Why They Run the Way They Do Read Online Free

crooked, but she wasn’t crying. She looked like she should be in the emergency room.
    â€œWell?” she said.
    â€œHi,” I said.
    I was standing there holding the index card; I could have run but it seemed pointless. Suddenly she sprang from the wall and grabbed my wrist, twisted it until the note dropped to the floor. Still gripping my wrist, she leaned over and picked it up, read it once, then read it again. Then she straightened up, loosened her grasp, and regarded me coolly.
    â€œAre you satisfied?” she asked.
    I had no idea what she meant. More important, I didn’t know which answer would get me out the door faster. “Yes,” I said, then changed my mind. “I mean no. Yes and no. Not really. Sort of.” I bit my lip.
    â€œSomeday you’ll know what it’s like to really love someone,” she said. She said it kind of gently, like she was talking to a little kid. “Some day you’ll know what it’s like to look at a man, his neck and his knees and his warm hands, and know that everything that was missing in your life has come knocking.”
    â€œMs. McDaniel—” I said. I’m not sure what I had it in my mind to say, but it didn’t really matter, because she wasn’t listening.
    â€œAnd someday, Anne Foster,” she said. “Someday some awful little girl you don’t even know will ruin your life for no reason. And when that day comes I want you to think of me.”

    Louise called that night and my father came to get me. I buried my head in my math book and told him I had to study for a test tomorrow. When she called again I told him the same thing. He returned to my room a few minutes later.
    â€œLouise says you don’t have a test in math tomorrow.”
    â€œShe wouldn’t know,” I said. “She had to go home early today.”
    He leaned in the doorway. “Everything okay?”
    I wanted to tell him what had happened in the bathroom. I wanted him to sit on the edge of my bed and explain point for point what had transpired, help me understand what Ms. McDaniel had said to me. But I knew, somehow more than I’d ever known anything, that even had I the courage to ask the questions (which I did not) that he would be unable to answer a single one of them. It was a realization that left me cold: the machinations of the human heart were inexplicable, not only to me, but to my parents as well, and thus, apparently, to anyone. Was this what Louise had known all along? I wondered. Was there truly no one in her life from whom she had ever, ever, expected a satisfying explanation?
    â€œEverything’s fine,” I said.

    â€œYou’re gonna have to tell me sometime,” Louise said from her seat at the desk behind me. We were in math class.
    I turned to her, deliberately put my finger to my lips.
    â€œWhat the hell?” she said. “What happened to you?”
    â€œWhen Mr. Payne was alive . . .” Mrs. Payne began.
    Mrs. Payne, a pain in the butt, a punch line to the joke of every fifth grader. Yesterday she’d been as flat and clear as a pane of glass. Today I gazed through her sagging breasts and jowls and saw her as a young woman, as young as Ms. McDaniel, a mystery slipping out of her nightgown and into the arms of her beloved.

MICHAEL THE ARMADILLO
    They’d made it through all the Michaels, Carrie and Dan believed, made it through Michael Jordan and Michael Douglas and Michael Moore and Michael J. Fox, made it through the terrible summer when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals in swimming, and then the next terrible summer when Michael Jackson died on every channel for days and days, dodged a bullet when Michaels, the crafts store, canceled plans to open in their town (that would have been hell—Dan drove by that strip mall every day on his way to work). Once at a library program when Chloe was two they’d been forced to sing “Michael Row the Boat