The Queen of Everything Read Free Page B

stooped down, and balanced on the ball of one foot to
gather her things. Sweat was beginning to darken the armpits of her dress. For a
second, so quick I couldn't even be sure it happened, she looked up at me and we
caught eyes.
    And then I did a horrible thing. A cruel thing.
I turned away from those thick fingers picking up loose coins and a half-empty
pack of gum and a small bottle of hand lotion, and I laughed. Loudly. To show
Melissa how much I agreed.
    "Entirely sick," I said.
    And then Melissa and I walked away. To buy
doughnuts to eat before dinner. Me trying to forget what I had just done, trying
to forget the coin rolling away on its edge and escaping those fat
fingers.
    "We'd better be quick," I said. "You know how
pissed Dad gets if I'm not there for dinner."
    We hurried past Randall and Stein Booksellers,
the shop my father's longtime girlfriend owned, waited for a break in traffic,
and jogged across the street to Boss Donuts. The doughnut guy was Mel Thurber.
His name should have been Mole Thurber, with his bald head, and eyes that were
always squinting, as if they still hadn't adjusted to life
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    aboveground. I got a squeamish feeling when I
thought of him touching my food, even when he used a square of tissue paper. I
was always glad to get out of there, to escape the smell of hot grease and the
container of pink lemonade that looked as though it had been there forever,
little skin flecks of lemon pulp clinging to the glass sides.
    "I can't see how he can stand to drink coffee
in this heat," Melissa said. She was referring to Officer Ricky Beaker, whom we
called the Tiny Policeman, due to the fact that he was barely five feet tall and
had a voice that resembled one of the Lollipop Twins of Munchkin Land. How he
had managed to dodge the height requirement for police officers, no one could
ever figure out. The Tiny Policeman could usually be found sitting in the corner
of Boss Donuts, nursing a cup of coffee as if it were a whiskey in a
cowboy-movie saloon instead of a Styrofoam cup on a sticky table set under
fluorescent lights. His eyes glanced suspiciously about, as they always did. He
was waiting for the bad guys in black to ride up on their horses and step
through the swinging doors. You could tell that he desperately wanted some real
bad guys around. There wasn't much crime on Parrish. The most serious crime
fighting the Tiny Policeman did was taking down the license plates of the
high-school boys who shouted,
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    "You should've eaten your vegetables!" at him
from their car windows.
    Outside, Melissa held out the waxed bag to me.
I took out a maple bar and we ate as we walked. When we reached the entrance to
our neighborhood, I looked down the street. "Dad's not home yet if you want to
come over," I said.
    In our driveway, I had seen only my father's
red Triumph, an old one covered by a tarp, which he called his midlife-crisis
car. I guess he felt the crisis was over; he never drove that Triumph as long as
I could remember, though he started it on occasion to make sure it still ran.
The Ford Taurus that he actually drove, and that he washed and vacuumed once a
week and wouldn't let you eat in, was not there yet.
    "Oh, God, don't look" Melissa said. She grabbed
my arm to hurry me along, clasped the collar of her shirt, and raised it to
cover half her face. I was sure this strategy had never succeeded in hiding
anyone.
    "What's he doing?"
    "Don't ask," Melissa said. "Probably seeing if
the trees are talking to him."
    Melissa's older brother, Jackson Beene, lay
under the big tree in their front yard, staring up at the branches, hands
forming a pillow behind his head. Ever since Jackson got lost in the woods on a
hike on Mount Conviction three summers ago, he "hasn't been quite right,"
as
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    Mrs. Beene put it. He had gone backpacking with
a friend, who during the hike fell down a ravine and broke his leg. Jackson
tried to get help. The friend was found that