Read Online Little Blue Lies by Chris Lynch - Free Book Online

believable even when you’re trying. And that one was just lifeless.”
    We both laugh at my lameness. Then he drifts behind and sticks the butt of his racket into the small of my back like a gun.
    â€œCome on, you,” he demands, “make a move. Or else.”
    I almost wish it were as simple as a shotgun life.
    We walk more or less like this all the way back to my place. Not the gun-in-my-back part, but still in the style of escorted prisoner. I don’t know what’s in it for him—a laugh, probably—but for me it serves the purpose of allowing me to be on my own without being alone. Good man, Malcolm.
    â€œThanks, man,” I say, pivoting in front of my house in a crisp, military way that says clearly there will be no invitation inside. Even though he deserves one. Even though I could really use him. “I had fun.”
    â€œYeah,” he says. “Fun. It’s written all over your face.” He points at my face, in case I’ve forgotten where it is.
    â€œReally?” I say.
    â€œNo,” he says. “You look like flaming crap, Oliver.”
    That’s crossing a Rubicon there. Even my parents almost always call me O, or Son, or something like that. If I get called by my actual name once every six days, that’s going at quite a clip, and since Malcolm hasn’t been around, the clip has been clipped to nearly nothing at all. It always means something when he uses it, even if I rarely know exactly what that something is.
    â€œI don’t,” I say with exactly the conviction a flaming-crap face would give it.
    He puts all the tennis gear down, right there on the sidewalk,where any old type of harm could come to his precious racket—also a blue-moon occurrence. He puts both hands heavily on my shoulders.
    â€œGo inside. Watch a movie. Eat. Have a bath. Google yourself. Google yourself until you go blind, in fact. Then change the sheets, have another bath, or maybe a shower this time. Then get some real sleep. You need a shave and a haircut. Don’t do those things for yourself. Tomorrow a.m. I’ll come by and we’ll go get buffed up, all right? Sound good? All right?”
    I’m thinking about all the various constituent parts of that plan, or at least I’m trying to think of the various constituents.
    â€œAll right,” I say.
    But truth is, all I can hear inside is Junie Blue, Junie Blue, Junie Blue, Junie Blue echoing like a cuckoo’s call around the vast forest of my skull.
    Mal collects up his stuff and walks off silently.
    â€œThank you so much, Malcolm,” comes the whisper-voice from behind the screen.
    â€œJesus, Mom!” I snap, and march inside.

Four
    Malcolm was right about my being pathetic. He must have been. Otherwise why would I have gone into the house and followed his instructions to the letter? Most of them, anyway, as I was pretty tired and too distracted to be really up to much.
    â€œAppearance is half your problem, O,” he says as we turn onto Ocean Boulevard. “Maybe even more than half.”
    â€œIs that so?” I say.
    â€œThat is so. Trust me, you’re gonna be a new man after this. Then you can dispose of that old man you got going there, because he frankly stinks.”
    â€œSo, a trip to Santo’s is going to change everything?”
    â€œEverything.”
    This is a remarkably bold claim, since not only has this establishment had previous opportunities to make a new man of me, but it is as responsible as any other place in the world for the me that I already am. On the outside, that is.
    I got my first ever haircut at Santo’s. I don’t remember it, but I know this to be true, because I got all of my haircutshere, and the first haircut I do remember, I was maybe four years old and Santo himself hauled out this wooden plank and laid it across the arms of the barber chair to make a booster seat because even with the chair pumped up as high as it could