Read Adelaide Piper for Free Online Page B

masking tape, and handed it back to Dizzy, who unfairly marked off the space between them. Little Lou was so flustered that all she could do was cross her arms and purse her lips.
    It was really hot, I began to admit to myself as my hair frizzed and my freshly applied makeup started to melt. Could something be wrong with the air conditioner? It groaned then sputtered every few seconds as if possessed by the morning heat of the Low-Country August. When Mama positioned the vents toward the backseat, the air covered me like a thick wool blanket. At this rate, I’d look like a greased pig by the time we hit Virginia.
    Now, Daddy said I had an overactive imagination, but it helped me cope from time to time. So instead of patting my brow or watching the paper mill’s smoke litter the sky, I pretended that I had an ejection button beneath my seat like the kind the fighter pilots have, and that I could press it and go flying out the top of the wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon, fly over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and descend gently onto the pristine quadrangle of Nathaniel Buxton University in a holler north of Roanoke, where the new life I yearned for could finally commence.
    Ever since I’d received that acceptance letter and then an encouraging call from an upperclassman, I trusted that Nathaniel Buxton University on its high hill would end my longing for a raison d’être and fill the gaping hole in my heart.
    Laughing over a Cherry Coke at Campbell’s Pharmacy last spring, I had named it for Jif and Georgianne Mayfield: “It’s like an itch— the itch of the soul.”
    â€œWe all have that, Adelaide,” Georgianne had assured me. “Every thinking person in the world has that !”
    Then Jif concurred by charging three fashion magazines and candy bars on her daddy’s credit card. “Here,” she said, handing me a Vogue and a Snickers. “These give me temporary relief.”
    We all nodded in unison and spent the rest of our afternoon devouring the sweets and the gorgeous people who lined the glossy pages.
    Now, without warning, little Lou, trapped in the middle, dodged a shove from Dizzy, and my chin caught the full impact of her sharp, eleven-year-old shoulder.
    â€œGet off me, Lou,” I said, my eyes narrowing toward Dizzy, the space miser and the perpetual destroyer of my peace. “Can’t you make this an endurable ride, Diz? After today, you’re not going to lay eyes on me until Thanksgiving, you know?”
    â€œ Hallelujah! ” she shouted in a Juliabelle tone of voice, hands raised in an act of worship.
    I chuckled as my fifteen-year-old wild child of a sister feigned a sudden interest in the rotting mill village that marked the outskirts of Williamstown. Dizzy had dressed in a black lace getup (much to everyone’s dismay) for this road trip, and I could see the sharp kohl streaks around her eyes beginning to soften.
    Dizzy scratched her itch with nicotine and rebellion, I thought to myself as I watched her finger the Marlboro Lights in her backpack. Daddy would have had a fit if he knew she had brought those along!
    Then I paused to take my own last look at the mill village. The small shotgun houses were propped up on cinder blocks, with weathered cars in the dirt driveways and Confederate flags flying from nearly every third roof. One had suffered a recent fire, its marred shell of a home staring back at me like a black eye. I could not help but notice the melted cuckoo clock hanging on the singed wall or the wrinkled newspaper that was trapped beneath a sofa and lifted in a breeze as we drove past.
    Next door to the burned-down house, I spotted a young woman with flat brown hair and dull eyes peering at me from the front window, and I shivered even in the August heat of the suffocating car when our eyes met.
    â€œGood-bye, Williamstown,” I muttered, and I might as well have said, “Good riddance!” Or “See