The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Author:Donna Tartt [Tartt, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-87348-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

5

——

The Red Gloves

The next morning, Harriet woke late: itchy, unbathed, in gritty sheets. The smell in the crawlspace, the colorful boxes all jewelly with nail-heads, the long shadows in the lighted doorway—all this, and more, had bled into her sleep and mixed oddly with the pen-and-ink illustrations from her dime-store edition of “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”—big-eyed Teddy, the mongoose, even the snakes rendered perky and adorable. There had been some poor creature tied up and thumping at the bottom of the page, like an end plate to a storybook; it was in pain; it needed her assistance in ways she could not divine but though its very presence was a reproach, a reminder of her own laxity and injustice, she was too repulsed to help it or even look in its direction.

Ignore it Harriet! sang Edie. She and the preacher were in the corner of her bedroom by the chest of drawers, setting up a torture contraption which was like a dentist’s chair with needles prickling from the padded arms and headrest. In some distressing way they seemed like sweethearts, eyebrows lifted, full of admiring glances for each other, Edie testing the needle points here and there with a delicate finger-tip as the preacher stepped back, grinning fondly, his hands crossed over his chest and tucked beneath his armpits.…

As Harriet—fretfully—slid back into the stagnant waters of nightmare, Hely woke bolt upright in the top bunk, so fast that he knocked his head on the ceiling. Without thinking, he threw his legs over—and nearly fell, for he’d been so freaked out the night before about what might climb up after him, he’d unhitched the ladder and pushed it over on the carpet.

Self-consciously—as if he’d stumbled on the playground and people were watching—he righted himself and hopped to the floor, and was out of his dark, air-conditioned little room and halfway down the hall before it struck him how silent the house was. He crept downstairs to the kitchen (nobody around, driveway empty, his mom’s car keys gone) and poured himself a bowl of Giggle Pops and took it to the family room and switched on the television. A game show was on. He slurped up the cereal. Though the milk was cold enough, the crunchy pebbles scratched the roof of his mouth; they were strangely tasteless, not even sweet.

The silent house made Hely uncomfortable. He was reminded of the awful morning after he and his older cousin Todd had taken a bottle of rum from a paper bag in the front seat of someone’s unlocked Lincoln, at the Country Club, and drunk about half of it. While Hely and Todd’s parents stood chatting at the poolside luau, nibbling cocktail sausages on toothpicks, he and Todd borrowed a golf cart, rammed it into a pine tree, though Hely remembered very little of this: the main thing he remembered was lying on his side and rolling down a steep hill behind the golf course over and over again. Later, when his stomach started hurting, Todd told

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