Read Online Adelaide Piper by Beth Webb Hart - Free Book Online Page B

Tennessee.”
    â€œGood grief!” Dizzy shouted. She maniacally caressed the cigarettes in her backpack with the tips of her black-painted nails and asked to go to the bathroom. Daddy gave her one stern look because he knew what she was up to.
    â€œIf I ever catch you with one of those in your mouth, I’ll tan your hide, Dizzy! Now, hand ’em over!”
    She pulled out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and he snatched them with his good hand and threw them in the trash can behind him.
    â€œYou might think you’re a renegade,” he said to her angry eyes, “but I’ll have you tamed yet, and we can do it the hard way or the easy one. That much of it is up to you, sister.”
    No one moved for a few seconds so that his point could sink into her hard head.
    Then Lou whimpered, “Can I g-get a Co-Co-Cola, Daddy?”
    â€œMe too!” Dizzy added, taking her eyes away from his.
    â€œOkay. Co-Colas and Nabs for everyone; then we’ve got to head back down the mountain and get on the interstate if we’re going to get Adelaide to her convocation on time.” And then he added, “If the air-conditioning is broke, no one at this place can fix it, so I need y’all to press on without it.”
    Back down the parkway we went, with Mama reorganizing her maps so that we could make up the lost time on the interstate. Daddy and my sisters were quiet, enjoying the sweet, dark bubbles and peanut-butter crackers that rolled down their throats. When we crossed over into Virginia, I marveled at the runaway truck ramps on our way through the mountains. Could a truck get going so fast that it needed a runaway ramp to slow it down? I scribbled this notion down in my journal as a metaphor for a future poem.
    Dizzy was like a runaway truck, speeding out of control by way of drinking and smoking and dressing in funeral attire, and Daddy would step up to serve as the ramp that she needed to stop her in her tracks.
    As for me, I was still a parked truck that had never left the lot. Sure, I’d had my minor run-ins with Averill and the no-goods and my romantic night with Luigi Agnolucci, but all in all, my life had been mostly uneventful. I had a tank full of gas, but what I needed was for someone to turn the ignition key and get me rolling. Surely college would lift the heavy speedometer needle of my boring life above the 0.

4
    Orientation
    A handsome, towheaded boy met us with a clipboard as we entered the campus gates. The grounds were lush and manicured, and the air was refreshingly crisp. Nathaniel Buxton University transcended the August heat, and the cool air that spilled through the open car windows left goose bumps on our arms and legs.
    We looked like the Griswolds with the full-sized storage box on top of the station wagon and our carload of frowning faces. I could see the boy grimace as Daddy awkwardly put out his left hand (the good one) to say, “I’m Zane Piper, young man.”
    â€œBo Hagerty, student council vice president,” he responded before glancing in to pick me out of the group.
    â€œBrought the whole family with you?” he said with a half grin, his straight white teeth standing out against his tan skin. He looked as if he had spent the summer on a beach.
    He scanned down his list until he found my name. “You’re on the third floor of Tully, Miss Piper.” Then he pointed the way around the bend to the freshman dormitory.
    â€œThank you,” I called from the backseat, but he was already talking to the inhabitants of a sleek Range Rover that had pulled up behind us. (He was so not South Carolina!)
    â€œBo Hagerty is Beauregard,” I said to Dizzy with a thump on her knee as we made our way around the bend. We had always been able to find a common ground when it came to good-looking boys.
    â€œIf you like the preppy, stuck-up type,” she said, still licking her wounds from the Exxon episode. She seemed envious of my