Eleanor Read Free Page B

offside rule the first day of class.
    Eleanor found it easy to melt away from the game and find a calm corner near the weaker goal to wait out the hour. When a ball would accidentally find its way to her, she trotted to it with grace and deftly passed it to a teammate. Mr. Blake had taken her aside once and asked her where she learned to play.
    â€œNowhere,” she said. “I saw it on TV once.”
    â€œNo kidding,” he said. “If we ever get a team going, you’re on it.”
    The next time a ball came to her, she flubbed the kick and sent the ball sailing over the fence into the parking lot.
    After sports, only some of the girls showered. Penelope did, using it as another opportunity to display her deathly frame. Barbara did as well, showing off her voluptuous chest and cleaning off any perspiration before re-coating herself in perfumes. Eleanor never sweated enough to need a shower but wouldn’t have showered if she did. She was an aggressively private person.
    Mr. Blake was still sweaty for their Spanish class but carried on with the kind of new teacher enthusiasm Mr. Graham had jettisoned before Mr. Blake was born.
    David was waiting in the classroom with Mr. Blake before the others arrived, sitting in a seat that had been empty all year.
    â€œThat’s my seat,” said Russell Liddle to David. “That’s where I sit.”
    â€œOh, I’m sorry,” said David standing up. David was several inches taller than the freckled boy challenging him for the seat. “Mr. Blake said it was available.”
    â€œNot today,” Russell said, loud enough for his friends to hear.
    David took another empty seat. There were many.
    The lesson was robust and mostly in Spanish. No one was very good at the language, and there was always grumbling about its usefulness. With patience, Mr. Blake would listen to the complaints and try to explain the value of a broad education, then smile, shrug, and finish the lesson anyway.
    When the bell rang to end the day, the seats emptied before the sound had died. Eleanor waited for everyone to go. She watched David get up and follow the others through the door and out into the sunny afternoon. Only when he was gone, when she heard his footsteps cross the threshold out of the building did she sigh, gather her books, and leave.

CHAPTER THREE
    T he school was tucked away from Highway 26, the only paved artery in or out of the town leading to other places. There was a bus Eleanor could take home but, unlike many of her classmates, she could walk home and preferred to. Many she knew, like Barbara Pennon and Robby Guide, lived nearly twenty miles away on secluded ranches in the tree cut hills. Eleanor could walk the two miles to her home faster than they could be driven in one of the town’s three aging school buses.
    Crossing Highway 26, Eleanor saw the usual speed trap at the town limits. Trucks and tourists slowed to admire the aggressively rustic wooden façades of a town grabbing at tourist dollars. Jamesford billed itself as the Cowboy Playground. For decades, in a hundred outdoors magazines, the chamber of commerce advertised the area’s scenic wonders, spectacular fishing, abundant hunting, and authentic western experience. It had worked somewhat. Jamesford became a modest destination of its own and not just a rest stop along a lonely stretch of wild highway between Yellowstone and Cheyenne. Rich city people eager for a true western experience filled the county’s eight dude ranches every summer to pay luxury prices for boiled beans, a wool blanket in a wooden shack, and the right to be woken up at dawn by a steel triangle.
    Eleanor crossed the highway and made her way between two motels and a sportsman shop that promised every trout fishing device known to man. She noted the many out-of-state license plates and the smell of over-sweet barbecue from the Buffalo Cafe.
    Beyond the highway, behind the façades, just a block away,