Read Online Darren Effect by Libby Creelman - Free Book Online

irritating, but Heather ignored it, wanting to be polite.
    â€œI still have your binoculars, Mandy.”
    â€œThat’s okay, you can keep those if you want,” Mandy said in a funny voice. “Did you see anything interesting?”
    Heather tried to shake her head, but her neck had become astonishingly stiff. She hugged herself and fell forward over her knees.
    Another tug. She shook him off.
    â€œWait. I did see something interesting,” Heather said, popping back up. “I saw the Marlboro Man.”
    â€œShe’s pale, Roger.”
    â€œLet’s get you back, girl.”

Chapter Five
    â€œI’d like to write a story about desire,” Mandy told Bill.
    He paused. She had asked him to massage her shoulders, which were hard as stone. “Is this a new idea?”
    â€œNo. I’ve had it a while.”
    â€œWhat does Heather say?”
    â€œShe’s still getting over the frostbite.”
    â€œTrue. But what does that involve? It’s been weeks.” He leaned into her neck and kissed her. “I don’t know about that sister of yours.”
    â€œBill!”
    He returned his hands to her shoulders.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” she asked.
    â€œI’m not sure she likes me.”
    â€œShe’s probably jealous of you, Bill.”
    He smiled at her behind her back. Mandy, Mandy, Mandy. The world revolved around her. He kissed her neck.
    â€œBill.”
    Sometimes she looked so tiny, perched naked on the edge of their bed, complaining of neck and shoulder pain, that Bill would think, she really is not for me.
    â€œYou should have seen her feet when they finally got her shoes and socks off.”
    She had told him already. She had been thinking a lot about those feet. And about the lost girl, Suse.
    â€œHeather wouldn’t cooperate at all.”
    At the end of the day, Mandy had a few sentences, several beginnings to a poem, an idea for a screenplay.
    â€œThey looked like frozen chicken. Honest to God.”
    â€œPoor Heather.”
    â€œYou were so nice to her, Bill. You know that?”
    They were not married, and she was fifteen years younger than he was, yet her airs of wifely expertise were not unconvincing. When she was twenty-one, he had lusted after her an entire term. He wrote her ludicrous, lovesick letters, which he later discovered she had not only saved — he had specifically asked her to destroy them — but had shared with her girlfriends — other students of his.
    The result was that he didn’t entirely trust her. Before he told her anything, he asked himself, do I want this repeated?
    Heather sat in an armchair lodged between her bed and window, her feet propped on a footstool. It was now late February and she was aware that six weeks was an alarming length of time not to have dressed or left her bedroom except for perfunctory visits to the bathroom and kitchen, although there were the two trips to the hospital to have the bandages changed and then removed.
    And a couple of visits to her doctor.
    And hanging the new bird feeder from a tree in her backyard.
    Heather had not called her mother, and she had made Mandy promise not to pass on any information about the frostbite. Heather had been cool to her mother since Benny’s death, though now she could not quite understand why. She knew only that it had seemed necessary to erect a wall around herself.
    Whenever she was angry at her mother, Heather thought of her first date. Grade eleven, Justin Tucker. He worked part-timestacking shelves in the corner store where she worked the cash. She at the front of the store with the customers, he at the back with the dry goods and dairy products and sour-smelling coolers that lined the back wall. Theirs were different but complementary roles, not just in the store but in the universe. These were the thoughts she had when she was in love with him. They embarrassed her later.
    When he rang at her house for their first date,