Read Online The Animal Girl by John Fulton - Free Book Online

and step out of that car or he’d kick her ass to he didn’t know goddamn where, though all he did was smash a dent into her locked door with his foot, turn around, hold his face in his hands, then kick the car again while Holly’s seated dance became more animated, her forearms raised and swinging double time and opposite the back-and-forth sway of her head, graceful, skillful in a way that my friends and I had never come close to on the dance floor. She moved in perfect sync to what Mr. Morris and all our parents felt was the frivolous, sexual beat of godless music, the sort of music his daughter locked herself into her room for hours to listen to. It wasn’t Christian, Mr. Morris knew. It wasn’t good, and so perhaps it was easier to hate his daughter for loving filth like that than to feel whatever he’d been feeling for his dead mother. He hadn’t gotten along with Holly, as the whole neighborhood knew, for the better part of a year, and his growing fatherly rage came out now as he continued to beat the hood and to curse Holly, no longer his little girl, not after she’d repeatedly sneaked out of his house at night, not after he’d caught her and an older boy he’d never met sharing a cherry Slurpee spiked with vodka at the Wilford Mall. He suspected she’d done other things, too, and so he hated her that afternoon, the dirty, rebellious girl whom his mother had always been so willing to drive around town—to the mall, where he’d caught her with that boy, to the movies, where she’d done God knew what, to soccer practice, to anywhere she’d wanted to go—which might have been the thought that made him shout, “You killed her!” And maybe it was those words that made him stop and put his head down on the hood of the car. His wife, who had been approaching the scene hurriedly from a block away—she’d been having coffee with Mrs. Eliot, the neighborhood piano teacher, and had arrived just in time to hear her husband call their daughter a killer—slowed down to learn from anearby policeman what had happened. She cupped a hand over her mouth. She shook her head. She went to her husband and held him then. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    â€œYour father says he’s sorry,” Mrs. Morris shouted at the car window so that Holly could hear her through the music.
    â€œShe won’t come out of there,” Mr. Morris told his wife.
    â€œPlease come out now, Holly!” Mrs. Morris shouted.
    â€œCome out now, Holly,” her father said.
    â€œSweetheart,” Mrs. Morris said. But Holly was gone, far away from them, and finally they had to leave her there and hold each other while the same policewoman who’d failed to lure his daughter out of her trance—or whatever she was in—asked Mr. Morris questions and had him sign papers that made him cry still more loudly. We’d come out from behind the vomity bush since nobody seemed to notice us anymore. All the same, we shouldn’t have been watching. This was private and shameful, we knew. But we couldn’t not watch. Others had gone in and Mrs. Allison came out on her porch to tell us that this “happening” wasn’t for us boys to see. We told her that we were just skating, which was sort of true. Mark Watkins was riding the nose of his board with skill and easy cockiness until his brother knocked him off and said, “Not here, dumb ass. Not now.”
    â€œShe’s fucking crazy,” Jack Rogers said.
    â€œShut up,” I said, thinking about the 200-plus points I’d scored on Holly’s ass and feeling both famous and ashamed about it. I would have fought for her then. I would have smashed Jack Rogers’s face into the ground and stood on his head to keep him from saying anything more about her. I wasn’t at all sure what I was protecting her from, and later, after what would happen between Holly and me at her