Read Online The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham - Free Book Online

offers no apologies, ever?
    “I got into a lot of fights when I was a kid,” he says. “You know, when you move around a lot …”
    They’ve gotten there already.
    She plunks Andrew’s breakfast down in front of him. He exhales a plume of smoke through his nostrils, drapes a muscled arm around her hips.
    “You’ve always got to prove yourself,” he says.
    They’ve gotten there. With Andrew, any conversation leads eventually to reminiscence, though it usually takes longer than this. He’s the most nostalgic twenty-eight-year-old in history. His past is his holy book, his seat of wisdom, and when a question presents itself, if the question is even slightly difficult, he consults the Book of When We Moved to Phoenix or the Book of When I Spent a Whole Year in the Hospital or the Book of When I Started Doing Drugs.
    Liz plucks the cigarette from his fingertips and takes a drag, just for the sexy-momma-ness of it. Expertly, she flicks the butt into the sink.
    “Eat, child,” she says.
    “You’re not having any?”
    “I’m still too high.”
    That’s not exactly true. But now, right now, coming down, she prefers to be a hallucination she and Andrew are having together. Any demonstration of appetite would quell it.
    He chows down, doggishly pleased by food. Snow taps on the windowpanes.
    Before he can go on with the Saga of My Childhood Fights, Liz says, “When I was a little girl, I beat up everybody.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Nope. I was the terror of the third grade.”
    “I can’t picture you as that.”
    Picture it, sweetheart.
    She strokes his cropped red hair, fingers the line of silver hoops in his ear, which inspires in her a minor spasm of fondness and pity. She knows where he’s headed. She feels guilty, a little guilty, about knowing it, but what can she do? Warn him? Tell him how his blunt-faced beauty will erode; how the whole thug-saint thing works at twenty-eight, but …
    She says, “You should never be the poorest person in the neighborhood. It’s funny. My parents were so proud of our little house out on the fringes.”
    “Right …”
    “Which, as it turns out, meant sending their kids to the good school, because they’d managed to buy a house that was within the district by about ten feet.”
    “And that’s a bad thing?”
    “No. I mean, suddenly I had teachers who weren’t drunk or psychotic. But suddenly there were all these kids who hated me for being a shabby, scrawny little thing. Suddenly I showed up wearing shoes that Dora Mason actually recognized …”
    “Huh?”
    “I went to school in shoes a girl in my class had just given to the church thrift store. Which was a surprise to me. I liked the shoes a lot, they were purple, with these little buckles, I can still see them … Anyway, I guess I’d assumed that my mother would by some magic make sure she hadn’t bought me a pair of shoes that might have been the castoffs of the meanest girl in the third grade.”
    “Drag,” Andrew says.
    “A big drag. Dora naturally announces the truth about my shoes to the whole class. So I beat her up.”
    “You go.”
    “I figured, if I couldn’t be popular, the next best thing was to be scary. Which actually worked pretty well.”
    Andrew grins up at her, showing bits of breakfast caught between his teeth. How is he not grotesque? It has to do with his innocence, his cluelessness, as fate forms around him, as the future arrives in such subtle increments it’s as unremarkable as the daily mail.
    “Don’t beat me up, okay?” he says.
    “I won’t.”
    And, credible as a child, he returns avidly to his breakfast.
    She leans over and places a chaste, kindly kiss on the top of his head. Here is the smell of his scalp, the … rampancy of it, its crisp, unperfumed vitality. There’s a hint of product, some gel he uses (Duane Reade, an obscure pomade he must grab off the shelf because it’s the least expensive one), but there is also that underlayer, the smell Liz can only