Every Day After Read Free Page A

I suspected he even slept with it, like a baby with a blanket.
    I watched him cradle it in his tanned hands. He was too quiet after Erin’s threat. He hadn’t said a single word since we’d left school. I couldn’t stand his calm any longer. “Did you see the looks she kept giving me? So my grades are better than hers. That’s no reason to have me packed off to an orphanage. And I still can’t figure exactly howshe knows about Mama. You think she’s heard it from all the church ladies?”
    Ben scratched his neck and kicked a rock across the road. He popped his slingshot’s empty band. Of all the times for him to get quiet, why did it have to be now? I stomped a ball of dried mud, crushing it into a thousand tiny particles. I was mad, and I wanted Ben to be angry too. But he wasn’t. He was too busy popping and snapping that blasted band.
    “Those church ladies probably think Mama’s crazy for not coming to church lately. A few of ’em came by to visit after Daddy left, to drop off a jar of jam or a batch of biscuits, but they never saw Mama. I always told ’em she was scrubbing floors or gone into town. They never seemed to doubt me. But still, when they stopped showing, their mouths likely started moving. Do you figure that’s where Erin heard it?”
    Ben shrugged and cleared his throat like he was gonna say something. He didn’t.
    “Benjamin Butler!” I yelled. “Do you hear me?”
    It was times like these I’d have traded Ben for a girl in a blink. Girls live to get riled up over stuff. Boys would shake hands with the man who’d shot their dog.
    He snatched up a rock and shot it into a sweet gum. A single leaf floated to the ground. “I just got a lot on my mind.”
    “Good. You should. I was starting to think you didn’t care what Erin did to me.”
    “Course I care, Lizzie. That’s why I think you should just sit this contest out. You’ve probably got the best grades anyway.”
    “And I’d like to keep it that way. Extra credit is sorta like my guarantee. And there’s no point in feeling sorry for Erin. You know her. What she wants, she gets.”
    Ben raked his fingers through his straw-colored hair. “Sounds like somebody else around here.”
    I heaved a breath in frustration. Ben wasn’t as worried about me as he should’ve been. Heck, he didn’t seem worried at all. But then again, he always wanted to see the best in people. He even refused to believe it was Erin who’d scared the life out of Myra Robinson. The very same Myra Robinson who’d dared me to knock at Mr. Reed’s door.
    It happened last October, not two months after Erin came to Bittersweet. Erin and Myra had started out friends, but Erin didn’t realize that she’d gone off and picked the wrong girl to friend up with—a bully just like herself. Aside from whipping out dares faster than green grass passes through a goose, Myra had the nasty little habit of spreading rumors, and it wasn’t long before she was spreading one about Erin. One Friday morning, Myra began swearing up one side and down the other that Erin was adopted. I didn’t know whether to believe it, but the Sawyers were pretty old. Not grandparent old or anything, but older than everyone else’s parents. And Erin didn’t look a thing like either of them, except forher eyes. You could’ve plucked out Mr. Sawyer’s eyes, put them in Erin, and not been able to tell the difference. And anyway, why would they want to hide that Erin was adopted?
    Well, by Monday afternoon, Erin had got wind of what Myra was telling the whole school. That Thursday, just as me and Ben were about to split an ice-cold Nehi from Hinkle’s General Store, Ziggy got loose. It was a known fact that Myra Robinson was terrified of dogs. Huge or tiny, old or young, it didn’t matter. If it had four legs and barked, she ran the other way. It was also a known fact that each afternoon Myra had to run past Mr. Reed’s driveway on her way home from school.
    Besides holding the prize for