What Curiosity Kills Read Online Free Page B

phase, but they should know that such a phase will never come. When you've lived the lives Octavia and I lived before we were adopted, you've been punished enough. Nowadays, you do what you're told. You are grateful for parents who love you (or even tough-love you). You are grateful for corny TV shows, for a roof over your head, and beds—even if those beds are bunk beds and y'all are sixteen.
      My sister whispers, "Go to sleep, and cover your face with your pillow. I've got a debate against Nightingale tomorrow, and I am not catching your germs."
      "I'm not sick."
      "Okay, Britney, then you are delusional."
      "Am not."
      "You have a fever."
      "Do not! I'm just warm. Like I've got a mohair sweater on and can't take it off."
      Octavia says, "Thanks so much for the gory details. The flu is all I need tomorrow when I argue whether Harry Potter is a threat to Christianity."
      "You're not going to catch anything! There's nothing to catch."
      "How do you know?"
      "I don't know. I just know. It's like a lisp. You can't catch a lisp."
      Octavia laughs. "People pick up other people's accents all the time. You go all backwoods when you talk to Kathryn Ann."
      "Kathryn Ann's from Mississippi, not Alabama."
    "Southern is Southern."
    "This ain't a debate."
    "See, there's that accent. You get angry, out it cuh-hums."
      See? Jugular. I try: "Maybe I've got allergies. You can't catch allergies."
      "You don't have allergies." Octavia insists. "You'd be sneezing or breaking out in hives or your throat would close up. Allergies are all about dying or phlegm. Besides, you've never had them. What crossed your path in the last twenty-four hours that's never crossed it before?"
      Other than the deli cat, I can't think of anything. Like the rest of my sister's opponents (no matter what color their cardigans), I roll over and concede.

    ***

    I wake up at 3:00 a.m. I don't have to pee. I didn't have a bad dream. I'm not hot. I haven't gotten too cold. I am simply wide awake in what is officially the middle of the night. It is dead quiet.
      Unlike every other room in our apartment, ours is the only one that faces the courtyard—which isn't a courtyard, really, but the back service area. Instead of a metal fire escape, you step out of our windows onto an 8-by-14-foot cement landing. The landing connects to a long, unsafe row of cast iron steps that lead down to a cement pit bordered by tall brick walls. Over those walls are B-sides of four three-story town houses.
      When our second-floor neighbor gets off the elevator with her five Shih Tzus, you can hear them yipping from our living room. In my parents' room, you hear our aging upstairs neighbor's TV when she falls asleep. Mom and Dad wake up having learned odd facts by osmosis about catfish noodling and 198-pound tumors with teeth. In our kitchen, for two hours every afternoon, you hear our second-floor opera-singer neighbor practice her scales. Scales are not La Traviata. Scales are shorthand for shrieking. When Octavia and I moved in, we thought this place was haunted.
      But in our room, you rarely hear anything other than rain against the metal air-conditioning unit. About four times a year, we hear a doorman sweep stuff off the landing. You'd be amazed at what the so-called Upper East Side elite toss out their windows for fear of discovery: cigarettes and condoms.
      The only other time anyone else is back there is when the exterminator comes to clear the rat traps. No building exists without vermin in this city. Mice and rats don't care if you reside squarely in the center of the 10021 zip code. If there is a way in, they will get in. Once, we caught a mouse that had eaten a hole through a Wonder Bread bag on our kitchen countertop. When we found its chewed entryway around the dishwasher drain pipe and stuffed a Brillo pad into it, my dad said to us girls, "Don't look so relieved. Where there's one, there's a hundred."
      I imagine a