Read Online South of Broad by Pat Conroy - Free Book Online

aristocracy. The Barnwells, the Smythes, the Sinklers, all that and more. So very much more, Mr. Nothing King. The blood of the founders of the colony flows through these veins. But my children are hideous disappointments to me. They poison everything they touch.”
    Mrs. Poe stopped in midstream that was half-genealogy and half-tirade and finished off a drink in a cut-glass tumbler. Then she placed her nose against the screen door leading to the piazza and said, “I think I’m going to puke.”
    She did not puke, but she did fall through the screen door and straight into my arms. I caught her, stumbled once, then righted myself and lifted her off the piazza floor, where she would have suffered some severe damage to her face. Sheba and Trevor both cried out, then together we carried their mother to her upstairs bedroom. The furniture we passed smelled newly out of the box, cheap copies of antiques, even the four-poster, rice-planter bed we laid her upon. The twins seemed undone that I had witnessed this humiliating event. But I was feeling heroic for catching their mother as she popped through her front door, invoking the infield fly rule and declaring her immediately out, and carrying her out of sight before anyone on the street could report the event.
    Back at the front of the steps, Sheba grabbed my hand and asked, coming very close to begging: “Please, Leo, don’t tell anyone what you just saw. This is our last year in high school and we can’t take much more.”
    “I won’t tell a soul,” I said, and meant it.
    Trevor said, “This is our fourth high school. Our neighbors can only take so much of this. Mom is capable of far worse.”
    “I won’t even tell my mother and father,” I said. “Especially not them. My mother’s your new high school principal, and my father will teach you physics this year.”
    “You won’t allow this to hurt our newfound friendship,” Sheba said, close to tears.
    “I won’t let anything hurt our friendship,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
    “Then let’s start with some truth. Just a little dab,” Trevor said. “My mother is from Jackson, Wyoming. We last lived in Oregon. You don’t want to know a thing about my father. Mama doesn’t have a drop of Charleston blood. And my sister is one of the greatest actresses who ever lived,” Trevor continued.
    That’s when Sheba astonished me by falling silent, wiping her eyes with her fingers, and giving me the most dazzling smile. “But that’s all part of the secret too. No one can know that either.”
    “I won’t tell a soul,” I repeated.
    “You’re an angel,” the newly composed Sheba Poe said, kissing me gently, becoming the first girl ever to kiss me on the lips. Then Trevor kissed me lightly on the lips too, and sweetly, causing me much greater surprise.
    At the bottom of the steps, I turned back toward the twins, not wanting to walk out of their presence just yet: “None of this happened. Simple as that.”
    “Some of it happened, paperboy,” Trevor said as he went back into the house, but his sister lingered.
    “Hey, Leo Nothing King. Thanks for being in the neighborhood. And by the way, Leo, it’s not just my good looks that will make you fall in love with me. You’re not going to believe how nice I am, kiddo.”
    “You could be mean as hell and ugly as sin, Sheba Poe,” I said. “But I’d still fall in love with you.” I waited several beats, then added, “Kiddo.”
    Floating back to my house, I realized I had never said anything like that to a girl, ever; I had flirted with a girl for the first time. A changeling self crossed that street as I skipped toward my house, having been kissed by both a girl and a boy for the first time.

CHAPTER 3
Yacht Club
    I t was the noonday hour, under a man-eating Charleston sun, the air so full of humidity it made me wish for a set of gills beneath my earlobes. I walked into the main dining room of the Charleston Yacht Club for the luncheon my mother had ordered