Ruby Read Online Free Page A

thought, the smell of falafels turning her stomach, it was better this way. Better to share the blame than to carry it all alone.
    The week between Christmas and New Year’s, as the city took on a sad holiday look—dirty snow, abandoned trees with tinsel still clinging to their branches, lights blinking foolishly—Amanda showed up at the Rose Tattoo. She came with two other girls, friends or sisters—Olivia did not know or care to know.
    “I’m in bad shape,” the girl said. “I don’t know what it is I want from you, but all week I’ve been thinking about you all alone. With the holidays and stuff.”
    She was so plain, a medium-sized girl with medium-brown hair. She wore painter’s pants and a pink ski jacket with lift tickets dangling from the zipper. Olivia saw a bright blue turtleneck, the top of the yoke of a blue-and-white Fair Isle sweater. An ordinary girl who had happened to kill David.
    One of the other girls, dressed similarly—green ski jacket, pink turtleneck, dark green sweater beneath—nudged Amanda.
    “I’m taking next semester off,” Amanda said. Olivia could see that the girl was trying to fight back tears. But still they spilled out, streaking her cheeks. “I’m going to stay with my aunt in Seattle. Maybe it will help to get away. I don’t know what to do.”
    Olivia wished she could find some words, but the only ones that bounced around her brain were: Why don’t you go jogging?
    “Amanda,” she said, her voice like a croak.
    The three girls in front of her seemed to hold their collective breath.
    “I don’t know, either,” Olivia said finally.
    They waited, but she had nothing to say. She did not forgive the girl. Or herself.
    “I brought you this,” Amanda said.
    She placed a small loaf of bread, wrapped in plastic and tied with red-and-green ribbon, on the counter.
    “It’s cranberry,” she added.
    “Thank you,” Olivia said. They both stared down at the bread until one of the girls took Amanda’s elbow.
    “I’ve got to go,” Amanda said.
    Olivia nodded.
    But Amanda didn’t go. She just stood there, still.
    “I keep thinking about you,” she said again.
    Finally, she turned and left, off to Seattle, to some life for herself. Olivia took the bread from the counter and pressed it against her nose. She smelled orange and cinnamon, the bitter scent of cranberries. The bread was still warm. Olivia breathed in its holiday smell; then she took it out back to the Dumpster and threw it away.
    Sometimes, Olivia looked out her kitchen window at the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond and imagined taking a bus out there, to Morristown, where Amanda lived. It hadn’t worked out in Seattle, the girl had written her. Now she was back home, taking Prozac, working at a bookstore. Olivia could go out there and find Amanda’s house, knock on the door, wait until she saw the girl’s bland face. But then what? She always came back to that question: then what? After all, what could a teenaged girl possibly give her that she could not give herself? How in the world, Olivia wondered, could someone so young and troubled possibly help her?

chapter two
Nouns Are the Part of Speech That Hurts
    O LIVIA JOGGED. IT was June. Hazy, hot, and humid. “The three h ’s,” the vapid weatherman had said on the sunrise weather report. He had grinned as he pointed to a drawing of a sweating yellow sun. Olivia added weathermen to her list of things that annoyed her. The list was long and growing fast. Just that morning, after driving through the night alone to get up here finally and close up the beach house, put it on the market, do what everyone had been telling her to do since David died—“Get on with your life!”—after drinking so many bitter take-out coffees that she’d been unable to sleep and instead had smeared paste on the kitchen wall and flung everything she could find up there, when she finally fell asleep on the couch, the phone woke her.
    “I hear you have a house for sale?”