Read The Window for Free Online

perfect and polite and without one bit of niceness. The voice of the kind of woman who will pry right into me.
    "Now," she says, "you're Emma's niece? I don't remember ever meeting your mother." She makes it a question that has to be answered.
    I wish I could wrap my arms around my insides, keep her eyes off my mom and me and my privacy.
    "Emma is my great-aunt," I say. "But it sounds silly to call her Great-aunt Emma, so I say Aunt Emma..." I hear myself babbling, but I can't stop. "You've never met my mother. We never got down here."
    Dinner is awful.
    It's in a dining room, with a cloth on the table, and Hannah's parents are both there and her little brother. And nobody says a word about how nice the table looks, so I know this isn't just for company.
    The food's spaghetti, which is hard for me to manage because of the sauce, and I eat very slowly and carefully, cutting small sections. Once Hannah reaches over and does something to my plate, and another time her mother whispers, "Hannah," and Hannah whispers, "Mandy, use your napkin."
    Her father wants to know about the equipment I've got, and I get talking about how the school computer has an add-on that synthesizes speech, how whatever is on the screen is read out loud. It really is a neat machine, and he seems interested.
    But then Hannah's little brother says, "Those computer voices are so bad," and he's right, of course.
    After dinner Hannah and I go to her room, where she turns on some music, tosses a cushion at me, and says, "So, want to hear about Ted?"
    "Ted?"
    "Or anybody else. I thought maybe you've been around long enough you must be getting people sorted out. That maybe you'd have questions about them?"
    "Or about you?" I say, I guess a little mean. But I am curious about this Hannah who lives in a perfectly clean house. Hannah, who is all the things I've never been, even nice. "That Ryan that Charla talked about, he's your boyfriend?"
    "Yeah, sort of. No. I don't know."
    "He's the guy who scored all those points today?"
    "Yeah."
    "Figures," I say, but she goes on like she doesn't hear me.
    "We're friends. It just makes it easier if we say we're a couple. Takes the pressure off, from everybody else, I mean."
    I think about that. Nod like I know what she means, even though I'm not sure.
    "Did you have a boyfriend," she asks, "before you came here?"
    "You mean when I could see?" But Hannah lets that pass, too, and I've got to think of a better answer.
    "There wasn't really time," I say. "Mom and I moved around a lot."
    "Maybe you'll find one here," she says.
    "Ted?"
    "He's good-looking." She puts a bowl in my lap. "Popcorn, made it last night."
    "Would you go out with Ted?" I ask.
    "No. But not why you're thinking. He's so smart he scares me. And it's hard to tell when he's joking."
    Yeah.
    We talk for a while, then Hannah has me move over so she can reach under her bed. "Ever play with a Ouija board?" she asks. "We can get us both boyfriends."
    I hear her click off the light. "It works better in the dark. There's enough moonlight to read the letters."
    Then Hannah shows me how to rest my fingers on the plastic disk. She says in this phony fortune-teller voice, "Oh tell us, Great Ouija, who will Mandy's love be?"
    Nothing happens. Hannah whispers, "Just wait."
    I wait, feeling foolish at first, and then holding in giggles and trying to make myself believe.
    The marker wiggles right, joggles left, suddenly moves fast three or four inches.
    "It's stopped on
X
," says Hannah. "Mandy, concentrate."
    Her mother opens the door. "Hannah," she begins, "why don't you find something Mandy can...," but switches to, "Don't stay up late, girls."
    "We won't," Hannah says. We wait for the door to close before we go back to the Ouija.
    The board tells us Hannah is going to marry someone with the initials B. T. S., and we can't think of anybody at school with those initials unless it's Boone Simon. Hannah says nobody would ever marry Boone Simon, who never takes a shower, and