What Strange Creatures by Emily Arsenault

Author:Emily Arsenault
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Kim’s squiggly line ended there. In the margin she’d written “April 12.”

I didn’t know the significance of the date. Maybe she’d figured out the date of Anthony’s incident?

This part of the book differed from the rest, as it was perhaps where Zach had asked the most direct questions. More often he quietly let the kids speak for themselves. Here it felt as if Zach were trying to get more remorse out of the kid than was going to emerge organically. If I were Kim, I’d hesitate to track such a person down. But then Kim didn’t strike me as a big hesitator.

I couldn’t remember news of a hate crime like this in Massachusetts recently. But the book had come out two years earlier, and Zach had probably done his research a year or two before that. And Jeff was right—I had my head in the sand when it came to current events. I was perhaps even worse back when I was married—back when I was working harder on Marge.

Without the real names of the victim or any of the kids involved, I couldn’t look up the incident.

I opened up a new e-mail to Zach.

“Hi, Zach,” I typed. Then I realized how obnoxious I felt asking him for another favor. Instead I decided to put it in the form of a question. “Thanks for the Sharon Silverstein contact. Just wondering—did Kim ever ask you for the real name of the kid ‘Anthony’ from your book?”

Polite sign-off, then more tapping the tabletop as I waited for my answers. I distracted myself from the dead silence by going onto Zach’s class blog. Scanning through a couple of Kim’s pieces, I found one with the name “Jenny.”

“Dreams” by the Cranberries

Whenever I hear it—and I really try not to, but the most painful songs have a way of snaking into your car and your consciousness, into the background of every other bar scene of every other movie you’ve ever watched—I think of my old friend Jenny.

The three of us would dance to the Cranberries—Jenny, Missy, and me.

We got “Dreams” from Missy’s older sister. Missy’s older sister was cooler than mine, although I was cooler than Missy. Figure that one out.

I would lip-sync, and Jenny and Missy would do backup and dance. I was ten, and they were eight and nine. So I was in charge, always.

Jenny would do an exaggerated swirling sort of dance with a sly smile—what Missy’s sister called “an interpretive dance.” We didn’t know what that meant, except that it was funny. While Jenny would interpret, Missy would just hop up and down, pumping her skinny little arms. We would do this for hours in Missy’s garage after school that fall.

Jenny was pretty.

Probably if she’d lived to the double digits, she’d have been beautiful.

But when you’re nine, pretty is all there is. Pretty is where it’s at. And Jenny was there. Blond hair to her butt. Bright blue-green eyes. Light skin, but with a healthy pink glow across the cheeks. She always wore a shiny pink-and-silver jacket to match.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.