Read Online Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea - Free Book Online Page A

himself upon his crooked stool and popped his eyes open. For the first time she watched the manfocus—on her. A smile ate his face, revealing rows of perfect, white teeth beneath his lips. They surprised Sophie; everything about Ronald seemed ruined; she’d expected a jack-o’-lantern’s grill, jagged and discolored as a ripped chain-link fence.
    â€œI know you.” Ronald nodded his head, happy the way a child is happy, happy at nothing, making no sense. “I know you, do you know me?”
    â€œYeah, you’re Ronald. I’d like for you to tell me where my grandmother is.”
    â€œYou don’t know me.” Ronald shook his head, his words long and mushed by his slow-motion tongue. “That’s not allowed.” Then his arm lifted, and he pointed down the hill. Away from the office her grandmother kept in an Airstream trailer beneath the only shade trees on the property. Away from where the trash grew into mountain ranges on the horizon. Sophie followed the point of his dirty finger, his nails green and fungal, toward a squat, lopsided building, a shed ringed with hulking metal barrels.
    â€œAngel,” Ronald coughed the word wetly, like something that had blocking his air passages. “She’s with Angel.”
    â€œGreat,” Sophie clipped. “Thank you.” The man began to tremble back into motion; his feet, jammed sockless into a beaten pair of sneakers, shuffled. The stool’s legs sunk deeper into the soft earth. Ronald was running in place. “Nice to see you,” he croaked. Sophie left him there, began the trek down the hill, her Vans kicking up puffs of dust that coated her bare, sweaty legs. The dump would make hergross, she thought sadly. Her nose would become accustomed to the amazing variety of foul stinks the breeze carried this way and that. The odor of swill decomposing in the sun would become as familiar to her as mown grass. She’d expect her skin to be gritty and smudged. Her hair would clump like Ronald’s into dreadlocks of grease. Just great. She comforted herself by the thought that at least no one worth caring about would see her. At least this wasn’t school, where an overslept morning could send you, disheveled, into the world of catty classmates, the world of boys Sophie just did not want to think were cute—she did not, they were jerks, most of them, serious jerks, could win medals in an international jerk competition, the cream of the jerk crop right there at Our Lady of the Assumption School in Chelsea, Massachusetts—but, they were cute. Several of them were cute. That she thought so made Sophie as mad at herself as at them, the losers. Tripping people as they passed on their way to the pencil sharpener. Sending mortified girls dashing into the bathrooms on false claims of period stains bleeding through their uniforms. Greeting everyone with the salutation, Hey, faggot! Sending phony love notes to students whose loneliness sat on their skin plain as acne. She hated them. But their cuteness was undeniable. She felt a relief at never having to see any of them during this, her punishment summer spent at the dump. She would submit to the grime, become like a feral cat wandering the heaps of trash.

Chapter 5
    S ophie saw her grandmother only a smattering of times each year, usually on holidays. Her home was dim and the furniture was old, bought new many years ago, when she had lived there with Sophie’s grandfather, before he disappeared. No one liked to talk about Papa Carl’s disappearance—it brought up in Andrea a sadness Sophie couldn’t bear to witness. It made the world seem topsy-turvy to watch her mother, so strong and harsh, be shoved to the brink of tears so abruptly, her adultness suddenly full of wobble, as if it could tip over and a little-girl Andrea would tumble out. Sophie didn’t like her mom’s bad moods but at least they were consistent, and she’d learned how