Romeo is Homeless Read Free

part at least twenty times. Visions of shopping in the city, seeing shows, even living in a little downtown apartment filled her fantasies. An adventure, any adventure, is just what she needed. Anything to break away from the farm, from Randy. From her mother. But that would never happen. How could it?
    The door opened and her mother stood at the threshold, a laundry basket balanced on one hip.
    August shoved the magazine under the covers. “Jesus, Mother. Can’t you knock? I could have been naked or something. Can’t I have any privacy?”
    “I’ve seen you naked before. What are you reading?” Her mother crossed the floor and set the basket on the end of the bed.
    “That’s private too.”
    Her mother pulled down the covers and grabbed the magazine. “Cosmo? Really, August. Where did you get this?”
    August crossed her arms. “Sara.”
    “Of course, the worldly Miss Tugman. None of these people in here are real, you know that, right? All airbrushed and made up.”
    “Looks pretty good to me. Beautiful clothes, nice hair, jewelry, tall buildings. No pigs. No cornfields.”
    “That’s not what the city is like. It’s just glossy crap to sell magazines.”
    “How would you know what it’s like? The furthest you ever go is Hubble Falls, population two and a half.”
    “I’ve been places.”
    “Not like Adaleen. Don’t you want to go to Paris? New York? Stockholm? Somewhere wonderful? Hell, anywhere but here?”
    “Don’t be disrespectful. She’s your aunt, not your friend. And don’t cuss.”
    “It must kill you that your sister gets to go to all those places. Has a rich husband.”
    Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “No, it doesn’t. I married for love. She just found a meal ticket.”
    “Yeah, well at least she’s travelling the world.” August crossed her arms and smirked. “Not making biscuits and threshing corn.”
    “Be careful what you wish for, child. The grass always looks greener on the other side. Until you get there and find out it’s just Astroturf.”
    August rolled her eyes and snatched the magazine back. “I’m not a child.”
    “You’re my child.” Her mother tucked clean clothes into the drawers of the antique dresser that used to belong to August’s grandmother, then stopped in the doorway. “Lights out, please. Chores at five.”
     

Chapter 2
    “August!” Her mother’s voice echoed up the stairwell. “Get down here for breakfast. The bus will be here in fifteen minutes.”
    “I’m not hungry!” she called back.
    She rummaged through the bottom drawer of her dresser and tossed pair after pair of other people’s second-hand jeans onto the hardwood.
    “Too big. Too short. Too hideous for words.”
    She settled on her favorites, with the softest denim and the most holes. Her mother hated when she wore them to school. She slid them on and struggled to button them. She’d grown, but the jeans hadn’t. She sucked in her stomach and forced the zipper shut.
    She caught sight of herself in the antique mirror and turned around, craning her neck to look at her ass.
    Couldn’t be too bad, Randy always grabbed it – and the rest of her for that matter. Boys at school seemed to appreciate how she looked if the whistles and comments in the hall were any indication.
    She reached inside her shirt and lifted her breasts in her bra, trying to accentuate her small cleavage, then heaved a deep sigh. It was her own face in the mirror, but the stick thin body was her mother’s doing. Between skinny genes, hours of chores every day and the torture of high school gym class, she just couldn’t grow curves.
    She leaned over the old dresser, her face just inches from her reflection, and performed her morning ritual – microscopic examination of every imperfection. Turning her head side to side, her face shifted and mutated with the ripples in the antique glass. Freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose, spilled down the sides and dotted her sun-kissed cheeks. She rubbed them