Brighton Read Free Page A

seventeen-year-old shoulders. The Smart One.And she’d loved them fiercely for it. Until now. Now that the moment was here. It wasn’t like practice, standing at one end of the gleaming third-floor hallway while Sister Ellen stood at the other, snapping a wooden clicker and telling her to enunciate. Not like the prelims where they’d arrived as a team, the Academy girls, smart as whips, quiet, modest, confident. Feared. That was then. This was different. They trotted out the finalists one at a time. The first speaker was a senior from Groton. He rested his hands lightly on the lectern and leaned forward, every gesture polished and easy, his speech little more than a private chat between two generations of New England privilege and power. When he was finished, the boy took his time, gliding past Katie with barely a glance. Then her name was announced, and a tiny trickle of piss leaked down her leg.
    Stupid Irish cow. Dumb cunt. Whore.
    Her father’s whispers hissed and snapped all around her as she walked on wooden legs to the lectern. He’d noticed the attention his daughter was getting. Fuck yes, he’d noticed. His attention. His spotlight. And that could never be. So he’d taken her for a drive two nights before the final and explained the pecking order—where she stood, what she was, what she’d always be.
    Stupid Irish cow, dumb cunt, whore.
    Katie looked out at her audience. One of the judges, the oldest with white hair and purple lips, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and waved at her to begin. She opened her mouth and a dry croak hopped out. The patrician wiped his lips clean and leaned to his left for a whisper, then a delicious smile. Katie felt the shame well in her chest as a chair scraped and her head emptied. She turned and fled, running from her stillborn future, hiding somewhere in its cooling past. Eventually, one of the nunsfound her in a bathroom stall. She told Katie it was all right. She’d do better next time. But Sister Ellen never spoke to her again, not like she had before. No one at the Academy did. And the only foothold she’d ever had in the world was scrubbed away in a flush of tears and fear and cunning. And she slid back down the hill, back into the valley of soot and ash where she belonged, where they all waited with their eager, misshapen smiles and sharp, shining teeth. And the bulb that had burned so brightly, so briefly, popped inside her head, the filament glowing red for the briefest of moments before her mind went dark forever.
    Stupid Irish cow. Dumb cunt. Whore.
    Katie Pearce flicked her cigarette into the morning breeze and watched it catch in the grass before winking out. There was more movement inside the house. HE would be up soon. She had to start the breakfast. And she had to get her only son out before they ate him alive as well.

3
    KEVIN WOKE to the rough burn of tobacco and squinted at the smell in his sheets and on his clothes. His mom was awake, standing on the back porch with the kitchen door open, enjoying a smoke in the cold. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, relishing the warmth of his bed for another moment or two. In the concrete distance, he could hear the early morning rounds of the ragman. He haunted the neighborhood at five miles an hour, hanging his head out the window of an ancient pickup, beating a spoon against a tin pan dropped on a rope over the driver’s-side door and sawing away in a singsong voice.
    Any old rags, any old rags, any old raaaags . . .
    Kevin listened to the wax and wane until the ragman’s call had faded down the hill. Then it was quiet again. His mother came back inside, slippers scraping across the cracked linoleum as she went back and forth. Kevin waited until the kettle began to whistle, then got dressed and crept into the kitchen.
    It was cold for early September. The radiator heat wasn’t up, so his mom had lit the stove and left the oven door open. Kevin pulled a chair next to the heat and drank from the cup of