Read For Today I Am a Boy for Free Online Page A

disorders were things that happened to young girls; grown women could not be too thin. I moved Adele’s winter sweaters into a Home box. I threw some books onto the ground. I flung her sneakers across the room, then followed them with a long volley of balled-up socks and underwear, the panties blooming open midair like juggling scarves. I counted them as I threw: eighteen pairs of socks and eighteen pairs of panties. I pulled out a tangled string of fake pearls and put it on over my head.
    I paused briefly at a thin photo album. Open to a random page, it showed Adele as a child, her stick legs in a yellow sundress. Almond eyes wide with invitation. It had been worse then: She made grown men sweat, made their thoughts dribble from their temples. Made them question what kind of men they were.
    When the box was light enough, I dumped the rest out onto Adele’s bed. I rolled on top, right in the center of the mess, a makeup compact digging briefly into my back. I pulled it out from underneath me and snapped it open. In its tiny mirror, there was just a small circle of the center of my face. I fluffed blush onto my cheekbones, trying to sharpen them into Adele’s high angles.
    Bouncing near me on the mattress was a pot of violet eye shadow that made me think of an eye forced open. I brushed it onto my eyelids. I wet my thumb on my tongue and smeared the shadow into an opaque layer, all the way from the tear ducts to the outside corners.
    â€œDon’t mess with her makeup, Peter,” Helen said, as though that were the worst of the things I’d done. She tapped a pen against her lips. She made no effort to stand. “You look insane.”
    I peered into the compact mirror again. I thought I looked lovely.
    I popped open Adele’s clear plastic umbrella with a border of roses at the bottom and held it over my head, like I was in a bubble. I heard the bathroom door open. I sat up, crossing one leg over the other above the knee, keeping my back primly straight. Adele stopped in the doorway. She took in the sight of her things strewn across the room and the miniature version of herself. I announced, “Now you can’t leave.”
    Adele pried my fingers gently from the umbrella. For a moment, she held it so easily it seemed to hover. Then she pulled it shut. The umbrella went back in the box.
    She scooped clothes off the floor in piles. She shoved the Away box up against the edge of the bed, and, in a few sweeps of her arms, everything tumbled back in again—rumpled, disorganized, but back in the box. I couldn’t believe how quickly my plan had unraveled. She gave me an uninterested, affectionate pinch on the shoulder and left the room.
    Â 
    Adele and Helen were once offered a ride home by a stranger. Helen was twelve and Adele was thirteen, the more interesting age.
    The man was not entirely a stranger, Adele would later argue—a friend of a friend’s father. She still remembered him as handsome, wearing a white jacket with large lapels like a preacher on TV. Unsustainably clean.
    He gestured to them from the window. She remembered noticing his neatly trimmed fingernails. There was a fine rain. Adele got into the car. Helen refused, so Adele gave her the umbrella. Helen watched the car disappear through a watery blur of pink roses. She thought Adele would never come home, and she couldn’t make herself feel bad about that. When you behave that stupidly, there are consequences: maybe the river would be dredged for bodies two weeks later.
    Helen and Adele arrived home at the same time. The coughing gray Lincoln Continental stopped at the house next door and Adele stepped out. One leg and then the other, like a movie star. Smiled and waved at the driver as he pulled off. Helen told herself that she was glad Adele wasn’t murdered, that she hadn’t wanted to tell the news cameras that she was the smart one, the one who didn’t get in the car, the one who knew it was better