Read Online The Cybil War by Betsy Byars - Free Book Online Page A

go,” he muttered.
    Tony clapped him on the back, almost sending him to his knees on the sidewalk. “I’ll tell them it’s all set.”
    â€œYes, tell them that.”
    Tony hurried off, leaving Simon alone. Simon kept standing there. All week he had been trying to prevent Cybil from looking at Tony—just from looking at him—and while he was congratulating himself on his success, he learned that somehow, without those looks, they had arranged a date. It was like the enemy taking the castle without the moat.
    He turned around on the sidewalk like a person starting a game of blindman’s bluff.
    Slowly he began to make his way home. He walked like an old man trying to get used to new glasses. He tripped over curbs, tree roots, blades of grass.
    It was, he decided, like Camp Okiechobie again, being led blindly to the toilets by Mervin Rollins. He could almost hear Mervin calling in his clear, young voice, “There are no daddy longlegs on the toilet seat.”
    And when he got home at last and sank down on the front steps, he even thought he heard, once again, the silken sigh of crushed daddy longlegs.
    The fact that he had now, without even trying, written an absolutely perfect sad sentence—I have a date with Harriet Haywood—was no comfort at all.

An Hour of Misfortune
    S imon stood by his bed looking out the window. It was dark, but he had not turned on the light.
    On this, the evening before his date with Harriet Haywood, darkness seemed appropriate. All day, as he had sat in school with his head down—never looking up once to see if Tony was looking at Cybil or Cybil looking at Tony or, worse, if Harriet Haywood was looking at him —he had wished for darkness.
    Now that the miracle had happened, he could not enjoy it. There had been a letter from his father that afternoon. He was in Arizona in a deserted mining town. He and some friends were working the mine, digging out turquoise. When they earned enough money, his father said, they were going to build a raft and sail to South America.
    â€œHe’s obsessed,” his mother said when she finished the letter. She let it drop to the table as if it were heavy. “He’s digging for turquoise when every single person in the world has as much turquoise as they can possibly wear.” She shook her head. “And what will he do in South America? Can you tell me that?”
    He shook his head. The letters upset them both, only they reacted differently. His mother asked question after question, one after another, questions that had no answers. Even a week later she would interrupt his studying to say, “And why on earth would he ...” Simon had asked the questions at first too, only now he had stopped.
    The image he had of his father was getting blurred, altered by all the pictures he’d seen of hermits and wild men, miners now, and men who let the ocean sweep them away on rafts. He could not remember his father’s face at all.
    Once he had believed he would be like his father when he grew up. It was more than a matter of genes. He wanted to be like him.
    He would wear old woolen jackets and patched pants and let his hair grow and protest nuclear power. He would no longer fear wasps and poison ivy and would genuinely care about the natural habitat of the snail fish. He would eat mostly beans and rice.
    But this afternoon, sitting at the table, looking at the letter that lay between him and his mother, he no longer believed it.
    It wasn’t that he could not imagine himself digging for turquoise in a mine hundreds of feet below ground or living in a forest. It was that he was still trying to go forward somehow, fighting through the confusion and complications, against all biological odds, and his father had gone so far backward that he wanted to go to South America on a raft.
    He sighed, watched the street below, where a dog was checking the garbage cans. The dog found a piece of meat paper and