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

brood. You should hear them coming down the stairs in the morning.” Bree wiped a drop of melted strawberry from the hairless expanse of her leg. “He’s not the oldest but he’s the tallest. Over the winter he got tall. And now he’s practicing all the time out in the back. Not with the other kids—by himself.”

Mari waited to see if Imogen wanted to say something. She herself was finding it hard to speak in the breathless tone that Bree seemed to expect of them. Finally she said, “I don’t think there’s anything for your parents to be worried about. That’s normal, isn’t it, for a neighbor to say hello. I say hello to our neighbors practically every day.”

Bree smiled, almost sadly, as if at Mari’s vast innocence. “This is different,” she said. “Completely different.”

“Because he took his shirt off?”

“No,” Bree said, “because of the way he looked at me.”

And how was that? (Mari didn’t add exactly but wanted to.) Bree couldn’t put it into words, she said. It was just a feeling. A back-and-forth. A spark. She frowned at the feebleness of her phrases. “This sounds arbitrary,” she said, “but it’s sort of like when you’re about to take a test and you turn it over and read the first question and immediately you know the answer, and you know it’s right? It’s that feeling in your chest when you know you know it.”

Mari felt her own chest growing tight as Bree spoke. She tossed her popsicle stick in the vicinity of the wastebasket and unexpectedly it went in. She tried summoning up the reason that Bree’s family no longer spoke to their neighbors—was it the noise? Or something about a dog? A pitbull? Nor could she quite remember where they came from, though she was pretty sure it was somewhere that started with a C. They were either Cape Verdean, or Colombian. Or maybe Cambodian.

Bree was saying, “I could tell from the way he acted that he could feel me looking at him.”

“He started missing the basket?” Imogen asked.

“Nothing that obvious. Though he did miss a few. It was more like he started walking and moving around in a different way, more slowly than before but also with more energy—”

Mari laughed abruptly. “You put a new spring in his step?”

“It was like he was slowly vibrating when he moved.” Bree’s voice was faraway, her face dignified. “And after he smiled at me, he never looked over at me. Not once. Not even when it would have been natural to glance in my direction. He made himself not look. And that’s how I could tell.”

“Well, just try not to get pregnant,” Mari said flatly.

But Bree was too happy, exalted, to even roll her eyes at this remark.

Bree didn’t get pregnant that summer, but she did end up having sex, and more than once. When Mari found out, her numb first thought was, But I was only kidding. The acceleration induced a sort of whiplash: How was it possible that Mari and Imogen, who between them had never kissed a single boy, or held hands with a boy, who didn’t really know any boys, had a friend who was now experienced at having sex?

Bree told them nothing at the time. Throughout the summer, she offered up a handful of distracting details: notes written and exchanged, with the play castle as mailbox; late-night meetings by the trash cans, parents not registering a new readiness to take out the garbage. Brief conversations on the back-porch steps; spasms at the sound of a screen door swinging open. Mari imagined a forbidden love unfolding chastely in a Revere that was gritty and poorly lit but in a picturesque way, as if Bree had been cast in a community theater production of West Side Story.

The whole time, however, actual real-life sex was being had. And not with Alex, the vaguely brown boy next door, but with Nicholas. Nicholas Pickett. Imogen’s brother was home for the summer before he went off to college, and Bree had sex with him. Or he had sex with Bree. Even years later Mari wasn’t sure, when forming the sentence in her head, who to make the subject and who the object of the preposition.

Since you’re not on FB I don’t know if you saw but no small feat getting bus up and running. Jon very handy to be fair but I gravely underestimated. Bought it for a song then fell down down down down rabbit hole of repairs. Talk about a money pit!!! Remember when we saw that movie? At Circle Cinemas. Starring Shelley Long and I can’t remember who played her husband. I think it scarred me. Seriously I have flashbacks whenever Jon starts looking at fixer uppers online believing himself secret real estate genius. Of course superior me I landed on biggest fixer upper of all. The moral is never buy school bus off Craigslist.

Imogen’s house didn’t have an ordinary backyard: what stretched behind her house was more like a woodland garden. Everything shady and dense, with only a small, irregular-shaped patch of lawn. A little creek ran through the greenery, and though you couldn’t always see it, you could always hear the trickling sound it made. The creek was so narrow you could step over it easily, but nevertheless a low stone bridge had been built. Moss grew in abundance, also ferns and hostas. A mass of rhododendron turned different shades of pink in the spring. Knee-high statues rose up at random from the undergrowth: an upright frog with arms akimbo, two cherubs grappling, a rabbit absorbed in reading a book. In the sun-speckled depths of the garden stood an obelisk and several urns.

When they were much younger, Imogen and Mari played there after school. Back then there was less statuary and a little more wilderness, also a primitive tree house and a rope swing and a short zip line. Mari was afraid of heights, afraid of insects, wary of dirt, alert to poison