Read For Today I Am a Boy for Free Online

tries to get away from every other little bit. Like how it sucks to share a bed with someone in the summer. When it’s cold . . .”—Adele squeezed Bonnie hard until she had to giggle—“they snuggle together close. Like you two, always climbing into my bed in the winter and sticking your cold feet on my back.”
    â€œThat’s not it at all,” Helen said, still facing away from us. “The kinetic energy increases as you heat something, so the particles vibrate at higher amplitudes, increasing their average distance from one another.”
    Adele tickled Bonnie, who hooted and arched backward over the railing, almost falling. “That’s what I just said.”
    Helen turned around. Her chin-length hair tangled in her face from the hot wind. Her shoulders broadened. Expanding. “That is
not
what you just said.” She gestured at Bonnie and me. “They believe whatever bullshit you say, you know. They’re going to think concrete has feelings.”
    â€œOf course not,” Bonnie protested. She slid to the ground, toed the bridge sympathetically. “It just doesn’t like to be cold.”
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    In August, the flies and bees came in from the lakes, swarmed like a fog through town. The four of us sat on the two-meter strip of grass behind the house, the bit of lawn that was ours in front of the sparse trees that belonged to no one. It was the last summer that we would all be together.
    Bonnie poured orange soda on her hand and held it out, watched in fascination as the flies swarmed the back of her knuckles, tasting it with their feet. The heat forced Helen to study by osmosis. She pressed the cool cover of her SAT prep manual to her forehead. The glossy cardboard soaked up her sweat, and the knowledge flowed into her bloodstream. She pictured the problem in her head: a sheet of paper folded in half and then in half again, the constellation of holes and half-holes. Four holes in seemingly random places, one half-hole like a bite mark along the edge. How many holes will there be when the paper is unfolded? Eighteen holes.
    Adele, in a white bikini, rested on her stomach on a towel. She dealt in small joys: bringing Alfie to life, letting the ticket-taker at the Luther touch her hand. Wearing a bikini on our lawn where boys could slow down their cars and gawk, too stunned to honk.
    I drew on her back in black Sharpie. I was drawing angel wings, feather by feather. She let me wear one of her old bikini tops, as long as I wore a boy T-shirt over the top. I felt the warm sunshine through my T-shirt, and I hoped I was getting a tan around the halter straps of the bikini. I held my elbows in tight as I stroked her back with the felt pen. It squished the flat skin over my sternum into ridges that were not completely unlike Adele’s shelf of cleavage.
    â€œThat tickles.” Adele yawned.
    The SAT manual blocked Helen’s face completely. It looked like it had replaced her head. “All the toxins in the ink are seeping into your skin,” she said, muffled.
    My angel wings were elaborate, eighteen pointed ovals, one wing sloping out of each of Adele’s shoulder blades. She shrugged and the wings shifted. When she showered that night, the soap foam would run black.
    Â 
    Soon there were boxes at the foot of Adele’s bed marked Home and Away, like opposing teams. While Adele was in the bathroom getting ready to go out—writing
18
in lipstick on the mirror and wiping it off with her arm—I went into Adele and Helen’s bedroom. I started pulling things out of the Away boxes. Helen stayed at her desk and didn’t stop me, which I took as tacit blessing.
    Helen lived at her desk. She ate handfuls of dry bran cereal and drank coffee that was dark as river silt. Already the seed of the woman she would become was visible, the woman who would crush multivitamins to a powder with the back of a chef’s knife, who would believe eating