Read Online Party Girl by Lynne Ewing - Free Book Online Page A

respect for Ana. She didn’t want Amelia in the life.”
    Pocho took off his jeans and fell back on the bed. He lifted one leg onto the mattress, then the other. I turned off the lamp. The light from passing cars and the glow from the neon sign of a taco stand on the corner lit the room, giving it a strange red cast.
    After a while Pocho whispered, “Kata?”
    “What?”
    “I didn’t mean to hurt the puppy.” His words struggled from his throat. “What makes me do what I do?”
    I shook my head against the pillow. “Why do any of us do what we do? We don’t have many choices here.”
    “I didn’t mean to,” Pocho said, and stared at the ceiling. He was silent for a long time, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he spoke softly, his words filling the room with sadness. “I wonder if this is the way guys feel in war,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”
    “I know,” I whispered. “I don’t want to die either.”
    He took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Why didn’t she love me?”
    I covered Pocho and put my arms around him. His skin felt cold, and he was shivering. I didn’t think I could ever warm his body. Then I realized he wasn’t shivering. He was crying like he had when we were little kids alone in thedark in my room. His sorrow scratched against his lungs and chest, sounding like a small bird trying to escape his body and soar to another world.
    Knowing each other’s hurts made us close but also drove us apart. It’s hard to pretend you’re strong around someone who’s seen you at your weakest. Usually we needed to feel strong more than we needed each other.
    Pocho pulled away from me. The movement was so sudden I thought he had changed his mind and decided to leave.
    “I feel like someday I’m going to run past the edge into the darkness, and I won’t come back,” he said.
    “You’ll come back,” I said. “You’ll always come back.”
    He slipped his hands behind his head and stared at the passing car lights brushing the darkness across the ceiling.
    “I can feel it waiting for me,” he said. “Something black and ugly. It makes me jealous of that puppy.”
    “How can you be jealous of a dog?”
    “’Cause I’ve been thinking about death, you know, ’cause of Ana, and I keep thinking about hell and what’s going to happen to me when I die. That little puppy just dies. I mean, it’s just gone and it doesn’t feel no more when it dies, but me, I got to go to hell and spend eternity in flame.”
    “No, you don’t,” I said. “It’s not your fault you live here. God knows that.”
    He paused and took in a deep breath, his chest risinghigh under the covers. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I go back in my mind to when I was three or four and I start living my life forward, thinking how different I’d do everything. Do you think I could have made anything different?”
    “Things happen for a reason,” I said. “Maybe we don’t figure that part out until after.”
    “When we’re with God.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “You know,” he said, “I try to think of death like a phone call. Like I’ve just hung up with Ana. She’s still there. I just can’t talk to her because the connection is gone.”
    “Yeah,” I said, feeling that dull pain in my chest again.
    His shoulders shuddered, and he made a strange sound, a hiccup like he was trying to swallow back a sob. “But I don’t want an invisible Ana,” he said.
    “I know,” I said.
    We lay in the dark a long time, not saying anything, watching lights and shadows change as cars passed outside my window.
    Finally he spoke. “Kata, would you scratch my back?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Remember when we were niños?” Pocho said.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “You was so mean to me,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I was mean to you.”
    “You taught me how to fight good,” he said.
    “It was the only way you were going to survive in our neighborhood,” I said.
    He was silent for a long time.