Read Invitation to a Bonfire for Free Online Page B

piece of potato pinched between my fingers.
    â€œHow very European ,” she said, at last, making it clear that she did not consider Europeanness a compliment. After that, I endured several days of girls piping up in the halls with whatever little foreign phrase they could pin down, their aim so broad that I got as much Parlez-vous français? and Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? as I did hearty shouts of Comrade! accompanied by punishingly affable smacks on the back. Only Margaret kept out of it, responding with a mild shrug to any comments made about me in earshot of her.
    We all talked about ourselves in terms of colors and seasons that year, a game thought up by a rising senior that quickly spread throughout the school: I was a spring, what with my light hair and the green undertone of my skin. Margaret considered herself a winter, but she was more accurately late fall. Soft browns, mustard yellows, certain shades of roseate pink all set off her skin and hair, turning her from a spirited girl into a kind of forest nymph. She tied her loose curls back in a ponytail, or let them tumble down over her shoulders with delicate twists pinned up behind her ears. She often wore tartan skirts and polished oxfords, pressed white shirts with pearl buttons that somehow managed not to look too sweet. In vain I tried to read her like my personal Rosetta Stone, but no matter what I did to emulate Margaret, it wasn’t enough. My true self always leaked through to the surface, sometimes frightening even me.
    10.
    â€œYou.”
    I was in the library one late-winter afternoon, grinding my teeth and trying to read Schopenhauer in an English translation. Marie’s caf é had seemed, for once, too far to walk, in part because the wind that day was so frigid and sharp I felt sure it could peel the bark off trees and the skin off my back. But also, I had woken up with an unfamiliar nesting instinct. Stay close , I thought. Stay here. Stay home. So I’d hunkered down in a study carrel, twisting myself into a tight ball of irregular verbs and borrowed pessimism. When the tap came on my shoulder I jerked around, knocking my book off the table and startling the girl I found standing behind me into taking a step back.
    Cindy Pink was a peripheral friend of Margaret’s who also happened to be in my math class. In general she spent a lot of time managing her cuticles, nibbling them until they bled or pushing them back with a small black emery board. You could judge her mood that way: if her nails were ragged, then class work was going poorly, or else she’d gotten into a fight with her mother, angry missives arriving by mail and the phone ringing off the hook in the dorms. There was a lot of gossip about it because sometimes those fights ended with Cindy receiving apologetic fruit baskets that she parceled out to her suitemates. That day, however, her hands were neat, with a thin layer of clear polish giving her naturally pink nail beds an extraterrestrial gleam. She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded to me.
    â€œHey, you,” she said again. “Are you busy? What are you doing right now?”
    â€œStudying?” I looked at my book, splayed out on the floor. “Why?” No one really talked to me, as a rule, except in class or else to tell me that the loose buttons on the side of my skirt had come undone. And even then, sometimes girls just poked their fingers through the hole to my stockinged leg, looking up at me as if to ask, Well?
    Cindy pursed her lips and glanced down at one hand, inspecting the glossy manicure there. She seemed conflicted. “You’re kind of weird, right?”
    â€œI’m not sure I know what you mean.”
    â€œSure you do.” Her hair was black and straight: she was a true winter, with pale blue eyes she narrowed at me, now. “You’re a spooky one. You know,” she gestured around her head, as if chasing off a cloud of gnats. “Woo-woo. So