The Myth of You and Me Read Online Free

world. Not a day went by when some stranger didn’t tell me I was tall.
    She reached me and looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. She had a wide, country-air sort of face, a French farm girl face, one of her boyfriends would later say. Her eyes were blue and so big that even into adulthood she would retain a quality of innocence.
    “Don’t be so unhappy,” she said, pausing a moment beside me. “Look up. It’s a gorgeous day.”
    I looked up and saw, rolling above me in the endless blue sky, perfect white clouds, so puffy they could have been picked like cotton.
    The girl went on by me, and I felt an urge to follow her, a tug, as though I were caught in her wake. To counteract that urge, I stepped, without looking, off the curb and into the path of a car with a long, dark body and wicked headlights. It sped toward me like a destiny. But somehow the girl was there, and her hand was on my arm. She yanked me back so hard that I seemed to leave the ground. I landed beside her on the sidewalk as the car flew by, its horn blaring. My first thought was that she was incredibly strong.
    “That car almost hit you,” she said. We were both shaking. She was still clutching my arm.
    I said, “You saved me.”
    She let go of my arm and took a deep breath. She shook back her hair. “What’s your name, anyway?” she said. “I should know it now.”
    “I’m Cameron Wilson,” I said. “I just moved here.”
    “I’m Sonia Gray,” she said. “I’ve lived here all my life.”
    “Nice to meet you,” I said.
    She said the same. We looked at each other a moment, and then she said, “Okay, well, I’ll see you later,” and she walked away.
    “Thank you,” I called after her, and without stopping she turned, waved, and then turned back around. I watched her go, frustrated that I hadn’t been able to say more, that I hadn’t been able to say what I wanted to—I’d felt a jolt when she touched me, as my life passed into her hands.
     
     
    I didn’t see Sonia again until the first day of school. Although I had three classes with her—French, English, and algebra—I didn’t talk to her during school that day. She seemed to be very popular. In the halls she always had a crowd of girls around her, and I noticed that even upperclassmen spoke to her, especially the boys. I spent most of that day feeling like a circus freak—taller than the other girls, and with bigger breasts. I didn’t have a perm or wear blue eyeshadow. I didn’t go to church or listen to country music. I hadn’t arrived at school in a pickup truck. To make matters worse, I was wearing a silly shirt my mother had bought, with bright appliqué patches that looked like labels: a Campbell’s soup label, a Dole banana label. She had insisted that in it I’d make an impression, and I was afraid she was right. In each class, I arrived early and sat in the back. For her part, Sonia swept in at the last moment it was possible to be on time and took a desk in the front row, offering a grateful smile to the person who’d saved her the seat.
    French class was half over before I learned that the teacher—a woman whose soft voice suggested a tight and frightening control—was Sonia’s mother. I wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. She was not as pretty as her daughter. She was farsighted, and her big round glasses rendered her already large eyes startlingly huge and emphasized the sharpness of her nose. Her chin was more pointed than Sonia’s, too, and when she was angry she seemed to jab the air with it as she talked.
    I learned who she was when Sonia accidentally addressed her as “Mom.” Madame Gray whirled on her like she’d shouted an epithet. Before Madame Gray resettled her face, I saw the anger beneath her control. She reeled off a few sentences in French that, judging from the puzzled expressions around me, no one understood. I caught the word
l’école,
which I recognized from skimming through the textbook. Sonia listened with