Surviving the Applewhites Read Free

heard.
    Zedediah Applewhite didn’t so much as blink. “You ought to spend a little time with Cordelia,” he said. “She’s taught my parrot the French for that. Spanish, Italian, and German, too.”

Chapter Three
    E .D. sat in the kitchen pushing a mini-wheat around in the milk at the bottom of her bowl, trying to let the shaft of early sunlight that fell across the table cheer her up. She wasn’t crazy about mini-wheats, but it was the only kind of cereal left in the house. She’d put her favorite kind on the list, but it was her father’s turn to do the grocery shopping, and he’d forgotten. Again.
    A dry leaf detached itself from the dying wildflower arrangement in the middle of the table and drifted into her bowl. She fished it out. Cordelia hadjust gone through a flower-arranging phase, and of course her arrangements had been beautiful. She was a true Applewhite, after all, which meant that whatever creative activity she put her mind to, she did it really well. But she’d gotten bored with flower arranging, and now the bouquets were blackening all over the house. By the time anybody did anything with them, there’d be nothing left but dry, empty stems and slimy water. By then even Cordelia probably wouldn’t remember how they’d gotten there. There was a disturbing lack of focus and follow-up in her family.
    E.D. didn’t know how she could have been born an Applewhite. She wasn’t anything at all like the rest of them. Even her mother and Aunt Lucille, who were only Applewhites by marriage, were more like them than she was. Applewhites were enormously talented. She was not. Applewhites thrived on chaos. E.D. wanted organization and sense. Applewhites loved spontaneity. E.D. wanted a schedule and a plan she could count on. Applewhites craved freedom. E.D. wanted structure.
    It was way too early for her to be up, but she’d wakened before dawn from nightmares she couldn’t quite remember, except that Jake Semple had been in them. She hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. This was the day he would be moving in.
    The Applewhites were determined to find the goodkid under the bad exterior. It didn’t seem to occur to them that the kid might be bad all the way through. His own grandfather, a man who looked a little shell-shocked, seemed all too eager to get rid of him. Hadn’t anyone noticed that? E.D. spooned the last mini-wheat into her mouth, put the bowl on the floor for Winston, who was sleeping noisily at her feet, and then sat, elbows on the table, chin resting on her fists, staring into the early sunlight.
    Yesterday, after the goats had been rounded up and her four-year-old brother, Destiny, had been found digging for pirate treasure between the circle of carrots and the circle of tomatoes in Lucille’s vegetable garden, there had been a family meeting. Everybody had been there except, of course, her older brother, Hal.
    Hal was not just a typical introverted artist. Sometime in the last year he had become an actual recluse. He didn’t come out of his room except, as far as anyone could tell, in the middle of the night, when he was reasonably certain everyone else would be asleep.
    The point of the family meeting had been to outline The Plan for Jake’s assimilation into the Creative Academy. It was worse than she’d feared. He was going to be in her class .
    This ought to have been an impossibility. The Creative Academy did not have classes. One of themain reasons the Creative Academy had been started in the first place was to avoid what her father called “clumping.” Applewhites, he said, shouldn’t be required to do what other people did just because other people did it—Applewhites weren’t like other people.
    It had all started when Cordelia was in the seventh grade at Traybridge Middle School and was told by a teacher that she wasn’t allowed to paint a zebra black and purple, because zebras were really black and white. The fact that the zebra in question was part of a science