Read Online Things I’ll Never Say by Ann Angel - Free Book Online Page A

I never forgot the wild laxity of my one night at Ruthie’s, and my secret concerts profited from the experience. I pictured Ruthie flipping that black scarf over her shoulders, and my lyrics grew more outrageous, my body loosened up. Best of all, underneath every song there was a hint of sadness, of stale smoke and old dreams. I imagined Courtney Love behind me in the mirror. She’d fold her bare arms, flex her tattoo, and howl,
Tell ’em, Cynthia. You tell ’em, girl!
    Still, I wasn’t sorry that Ruthie’s house was now off-limits. Being her friend would have cost me too much at school. I spent perhaps six hours a week on my secret rock career, but popularity was something I cultivated every waking minute. My entire life, from the 7:45 a.m. bell to the last phone call I was allowed at 8:00 p.m., would have been destroyed if I’d joined Ruthie in the ranks of the untouchables. Fate had stepped in and saved me from having to choose between my permed and perfect clique and this strange, sloppy siren whose mother told stories and burned houses and popcorn.
    So I took a grim satisfaction in telling Ruthie each time she asked that I had too much homework. Of course, we both knew it was a lie, a polite one. As polite as the one she told me back. “I guess you’re right,” she’d say. “I’m going to start that history paper soon as I get home.”
    But if the inside of the Kepner house was off-limits, I was still allowed as far as their porch. That was where I met them on Thursday afternoons, when Lenore and Ruthie went shopping. Since Mrs. Kepner didn’t drive, my mother let me walk them to the store to help carry back bags. “People who have,” Mommy said, not without a certain smugness that indicated which side of the equation we were on, “should help those who have not.” After my first trip to the store with our have-not neighbors, I decided it was the least I could do. Because it was on those walks that Ruthie’s mother told us more stories.
    From these twisted tales, from the way they turned everything upside down or broke into sudden, breathtaking riffs, I picked up again the scent of the wildness I both craved and feared. Mrs. Kepner’s version of Snow White, for example, was a strangely reassuring departure from the sweet Disney tale I’d grown up on. According to Ruthie’s mother, the Evil Queen’s magic mirrors had to be replaced every week: “‘Lord, sweetness,’ that new Magic Mirror said, on account of it couldn’t keep its big mouth shut, ‘you got a face that’ll shatter glass!’ Now, there are some folks who, when they ask you a question, want a straight answer. But Snow White’s stepmother, as that tell-all mirror found out a split second later, was sure not one of them.”
    It wasn’t just the queen’s fist through her mirrors, though, that riveted me, that made me hungry for backbone and truth. Where Disney’s princess succumbed to a poisoned apple, Mrs. Kepner’s was lured by the free trial of a curling iron and felled by knockout drops in a brownie; where Disney’s story ended with a magic kiss and happily ever after, Lenore Kepner’s finished with morning breath: “If you was to go and fall asleep for years and years, would you want someone’s tongue down your throat soon as you opened your eyes? ’Sides, when you snooze, you lose; you miss your first date and prom night and necking in the backseat. So once His Princeship woke her up, Snow White was gone like a shot. She had a whole lot of living to do, you know?”
    Mrs. Kepner’s heroines may not have worn black stockings or sequined bras, but like Courtney Love, they broke the mold. In her version of Red Riding Hood, it was Grandma, not the famous little girl in a cape, who took charge: “Yeah,” Granny told Red, “I fed him that jive about ‘Oh, what big teeth you