Girl Unmoored Read Free

peace, prepare for war.
    My dad was staring down at me smelling like coffee not wine, so you knew it had to be morning.
    “Time to get up, Apron,” he said.
    He looked tired; his freckles were hanging too low on his face. He used to have brown ones like mine, but now those were graying too.
    “And don’t forget the tunics for the Meaningless Bowl. Twelve greens and eleven blues, unless,” his voice faded, “Jesus H. Christ, that moron, Chambers, shows up again.” I groaned, but my dad said, “Hurry up” or “Fire truck,” I couldn’t tell which, and walked out the door.
    I blinked enough to window wash the sleep out of my eyes and twisted my bracelet around. It was going to be sunny today. Already a streak of yellow was sneaking in from under the window shade, lighting up the Little House on the Prairie books on my shelf. I had read every book in the series by the time I was eight, and a few hundred times over since then. I have to sneak them now, though, otherwise my dad says, “Aren’t we a little past those, Apron? I mean really. How about some Moby-Dick ?” But the truth was that Laura Ingalls Wilder was the nicest girl I’d ever not known. Rennie would throw me under a bus for a piece of chocolate. M’s chocolate anyway. M told her it was from Brazil, but you could find the same kind at Stop & Shop if you knew where to look.
    I flung my covers into a triangle and rolled out of bed. I could hear M banging things down in the kitchen and voices coming up from Hello Maine! By the time I got home from the play last night, M was asleep. That was all she did these days. At first I thought maybe she was sleeping in the guest room until I put a marble on her pillow that never moved. “They’re doing it,” Rennie nodded. I wanted to punch her perfect Bambi face in when she said it, but I knew she was right.
    I shuffled over to my closet. You could hear a dog barking outside, which was Betty, whose mother, Nutter, was dead, too. My mom used to put leftover food on the porch for her until Mrs. Weller came over and told her that Nutter was getting too fat. My mom said, “Never again, Mrs. Weller. I’m sorry.” But Mrs. Weller stayed right there frowning in the doorway under her orange umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but everything she owned was orange. After that, Nutter came over anyway and my mom said, “A few bites won’t kill her,” which it might have, because after she fed her leftover meatloaf one time, Nutter got hit by a truck and the only way you could tell it was her was by the orange collar.
    I walked over to my mirror and pulled off my nightgown. Two miniature pyramids with nipples that looked like someone had poked them through from the other side with a pencil stared back at me. Half the girls in my class were already wearing bras, but not me. Or Rennie, who had even smaller pyramids than I did. We were going to get our first bras together, though. “At least you have big brains,” Rennie would say. But brains didn’t need bras, so boys never noticed me.
    I slipped on my long-sleeved T-shirt with Portland Head Light on it and stepped into my pants. Sometimes I went for days without changing my underwear.
    Then I brushed down my red, sleepy head, trying to see what M saw when she looked at me: someone pointless and pale and always in the way.
    Downstairs in the kitchen, M was standing at the stove stirring something bumpy. Her eyes were glued to Hello Maine! It was going to be sunny today: “Mid-70s and gorgeous, gorgeous.” She looked bad, even for M. She had sick mood written all over her and her black hair was down, which meant she wasn’t going to be a nurse until later and we would have to meet her at the hospital for dinner. She wasn’t a real nurse, she was only a nurse’s aide , so she got the worst shifts.
    When I walked by, she pulled her eyes off the screen just long enough to look me up and down once before turning back to the weather. “Morning, Aprons.”
    There weren’t