris reached the top. She didn’t hear any more kicking noise, so she guessed the lock held. She’d only been up here a couple of times. There was striped wallpaper with something wet soaking through part of it. Light came down from a high window at one end, white and smeared. The upstairs had a smell like boiled vegetables. “Hurry up,” Iris hissed. She could hear Rico stumping along and blowing like a horse. “Hurry,” she said again, uselessly.
    When Rico finally reached the top stair he said, “Whew.” They went into his mother’s room. It was smaller than Rico’s and almost all the space was taken up by the bed. It had a pink bedspread and some fancy pillows with fringe. There was a closet with a chest of drawers inside it. Rico pushed the clothes on hangers to one side and then the other.
    Iris went to the window. She could see the street in front of the house, and some of the yard, but not Jovanovich or Goombah. She guessed they were on the porch. Mr. Ortiz was still up in his tree. He looked a lot closer from here, almost like you could have a conversation with him. He was sitting on a big limb, riding it like it was a horse, and pulling his ropes up from the ground. It looked lonesome up there with nothing but the sky and the bare branches.
    Rico was scraping around in the closet. “She must of moved it. The gun.”
    â€œUh-huh,” said Iris. She watched Mr. Ortiz take his gloves off and blow on his fingers. It was probably real cold up there. She wished she was him. She wished she was a hundred miles up in the sky, away from everybody else in the world, and that all along she had been somebody else.
    Iris opened the window. It was stuck shut, and she had to bang on the frame and push on it one side at a time. She unhooked the screen, knelt on the bed and stuck her head out. She could hear Jovanovich and Goombah walking around on the porch. She looked for something to throw to get their attention, but all she saw was pillows.
    â€œHey.” Rico was on the bed, trying to squeeze in at the window. “Quit hogging.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to see.”
    â€œWell let me see it.”
    Iris let him take a turn. With his knees up on the windowsill, he looked like something the window couldn’t swallow. He backed out again, carefully, and unrolled his shirt to show her something he had tucked away in his stomach folds. “What’d I tell you?”
    The gun didn’t look real to her because after all it was just Rico holding it. But once she held its dense, heavy weight, heavy like it was made out of some metal that came from deep inside the earth’s core, once she rubbed her finger along its oiled, dull shine, it was the realest thing in the world.
    â€œIs it loaded?”
    â€œCourse it is.”
    â€œHow can you tell?”
    â€œGive it back here.”
    She didn’t want to let it go. Her hand liked the feel of it. But she allowed Rico to show her how to pull apart the barrel and see where the bullets were, nine of them, each one in its little slot, like seeds. “It’s a revolver,” Rico said. “A twenty-two. You could play Russian roulette with it because you can spin the bullets around.”
    Iris said she wanted it back. She stuck her head out the window and looked around for something to shoot. “How are you supposed to aim it?”
    â€œJust squint along that little bump thing at the end.”
    Iris pointed the gun at a car parked across the street, and then at an ugly fancy lamp in somebody’s picture window. She swung it toward Mr. Ortiz but she decided she liked him and wasn’t even going to pretend to shoot him. She backed away from the window. “So have you shot stuff before?”
    â€œSure,” Rico said. “Lots of times.”
    â€œLiar. You lie like a rug.”
    â€œYou don’t know shit,” Rico said, but Iris knew she was right. Rico never did