The Accident Season Read Online Free Page B

her friends because we don’t have room for a press in the attic of our house, which is where she works the other half of the time. The attic is cluttered with canvases and paints and always smells strongly of turpentine.
    “So,” she says, waving her sketchbook in the air, “the rest of the day was a bit of a write-off, so I went for a drink with the girls instead. I just got home five minutes ago.” Then she frowns, as if she’s only just noticed I’m here. “Why are you all wet?”
    I don’t want to tell her that the bridge collapsed, so I make something up about a pipe bursting in the girls’ bathroom and drenching my uniform, reassuring her that nobody got hurt in this fictional accident.
    My mother nods absentmindedly. “Is your brother home too?” she asks, pushing the hair out of her face and swinging her legs to the floor. Then she says: “Christopher called this afternoon.”
    Suddenly I understand. Her eyeliner has smudged a little at the edges and she looks so much younger than she is. I try to make my voice light, but it comes out as kindof teasing. “So it was
that
kind of drink ‘with the girls.’”
    My mother makes a face. “Don’t you ‘with the girls’ me, young lady.” She’s smiling, though, and she swipes the hat from my head and ruffles up my hair. She says softly, “The accident season is hard enough to handle.” I nod to let her know I understand what she means, but hearing my mother talk about it makes the sinking feeling in my tummy come back.
    Christopher is Sam’s father. We haven’t seen him since he left four years ago. He calls maybe once a year, but Sam never calls him back. My mother keeps her ex-husband informed of his son’s well-being, but every time she gets off the phone with him, she goes out for “just one drink with the girls.”
    “Where did you say your brother was?” she asks me again.
    “He’s not my brother,” I remind her. “He’ll be home soon, I’d say. He had to suffer through PE last class, which thankfully I didn’t have to do.” I hold up my bandaged wrist by way of explanation.
    My mother sort of laughs and says, “Well, I’d take a sprained wrist over PE any day,” and I agree.
    Sam is three months and twenty-four days older than me, which means we’re in the same year at school, which means we take most of the same classes. Sam and I are alike in many ways, but if PE weren’t compulsory, I’d never go within half a mile of the sports fields, while Sam was on our school’s soccer team for almost a year—until he brokehis nose during a game one accident season and my mother made him quit.
    My mother flaps her arms at me to send me toward the stairs. “Go get changed,” she says. “Shoo! You’ll catch your death in those wet clothes.”
    When I come back downstairs in more suitable (and drier) attire, my mother and I go into the kitchen and put a pizza in the oven. Because it’s the accident season, my mother’s got padding on the edge of every counter. She installed an electric oven a few years ago, but because the burner still runs on gas, she has disabled it, so everything we cook is either oven-baked or microwaved. The floor tiles are covered in knock-off afghan rugs. Our kitchen looks like a cross between a padded cell and a nomad’s tent.
    My mother hands me a bottle of beer. (My mother decided when we turned sixteen that if she drank the occasional beer or glass of wine at home with us, we wouldn’t feel the need to get drunk in fields and have liver damage by the time we’re thirty. I think if she knew about the parties we went to over the summer, she wouldn’t be so sure.)
    “Let’s celebrate,” she says.
    “What are we celebrating?”
    My mother thinks for a moment, then she says, “We are celebrating because you didn’t have to go to PE, and I got to take a half-day.” She’s smiling, but something in her voice is off.
    “We’re toasting the last week of the accident season!” she says grandly. I