The Beginners Read Free Page A

suspended within that stasis, but then strangely at the same time I was restless. It seemed as though I ought to go outside and disrupt the stillness, change something. Should I run into the yard and holler, and wriggle my arms and legs “like spaghetti,” as we had been instructed in gym class, as an antidote to sedentary habits? Or should I ride my bike down to the video store and rent a movie, something my mother would like, a big bowl of popcorn between us on the couch? This was one of the ways that I endured her. But it was too late already for that. Even in the time that I had taken to think this, darkness had fallen completely and I found that I had locked my door, and was lying on my back on my bed, and had pushed down my pants and spread my legs and with my middle finger was gently seeking something I had previously only read about.

2.
     
    I t is an early morning, a few days later. I am alone, walking through Wick, starting from one end and heading to the other. It is so early that birds have only just begun to sing, and the day’s weather has not yet taken hold. We start out always with this same pale mist, the same cool yet humid air. It could be mid-October, it could be early July. But it is May.
    I am on my way from the Endicotts’ house, Cherry’s house, to my own, where I will slide as quietly as possible in through the kitchen door and then down the hall past Jack’s room, silent, into mine, where there is a book I need for school, for my English class. We have been reading Frankenstein, and today is the day we will be quizzed on our comprehension of Chapter Twelve, in which the monster relates his covert observations of an “amiable,” if poverty-stricken, family of cottagers. My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people. My classmates are wretches, who have neither the time nor the place for books. A test is administered to them toward the end of the dumb agony of their high school careers, which determines that they are qualified for going into sales, or the service industries, civil or private sector. Or certainly the military will have them.
    My friend Cherry and I are different. We are not exactly studious, but we have the raw materials for brilliance and we know it. We see it mostly in the course of our endless conversations, in which we dissect our days, which augur an indescribable richness of days to come; a richesse, as Cherry’s mom would say. Her name before she married was Bouchette. She has helped us immensely with our French.
    It’s also in the way we reflect each other’s perfection. We can sit together in front of a mirror, or a television set, or a window, for hours on end, and everything that passes between us seems to be recorded—giggles, silences, commentary—in the annals of righteousness.
    Raquel will later tell me that this is called “an inflated sense of self.” She says that it is “better to be mediocre, because then you won’t run into trouble.”
    But we have so much fun. We mock everybody in school, especially other girls, and we complain about our teachers. We do our homework together, sometimes: the exercises at the end of the chapter, book reports, even take-home tests, which, of course, you’re supposed to do alone. When Cherry insists, we put on eye makeup together, and then take it off and put on another color.
    Cherry is two years older. I skipped second grade, and she stayed back one year, the year she had mono. Still, she often says that I am the more mature of the two of us. She means intellectually, for clearly in the physical realm she is ahead by leaps and bounds (“as she should be,” my mother says, in a rare effort at shoring up my self-esteem). She’s had a couple of boyfriends, the last of