Read Online Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey - Free Book Online

eyes seemed to be watering, too. But then she just shook her head. “Don’t give me that shit,” she said, and returned to her chopping.
    The next day at school, while Georgia—bound to the cardboard rock with cardboard chains—rehearsed one of her scenes, Flora leaned over to Alex Tillman.
    “You want to know what Georgia does in her spare time?” she whispered in his ear. “She reads the encyclopedia.”

4

    Nighttimes
    I N F LORA’S LITTLE APARTMENT in the city, there were two ways in: the thick front door bejeweled with chain and bolt, and the metal-gated window that led to the fire escape. People called the country safe, but in her father’s house, every thin pane of glass on each of the ground-floor windows asked to be broken with a casually thrown rock, and every door to the outside (three total) looked a formality, a token gesture to security. Even the exterior walls felt meager, insubstantial boundaries between inside and out. The house was built in the 1860s and spoke the language of creaks and moans that all old houses speak. When the heat came on, the hot water rushing through the pipes, the house made a great fuss, letting one know how taxing one’s selfish need for warmth was on its old bones. “I like a house that tells you how it feels,” her father told her when she’d complained on a visit. “It’s letting us know it’s still with us.” But the noises were ominous. Flora heard the whispers of voices in the pipes—a steady murmuring, like a cocktail party next door she tried to ignore. Where was the line exactly between loneliness and insanity? And how would she know if—when—she transgressed?
    With the lights out, the house was impenetrable, so dark it almost ceased to exist. With the lights on, it was a giant aquarium-Flora a bottom-dwelling flounder, perfectly visible to the outside world, which was perfectly invisible to her. Anyone might be peering in, or no one, watching her as she made herself a dinner of fried eggs. That had been breakfast, and lunch, too. That was life for the time being: fried eggs.
    Soon Mrs. J. would be stopping by with Larks. Flora had called her to say she’d be happy to take him now, after she’d awakened in the night several times badly needing to pee but too terrified to leave bed. Larks was no fearsome guard dog; he was a wet-nosed tail wagger. But he was alive, another creature, a witness.
    In the country, in her father’s house newly hers, Flora felt aware of being alive to an uncomfortable degree. When people said something made them feel so alive , they seemed to mean it was a desirable state to find oneself in, a source of elation. But for Flora, feeling so conscious of her beingness was lonely, and a little gross. Being so alive was morbid; it was near death.
    “I’m having a near-death experience,” she told her mother over the phone, and it was true; death was near all right—it was her housemate. She’d called from the kitchen phone to have a little company while she ate her eggs, but the short tether of the cord reached only as far as the counter, so she ate standing up.
    As a child, she loved to play a simple word game with her mother. Her mother would say, “I’m me, and you’re you.” And then Flora would say, “No! I’m me, and you’re you.” Her mother: “Sorry, Flo. I’m me, and you’re you.” Flora: “Nooo! I’m me, and you’re you.” And so on, the game continuing indefinitely and hilariously, with no hope of resolution, Flora’s laughter increasingly hysterical. How could they both be right? Were they both me? Were they both you? Now it seemed more poignant than funny: a parent and child negotiating the murky territory between them—that border loosely patrolled, and regularly trespassed. In her father’s house, back in Darwin, who was who exactly?
    “What are you going to do up there all by yourself?” her mother asked. “I still don’t understand this plan.”
    “Plan,” Flora said. “That’s a