Read The Boy for Free Online Page B

emerged from various chicken coops owned by friends holding not one, not two, but three sharp-beaked, crazy-eyed things lovingly in her arms, as if they were puppies.
    “Chickens stink,” Anna said.
    “But Mamma . . .”
    “They stink,” Anna said.
      
    Summer carries with it both mutiny and slumber. The heat swallows hours, entire midsections of the day, but beneath all that something always stirs, something always pulls, a kind of anarchy just below the skin, something to do with the body—what the body might want, what the body might get, should the heat hold.
    On one end of town, not far from an abandoned mill, a marquee went up for the Croquet Party, a seasonal extravaganza sponsored by a few good families on a single premise: that everyone wear white. Eva agreed to a white T-shirt over white tennis shorts. After standing in front of the closet for a long time, Anna pulled out a short thing with a zipper down the back.
    Ree called. “What are you wearing?”
    “A short dress.”
    “How short?”
    “Roughly ten centimeters above the knee.”
    “I don’t do centimeters.”
    “I don’t do inches.”
    “Does it cover your ass?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “Remain standing. Defy gravity and remain standing,” which Anna did, in exactly the same spot, with a great many people swirling around until the crowd parted along some preordained diagonal and Richard Strand approached, son in tow.
    “Anna,” Richard said, leaning in for a kiss, “you remember my son Jack.” And before she could take up arms, before she could conceive of a defense, never mind raise one, Anna felt something turn in the middle of her—a slow movement just below the heart.
    “Of course,” she said, trading a casual nod for a burning stare.
    “She’s jumped ship,” Richard Strand told his son. “I haven’t seen her since the mojito party.”
    “She’s been keeping the hell away,” said the boy.
    “She’s been keeping the hell away?” Richard Strand inquired mildly. His son nodded.
    “You’ve been keeping the hell away?” asked Richard.
    “Me?” said Anna, her eyes on the shimmering crowd, a ghost of a smile on her lips.
    “Yes, you,” said the boy.
    She fixed him with cold eyes. “Richard,” she said, “this is the second time your son has forgotten his manners.”
    Richard Strand turned to his son. “You’ve been disrespectful?”
    The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. What’s disrespectful?”
    “There are very clear standards,” said Anna. “Very, very clear standards.”
    “Show them to me,” said the boy.
    “There are rules,” Anna snapped. “Rules of conduct, rules of behavior. There is a stratified order from which you are not exempt.”
    “A what?”
    “A stratified order.”
    Richard Strand laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Son, answer the question. Have you been disrespectful?”
    “Depends.”
    “On what?”
    “On what she wants,” and for some reason, in the tempest of blood raised by the son, it was to the father Anna turned.
    “You’ve got a problem,” she said. “A very big problem.”
    Richard Strand looked at her out of clear eyes. “My son has never been a problem,” he said, so after a moment of clerical silence, Anna left them both standing under the marquee muttering, “motherfucker,” as she went.
    The boy was everywhere that night, everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, curse and apparition, apparition and curse, shoulders broad and loose beneath his T-shirt, hips fine and narrow in his jeans. Anna called on the moon repeatedly for help, a low, lazy moon in the lowest quadrant of the sky at first; a hard, distant globe glaring down on human folly by the end. Tight in her skin, hot in her head, she resolved a thousand times to leave but didn’t. Every time she looked up, he was there, his eyes fixed knowingly on hers.
    It was infuriating. The boy’s relationship to the ground was so smooth, the core of him so casually aligned with the visible and invisible