Read Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) for Free Online Page A

like one of Mrs. Petrick’s fables. And as I say, I could watch, I could listen. It wasn’t science, but it was a kind of research. And along with the Internet, I was learning a lot.
    Once, I happened on Victor King. Just me and him and a girl I’d never seen before. Under the stands, next to the Zamboni, coming out of the locker room before the game against Moorhead. Victor had his skates and the girl around his neck. I thought he’d welcome me.
    “Beave,” he said to me, “what’re you doin’ here? You should be on the ice.”
    She slipped a small packet into his palm and gave it a squeeze.
    “Thanks,” he said to her. “My headache feels better already.”
    She blew him a kiss, opened a side door, and walked away from the rink.
    “C’mon, man,” he said to me, “this is a big game. We need you to get the crowd psyched.”
    “There you are.” Perfect Teeth Melissa, his girlfriend, trotted up beside him, ran her fingers through his hair. “Coach’s already got the guys on the ice taking warm-up drills. Thought maybe you were messin’ around with someone down here.” She winked.
    “No, just me and old Bucky. Some piece of tail, huh?”
    “You’d be pretty hard up.”
    “I’m only hard up for you.” He slipped the packet into his skate. “This clown,” he said derisively, “is for the crowd.” With that he shoved me forward up the ramp into the arena.
    Clown!
    ***
    In the meantime little was patched or painted or rehabilitated in or around the house, even with all three of us kids taking Momma’s sporadic, often chaotic, direction. It seemed to me that she simply didn’t want anything to change. Including me.
    Momma told us, “We got spirits settled in. We know them; they know us. I don’t need no more sufferin’. Long as the wind don’t bring in heks or tussers , we’ll be alright. Still, you be watchful, don’t bring us no misery.” She looked at me and shook her head.
    I did my homework. For fun I read more of Momma’s magazines. Fascinated by people and why they did what they did. Usually infidelity or money or both played a part. The “milkshake murderer” was one of those. She killed her husband by having her unsuspecting six-year-old daughter serve him strawberry milkshakes laced with sedatives. She drowned him in milkshakes. Then with the children out of the house, she bludgeoned him to death. I went to bed. I slept if the wind left me alone.
    Just before I completed high school Momma explained that she expected me to pay rent for my space underneath the farmhouse and that, of course, I would have to get a job. “That don’t mean you’re gonna stop shoppin’ for me or cleanin’ this scrapheap or gettin’ my pills neither. You understand that, right? You pay for your food too.”
    Momma went on to explain that Carly was already making her way just fine and had to keep herself focused on her studies and her sports. Momma had decided the college hockey scholarship looked like a sure thing, even if it was a few years away. Lyle was still too young to be useful she said, though he was sixteen, only a year younger than Carly and only three younger than me. He’d started sleeping on the couch.
    “You understand, right?” Momma repeated.
    I understood. I understood that without a job I’d never go to college and become the next Gregor Mendel or Christiaan Barnard. So I devised another of my lists, I put my atoms in order.

    “That’s ghoulish.” Lyle sipped a Keystone from Momma’s stash.
    “Osteologist? It’s science.”
    “Studyin’ bits of dead folk’s bones?”
    “People want to know what killed them.”
    “They’re dead, they don’t give a shit.”
    “I’m talking about their loved ones. In twenty percent of all deaths, no cause is found.”
    “You tell Momma? I’ll bet she’ll freak.” He cocked his head and saluted with the beer can.
    All I could do was close my eyes. Of course he was right, and maybe if I was in St. Paul, but Momma was depending on