Rainey Royal Read Free

sick. The government is based on a tripartite system, and she’s supposed to care about this why, exactly? She’s in love with Studio Art; it’s got Rapidograph pens, and Rainey can draw anything—Ophelia drowning, Icarus falling, Janis Joplin lusciously dead from smack, with that fabulous throat—but Mr. Knecht assigned some weird shit. They had to form eggs out of raw clay, let them dry for two weeks, and then polish them in an endless, circular motion with the backs of teaspoons.
    School did not provide the teaspoons. Rainey took one of Lala’s spoons, an English antique sterling spoon that showsa leaping hart. She knows the difference between a leaping hart, which she draws surrounded by William Morris–like leaves, and a leaping heart, which she draws interpretively. Sometimes she draws it so interpretively she has to tear the picture out of her notebook and rip it into little strips and throw them out in different trash cans on her way to school.
    The egg polishing goes on for two more weeks, consuming entire art periods. Rainey steals her egg from the windowsill and burnishes during French, world religions, and math.
    “What’s the fucking point?” says Tina. They are baking their dinner: zucchini muffins. They can’t decide if it’s better to distribute the whole nickel bag through the batter or roll a couple of joints first.
    “My egg is perfect,” says Rainey. “It looks like pewter.”
    Aqua threads trail from Lala’s ancient copy of
The Joy of Cooking
as if it has a secret underwater life. Rainey checks the recipe, then pours a dollop of vanilla into the bowl without measuring.
    “Now, see, if he told me to rub an egg on a spoon,” says Tina, in that husky voice Rainey never tires of, “I’d stick the spoon down his throat.”
    Rainey readies herself. She always has to mention the one thing that hurts; it’s like nudging a loose tooth. “Your grandmother said you could sleep here both nights, right?”
    Tina winces. It’s a faint movement around the eyes. “Probably.” The grandmother is a sensitive subject. Tina turns her back and reaches for a bag of sugar. Her top rides up,revealing an indented waist that Rainey appreciates because it is necessary that they both be sexy, but revealing, also, a little sash of fat, which Rainey relishes because it is necessary that only one of them have a flawless body.
    It is after the time Howard said to her, “Next to Tina, you’re a centerfold—is that why you hang out with her?” and Rainey, thrilled and mortified, choked out that Tina was her
best friend
, and Howard looked past her at silent Gordy and said, “ ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ ”
    Tina licks a finger and dips it in the bag of sugar. “You think Gordy might come in our room?”
    Rainey brains an egg on the edge of the bowl. She thinks about a redheaded oboist she likes to look at across the parlor till he blushes. She demanded his name once, and he stammered it: Flynn. Howard likes to say he has the only jazz oboist in New York. Rainey is not allowed to bother the acolytes, but she can stare.
    Gordy has never come in on sleepovers before—she assumes because she stays up and talks.
    “He just checks on me,” she says in a low voice. “He never
does
anything.”
    When Tina laughs it sounds like
huh
. Rainey suddenly feels grateful to have confessed the hair stroking, grateful that Tina doesn’t judge. Maybe Tina intuits the back rubs, which only just started. Tina, caught beneath an overhead light that brings out the cinnamon in her hair, has her moments of beauty and perfect understanding.
    “If he comes in,” says Tina, “can we be mean to him?”
    “He lives here,” says Rainey, who only knows certain ways of being mean to Gordy.
    “You know the kind of mean I mean.” Tina orbits her upper teeth with her tongue as if checking the jewels on a bracelet. They have both perfected the Pearl Drops move.
    The words
drawing off
come faintly to mind—a