Read Online The Education of Ivy Blake by Ellen Airgood - Free Book Online Page B

mom remembered her like this, that she knew about her flashlight and had brought home something Ivy wanted and needed, and so much of it. She’d actually taken it as a sign that maybe life with her mom
could
get better. It never occurred to her the batteries might be stolen.
    Her mom saw her and stretched her arm out. It was an order:
You come here.
    Ivy met her mother’s gaze and asked with her eyes,
Did you do this?
    Her mother beckoned again. After half a second, Ivy turned and headed back down the walk.
    â€œHey, hold on—” the policeman called.
    Ivy didn’t.
    â€œIvy! Get back here.
Now,
” her mom yelled.
    Ivy walked steadily onward.
    She felt like one of Mom Evers’s sewing pins trying to peel itself away from a big powerful magnet. (Ms. Mackenzie had brought magnets and pins in for their science section last week.) Her legs were as heavy as bags of cement. She’d helped Dad Evers with the addition’s foundation before she moved, so she knew exactly how heavy that was: crazy heavy, much heavier than it seemed like one not-very-large sack of mortar could possibly be. Her feet were almost impossible to lift.
    She did it, though. She put one foot in front of the other until she was halfway down the block. She risked a look over her shoulder then, but none of the policemen had followed her. Probably they had bigger fish to fry than one doomed girl. She turned the corner and kept walking.

Ivy passed the pizza place and a park that was only a sliver of land between two houses. Two women pushed toddlers on the bucket-seat swings. After one glance, Ivy looked away. Aunt Connie used to take her to a park and push her on the swings when she was little. She was pretty sure her dad had too, though she only had wisps of memory about it.
    She slowed down at the house with the wrought-iron fence. The woman who lived there was on the porch, reading in a wicker chaise, using Dad Evers’s chair as an end table. She sipped from a red pottery mug and turned a page. Her face lit at whatever she’d read and it was like watching someone run into an old friend.
    Ivy wrapped one hand around a fence spindle—the iron was cold, the grit of rust nibbled her palm—and gripped down until the spindle’s edges creased her hand. She wanted—she
needed
—whatever it was that the woman on that porch had.
    The woman looked up. She had short reddish hair and freckles and an expression on her face like she might invite Ivy onto the porch—a total stranger!—and offer her a glass of lemonade. A wish slashed through Ivy in that moment. She wanted to be that woman, at peace in her own home—a real home, a home that was inside and outside of herself—and safe. Living instead of just surviving. She pulled her hand off the fence spindle and walked away.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    She passed the hospital and the school and kept going even though the neighborhood was less familiar. She went by a grungy-looking deli and a tattoo parlor and a dry cleaner with a HELP WANTED sign in the window. As much as she wanted to walk right out of her own life and into a new one, Ivy’s steps began to slow. She heard shouting up ahead and slowed more.
    Half a dozen boys were clustered in front of a bodega, jostling each other, talking loud. They called out rude things to two girls walking by and doubled over laughing when the girls grabbed each other’s hands and ran.
    Ivy gnawed on her thumbnail. Maybe if she waited they’d get bored and leave, or the bodega owner would chase them away. She turned and looked at the store she’d stopped in front of. A neon sign that said PAWN, BUY, SELL, INSTA NT CA $ H hung in the window.
    Three electric guitars were propped on stands behind the glass. There was also an amplifier, a bowling ball, and a kitchen blender. The blender—chunky, with a yellow base—looked like the one Aunt Connie’d had. It had originally belonged to her