Read Online Man V. Nature: Stories by Diane Cook - Free Book Online Page B

her uneasy. This study in the past cast doubt in Linda’s mind about the girl—she couldn’t possibly be Beatrice; Linda felt little for her. At times she wondered if the man had lied to her, or mistaken this girl for another. When the children were all together, Linda watched the girls and tried to feel a yearning for them, something. She asked herself, Is that how my Beatrice would look at age six? But none of them were like the daughter she’d spent years building in her imagination. And neither was this interloper who always seemed unsure where to stand, with her sly stare and twigs in her hair.
    Some nights, after Beatrice had slipped out, Linda stood at the door and placed her hand on the lock, debated turning it. What would become of her? Linda pictured the girl returning to the sprawling house in the woods where she’d been raised, where her hiding spots were, padding across those bare floors with her dirty feet, tacking up new pictures, living like the man, collecting things in her travels, which would eventually lead to collecting children.
    These were rare times Linda felt a straightforward, understandable emotion for Beatrice. She felt pity for the girl who was far from home. But it wasn’t the same as love.
    So she took to imagining Beatrice truly roaming, undetected, wild; able to cast off the trappings of her true home and Linda’s home. Searching for a new home in the bottom of a dead tree, or maybe in a wet cave deep within a park. She’d sleep on pine boughs in the hot summer and shiver in her filthy yellow blanket in the winter.
    Linda spent long nights composing Beatrice’s adventures, obsessing over the details. She tried to convince herself they had the makings of an enviable childhood: Beatrice drinking from fountains and bathing in lakes, calling owls at night and chasing butterflies during the day, hiding from snooping dogs, raiding squirrel stashes, spying on crows, making speeches to the tallest trees, weaving weeds through her hair, drawing pictures on sidewalks with burned wood, being a princess, reading street signs like they were adventure stories, laughing with ducks who told her jokes, digging through garbage, watching, from a tree, happy families picnicking across a great lawn, and waiting for the moment when she might slip unnoticed among them as though she belonged to them and steal their lunches, then, more.

GIRL ON GIRL
    Freshman year starts, and somehow everyone is someone else, someone older, someone interested in the faraway future life. Everyone except me. I’m back from a summer at my dad’s divorce condo—decorated to seem remote and armed—and no one cares. I’m watching my old clique grind into boys on the dance floor while the male coaches-slash - civics-teachers roughly separate them, swipe at inappropriate girl parts, and get away with it in the authoritative heat of the moment. I’m watching it all, cringing, but I wish I were in the scrum.
    I want to be fondled. I want someone to press me somewhere too hard. I’m hot with shame. The good kind.
    I turn to Clara. She never talks because her parents are professors. She still wears girls’ undershirts, and she can’t quit horses. She looks about as far away from the dance as a dead star.
    â€œWhat do you think Mr. Ryan tastes like?”
    Clara turns red. I do too.
    My math teacher is breaking up a couple by getting in between them, his groin brushing a junior in a glitter skirt. He has a chestnut beard and glassy eyes. Sharp shoulders. I’m imagining inspecting the pale skin under those fine dark hairs of his forearm as he leans over my desk to tell me what x is. He must taste like just-dug rocks. My mouth waters. His calculus fingers wiggle toward me. He says I’m a ripe pear. He is very close. My ears ring. Pears are rotten.
    I smack my head to stop my dirty movie.
    That’s when I spot Marni tossing her hair around the way women do on daytime