The Secrets of Peaches Read Free Page A

hell. The Birdie on her right shoulder welled up with sentimental tears. Finally she looked back up. She could see where her mom had missed a button on her shirt. For some reason, Leeda wanted to reach out and fix it.
    â€œOkay,” Leeda said. “Yeah, of course.” Her heart fluttered.
    â€œGood,” Lucretia said flatly. Then the window closed as abruptly as it had opened.
    Leeda stared at the green leaves rustling in the breeze and then at the limb underneath her. “Damn,” she muttered. Then she slowly, carefully shimmied her way out of the tree.
    It was harder going down.

Three
    B irdie lay on her stomach in her white T-shirt bra, her bare belly against the soft fabric of her quilt, her toes working a loose thread at the foot end of the bed. Now and then she let out an angsty sigh. She held a crumpled piece of paper in her hands.
    The thing about Enrico’s letters was that she could feel them. He stuck things in them like leaves, scraps of notes from his classes with the frilly bits where the paper had been ripped out of a spiral notebook, little folded-up poems from the grade school kids he tutored. He also sent things like pencils, match-books from cafés, wrapped mints. Birdie turned them over in her hands as she read his words, usually several times, pulling out the best parts and letting her eyes leap along them like skipping stones. She loved his handwriting, open-looped and crooked—honest and unassuming.
    She focused on one bit of the letter over and over again. If you come to Mexico at New Year’s…
    Honey Babe and Majestic watched her from their doggie bed. They were wearing a pair of matching red-and-green-striped sweaters that Birdie had knitted. Across Honey Babe’sback she’d embroidered the word Hola . Across Majestic’s, Amigo . Birdie pulled a sock off her foot, rolled it up like a doughnut, and threw it to them. Honey Babe chewed on the sock while Majestic tilted her head at Birdie questioningly. “He wants me to come to Mexico,” Birdie whispered.
    She had known the orchard Enrico and the Texas Enrico. But now that they wrote to each other, his letters were full of Mexico—his little house at the foot of the mountains outside Mexico City, his mom who drove a bus, his dad who worked at the Zócalo as a security guard, his brother who was still in grade school. He had gotten a scholarship to transfer to the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City next year. In Birdie’s head, Enrico’s life took on the shape of a cartoon. It was all so exotic and breathlessly foreign to her. Birdie lived in the smallest corner of the world—or at least it felt like it.
    She laid the paper down and rolled onto her back, running her feet up and down the wallpaper, throwing her arms back over her head, restless and bursting at the seams. If you come to Mexico at New Year’s… It was out of the question, of course. There were several layers of reasons why: Out of the question asking her parents. Out of the question finding the money. Out of the question staying with Enrico’s cartoon family in cartoon Mexico. But she wanted to, so badly she could taste it.
    She stood and stepped over the pile of textbooks on the floor and surveyed herself in the mirror on the back of her bedroom door. It was hot, and glancing in her mirror, she saw her cheeks were flushed. Birdie’s jeans hung loosely off her hips, the ankles slinking over her red Crocs. Her auburn ponytail was swept back with sweaty little curls clinging along where her ears met herhead. She felt pretty. No, sexy. She wondered what she would look like to Enrico with bigger lips. She stuck her tongue over her upper lip, flattening it out so that it looked like a big lip.
    Behind her, Birdie’s room had become a testament to all things español . Murphy called it Casa del Infatuatión. Her desk was strewn with Spanish language CDs from the Bridgewater