Read Online Beach Girls by Luanne Rice - Free Book Online Page A

wondering what could be making a beach girl cry on such a beautiful day.
     
    AS BABIES,
crows, blue jays, and starlings were insectivores. Their parents would catch mosquitoes and gnats, eat them, and regurgitate them. Their offspring would grow, eventually turning into omnivores, the goats of the avian world: birds that would eat anything. Stevie credited her editor for that bit of knowledge: Ariel Stone was a stickler for scientific details, and she loved emotional love stories. The combination made her a great editor—and had led her to push Stevie into writing
Crow Totem.
    “Crows are intensely loyal,” she said to the baby, quoting from her own book, trying to get the bird to eat a crushed fly. “Did you know that?”
    The bird refused to budge, or open its beak. Tilly hovered outside the bedroom, scratching at the door. Stevie wondered how refined the bird's responses were, whether he registered the noises as direct threats upon his young life. She kept trying, until finally—perhaps trying to squawk—the bird opened his beak, and she shoved the fly in.
    “There you go,” she said. “Wasn't that good?”
    It must have been, because the baby opened wider, and she dropped in a pair of mosquitoes and another fly, snagged in a spiderweb by the back door. Country life, she thought . . . Trumpet vines, hummingbirds, spiderwebs, a motherless crow: nature at her back door, inspiration to do her work.
    “This is for you, Emma,” she said, giving the baby crow another dead fly.
    Emma would have laughed at that. “Thanks, Stevie,” she'd have said. “A dead fly.” She'd had a strange, dark sense of humor. Stevie spun back in time . . . the warm breeze brought it all to the fore.
    The air on their skin, driving in Stevie's convertible Hillman, on their way to pick up Maddie at the New London train station, coming back from visiting her aunt in Providence. Two sixteen-year-old girls, wearing wet bathing suits under T-shirts, damp hair blowing in the wind—nothing could have torn them away from the beach, except the arrival of their friend.
    Downtown New London had been different back then. Crumbling beauty and abject poverty had defined the old whaling town. Driving along Bank Street, they'd seen a homeless woman curled up in a doorway across from the Custom House.
    “We have to help her,” Stevie had said, pulling over. The woman had cracked skin and dirty clothes. Her hair was matted, unwashed. A shopping cart from Two Guys held her belongings.
    “And do what?” Emma had asked. “Pick her up and take her back to the beach?”
    “Yes, and feed her,” Stevie had said.
    The two friends had stared at each other, Emma realizing that Stevie was serious. Their families were very different. Stevie's father taught Stevie that all human beings were connected, and that art and poetry held them together. Emma's parents taught her that life was one big case of keeping up with the Joneses: you looked at your neighbors not to help them, but to judge how well you were doing in relation to them. Emma gently took Stevie's hand.
    “I love you,” she said. “But you are a crackpot.”
    “No, Em—we have to . . .”
    “Don't you know that there are ways . . . and there are ways? That's what
charity
is for. My mother taught me that . . .” Emma trailed off, the unspoken, unfinished, mournful part of the thought being that Stevie didn't have a mother to teach
her
. “Suburbia isn't built for people like her, not even passing through. Can't you imagine the beach ladies flipping out? No—we have to help her here, on her own turf.”
    “So we can just go back to the beach and forget her?”
    “Yes—and that's not mean, Stevie. We'll buy her some food, and she'll be better off. And then we'll go back home.”
    Stevie remembered feeling sick.
People like her:
had Emma really said that? Yet Emma's desire to help seemed real. She patted her pockets for money. Stevie looked through her purse. They had six-fifty between