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

to squish down the sidewalk in waterlogged shoes than risk getting strangled by a pervert. She watched Adele wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
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    I ran from the bathroom back to Helen’s post. The one thing Helen and I had in common was our lack of friends. Bonnie sometimes disappeared to other little girls’ houses, and Adele had a wide territory through town. She could be anywhere.
    â€œHelen, help.” Helen looked up and saw me frantically rubbing my eyes, purple- and pink-stained, as wide as raccoon markings. “It won’t come off. It won’t come off! Dad will be home soon!”
    Helen watched my agonized dance as I hopped from foot to foot like I had to pee. Her face said
I hope you’ve learned something.
She ushered me back to the bathroom. She knelt to get into one of the cupboards, and her seventeen-year-old knees cracked.
    â€œHere.” She handed me a tub of cold cream. “Put it on top of the makeup, then wipe it away, then wash your face again.” I spread a thick layer over my entire face, leaving holes for my eyes. A Halloween mask. Helen crossed her arms. “Why did you put it on?”
    I was too busy dunking my head under the tap to answer. Water flooded in and out of my nose. “You want to look like her,” she said. I didn’t deny it. “You’re too young to understand how pathetic she is. How badly she needs people to like her.” I pressed a towel to my face and inspected it in the mirror for blush and shadow. My skin was dried out from the scrubbing. “You look at her and you think that beauty is all that matters.”
    My face was clean. Colorless and uninteresting as Helen’s. Everyone could see that Adele was the superior creature: the ticket-seller at the Luther, the man who drove her home and left Helen standing smart and unwanted on the curb.
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    The night before Adele was supposed to leave, I was determined not to sleep. I sat up in bed, convinced there was some way I could stop it from happening. I’d hidden her bus ticket in the pantry, but that was only a stopgap.
    I heard Bonnie shifting in her bed. “Hey, Peter?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œThe cranes aren’t birds, are they.”
    â€œNo.”
    We sat in the dark, both of us picturing giant white birds sleeping in construction yards. Their heads were tucked under their wings, beaks harder than steel. Who would give us these visions? Who would take us to black-and-white films, let us draw on her back and wear her clothes? When Adele left, all beauty would pass from the world.
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    The sun seemed explosively bright when I woke up, though our bedside clock said it was only six o’clock. I got dressed without waking Bonnie. Her leg hung off the edge of the bed and twitched as she slept.
    I stepped silently through the hallway and the living room. Adele’s boxes and suitcases were lined up by the door, the stacks varying in height like siblings in a family portrait. They were the symbols of her leaving. They were the agents of her leaving. I was going to bury them in the ground.
    I decided to start with the heaviest box I could carry, leaving the easier boxes and the wheeled suitcases for later, when I was tired. I carried it as far as the backyard before I had to flop down. I took a moment to breathe then dragged it into the trees, digging my heels in the dirt.
    Adele would be able to dig them up later, once she’d been convinced of her mistake. The boxes were sealed with tape. The contents would stay clean. I was doing her a favor.
    In the copse of spindly birches, some of them dead but still standing, the trees were too far apart to provide much cover. I left the box between them anyway. I went back to get the metal snow shovel from where it hung behind the house. It was heavy. Another body to drag.
    It took all of my strength to lift the shovel up and drop it, point down, to the ground. It bounced off the hard earth. There