The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter Read Free Page B

the maid has already walked away.
    â€œHenry Lee.” Sour in my mouth.
    â€œAll my worldly possessions in a bandanna tied to a stick. Hoppin top a one freight car to the next.”
    â€œHenry Lee, I’m gonna be sick.”
    â€œNot here.” He ascends the stairs, and I follow. Walking through the kitchen, Henry Lee says nothing to the maid at the ironing board. A colored boy older than us sits at the table doing homework. “Who’s your friend?” the maid says, eyes on her work. The colored boy looks up.
    â€œRandall!” As if it were the stupidest question.
    â€œWell Randall can’t see your room till it’s straight, you know that.”
    â€œHe’s going to the bathroom !”
    â€œAlright.”
    Compared to the mess I made last summer with the Camels, I only throw up a little now so Lucky Strikes must be my brand. Wash my face. I shake my hands dry, afraid to touch the towels all spic n span. They’re burgundy, matching the toilet cover and rug and bringing out the touch of burgundy in the wallpaper.
    I walk down to the kitchen. “You wanna glass of milk?” Her eyes still on the sheets she’s pressing.
    â€œNo thank you.”
    She and the boy look up. Like manners is some anomaly in these parts. My mother was a maid before I was born, and she always said if we ever had one, she’d treat her with the respect she never got. But maids were never in our budget.
    â€œWater?”
    â€œOkay.”
    She gets a glass from a cabinet, holds it under the spigot. “Randall?” I nod, taking the tumbler. “I’m Mrs. Lawrence. This is my son Roger.”
    â€œI’m finished !” Henry Lee’s entrance, all singsong. Mrs. Lawrence and Roger go back to their previous activities.
    â€œDon’t you wanna inspect my bed?”
    â€œYour mama can do that.” She sprays Niagara starch.
    â€œI got a new freight car, Roger. Coal.” Roger looks at Henry Lee, then at his mother. She shakes out a clean pillowcase.
    â€œFor a minute. Then finish your homework.” Henry Lee apparently does his homework later. If he does it. Now he flies down the steps. I follow, Roger sauntering behind affecting well the nonchalance.
    â€œLook at this. Shiny like real coal.” Henry Lee picks up the tiny pieces, lets them fall through his fingers. Roger nods, observing with remote interest. “Hey, Roger, you just missed a very tragic accident. You wanna see a very tragic accident?”
    â€œI better get goin, Henry Lee.” As I speak it, we all hear a car pulling into the driveway overhead.
    â€œWait a minute.” If Henry Lee has heard me, he makes no indication of it, bounding up the steps.
    â€œThat means he didn’t finish making up his bed, now trying to do it before his mama see it.” Roger’s eyes have drifted from the train to my schoolbooks.
    â€œI have to go anyway.” I don’t want to risk meeting Henry Lee’s mother and her holding me up, suddenly excruciatingly aware of what I’ll be in for at home: my own mother’s worry fury, augmented by the minute.
    â€œHow come this says 9 ?” Henry Lee holds up my algebra book. “Aren’t you in the eighth like Henry Lee?”
    â€œYeah, but I tested high for math.”
    â€œI’m in ninth.”
    â€œFourteen?” He nods, opening the book. I might’ve guessed fifteen. He’s had the growth spurt I’ve been longing for.
    â€œNineteen forty?” He’s looking at the copyright page. “Last year! Pshew, colored school, our books from the twenties.” He picks up my big fat lit. “Nineteen forty-one!”
    â€œI gotta go.”
    â€œ Ethan Frome .” He has opened it to the contents. “‘The Raven.’ ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’” I gently put my hand on the book, my last polite warning.
    â€œNext time I’ll rent it.”
    I stare at