Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

had short brown hair and the long, waistless torso of a dachshund. On the first day of school, she appeared in a teal sweatshirt violently spattered with paint, a top that Mrs. Schmidt said was jazzy. It looked store-bought, not homemade, like something she had saved up for.

Bree took the trolley to school from a town called Revere with the help of a student transportation pass that hung from a lanyard around her neck, which she removed every morning and tucked carefully in her book bag as she was entering the building. In the locker room, Mari had overheard some girls pronouncing Revere as “Ruh-vee-ah” in order to amuse each other, and this was how she learned that Revere was an undesirable place, inhabited by locals who couldn’t tell how thick their accents were. But Bree didn’t say it that way; she spoke quickly and correctly and without any accent at all, participating in class with palpable happiness no matter what the subject was. She was “bright,” Mari saw early on, which was probably what made her interesting to Imogen. Any girl at their school was smart enough to be there, or at least well-organized, but not many of them, not even a few of them, had an air of intensity.

To be clear, Bree wasn’t excessively studious or preoccupied with cerebral pursuits, and Imogen and Mari weren’t, either. They didn’t read Russian novels or follow current events or dismantle electronics to figure out how they worked. Together they circled the mall and talked about their teachers and occasionally stopped to go inside a store and touch things that they wanted to buy. They ate swirled frozen yogurt and then watched a blockbuster movie full of French kissing and shoot-outs. But if, for instance, the sight of a botanical rendering of lavender wrapped around a bar of soap should suddenly fill Mari with a rich, heady, Eleanor of Aquitaine feeling, and if later she went home and pulled off the cookbook shelf an illustrated guide to medieval herbs from which she painstakingly copied out on little sheets of paper the properties and uses of yarrow, chamomile, mugwort, and horehound, and then dipped the sheets of paper in tea and dried them outside so as to make them look more like parchment, neither Imogen nor Bree would wonder at it. Not that they would ever do the same; they weren’t excited by herbs. It’s just that they would recognize, wordlessly, the impulse to do so.

That’s what the three of them had in common. Otherwise, Mari and Bree were short while Imogen was tall. Imogen and Bree were white and Mari was Japanese. Bree lived in Revere and Imogen and Mari did not. Their differences were evenly distributed, yet when Mari glimpsed a reflection of them gliding past a department store’s plate-glass window, she saw with perfect clarity that Imogen belonged to another species altogether, like a wood elf among dwarves, or a human escorting hobbits. Her hair shone in the muted light pouring down through the atrium. Her shoulders were pulled back, and her neck was long. When she laughed, she opened her mouth wide and you could see practically every one of her straight, gleaming teeth. She didn’t have a single cavity. However sometimes her breath up close could smell a little bit sour, a detail you’d have to be her best friend to know, because to the rest of the world she was just a radiant creature passing by, laughing, her head floating well above the other two.

What did they talk about?

“They’re making us do the mile-run next week.”

“Who told you?”

“Coach Bell.”

“I love Coach Bell. I wish we had her more often.”

“I can’t do it. I will die. I will collapse from exhaustion, and then they’ll try to revive me on the side of the field and realize I’m dead.”

“What if we walk? Like speed walk? Or jog very slowly and then walk?”

“Last year I tried that but Coach Boudreau threatened me and said she’d make me do the whole mile over again if I didn’t start moving.”

“‘Moving with a greater sense of urgency.’”

“That’s why you guys always say that?”

“She got the second-fastest time in the grade. And she had a cold.”

“Shannon was so much faster than me, it wasn’t even close.”

“I don’t like being timed. It makes me feel like a racehorse.”

“I’m more like a cow. Cows move at their own pace.”

“We should tell them we’re cows and that running is not in our nature.”

“Running for a mile. That’s dangerous for a cow.”

“Don’t say that. You’re not cows. You’re more graceful than cows.”

And so on.

Mari hadn’t had a new friend in so long that she had almost forgotten what it was like to go to someone’s house for the first time, the inevitable shock to the senses. The smell most of all, not unpleasant but unfamiliar. The school year was nearly finished before Bree invited them over, and it turned out that she lived on the right side of a graying clapboard house that had an identical left side where a different family lived. A flight of concrete stairs rose from the sidewalk, and at its top was a shallow concrete porch, and there on either side stood two front doors, exactly symmetrical even down to their storm-door handles, which meant that one door opened up to the left and the other one to the right. Squashed behind the storm door on the left was a scarecrow holding a sign that said WELCOME in autumn colors. “We don’t talk to them anymore,” Bree whispered as she extracted her lanyard, which in addition to her trolley pass held her house keys. “Long story.”

She opened the door and out leapt the smell of her house, indefinable but strong, a little reminiscent of chicken noodle soup in a can. Soon enough it went away. Bree had cable TV, tropical fish, and a toilet lid covered in burgundy carpet. The three of them bargained over which channel they would watch, and