Free The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

do to help each other in this any more than we did in our writing. We didn’t know each other well enough yet to risk mucking around in any real way in each other’s lives.

    T HE NEXT MORNING when I went out to get the paper, Linda blew right by me in pedal pushers and sneakers as if she was training for the Olympics herself, the sweat running down her neck as that blond braid bounced out of her Stanford cap. She showed up the next morning and the next and the next, and by the second Olympic Wednesday she’d changed her pedal pushers for little shorts like the women running in the Olympics wore, and she’d traded her Keds for men’s athletic shoes, or boys’. I wondered if she’d had the gall to try on the shoes right there in the men’s department at Macy’s, but—this is Linda we’re talking about—I suppose she didn’t think it at all outrageous, or enjoyed it all the more knowing it was. Which was why it surprised me that she didn’t say anything about her running when we met at the park that morning—never mind the evidence she wore, the pale white sweat ring around the rim of her cap.
    Kath was uncharacteristically disheveled that day; she hadn’t worn her headband braid and her mascara was smudged, which would have been par for the course for me, but Kath was always so tidy. She’d been pretty quiet while Linda went on and on about the Olympics again, too, but when Brett asked if she was okay, she said she was fine, just fine.
    “It’s just . . . these girl athletes, they’re just . . .” The word she was looking for was not flattering, you could tell by the tone of her voice. “I
hate
women athletes! Field hockey and gymnastics and basketball. Like Pookie Benton.”
    “Pookie Benton?” Linda said.
    Kath waved her off, saying, “Don’t mind me. I put my boots on backward this morning is all.”
    Ten o’clock came and Arselia arrived and we turned to writing. “Remember: brutal honesty,” Linda said, and Brett said, “Maybe not
brutal,
Linda.” And we all agreed: “Honesty.”
    I’d asked for it, of course, but what I read that morning was not something I’d intentionally written as drivel. These were the real first pages of a serious novel—my way of letting my friends into my life, I see in retrospect. My own life dressed up in fictional garb. But Linda didn’t know that, and she was hell-bent on starting out right this time, so she began honestly.
    “I’m willing to buy that this family
might
exist,” she said, “though—”
    “Though if your Dritha really can’t afford college,” Brett interrupted, “she ought to—”
    “Do something about it,” Linda said. “Her father says an education ruins her for a proper life, and she says, ‘Oh, okay’?”
    I sat there, looking past them to the new-mown grass and the red-orange-gold trees and the paint-stripped balustrade over the mansion porch, wanting to say,
But that was the way it was
. Maybe that wasn’t the way it was in swanky East Coast families like Brett’s or Linda’s, or rich Southern ones like Kath’s, but it was the way it was in blue-collar Midwestern families.
    “Maybe she could have gotten a scholarship?” Brett offered.
    “But . . .” I looked away to the playground, to Mags, who would go to college if I had to scrub toilets to pay her tuition. “But if she goes to college on a scholarship, she won’t make any money, whereas if she takes a job at . . .”
At the Northwestern engineering school.
“If she takes a job and keeps living at home, that’s one whole paycheck that can go to paying for her brother’s college.” One of four brothers in my case, three of whom were younger but all of whom stood ahead of me in the going-to-college line.
    I imagined writing the real scene: Sister Josephine calling me into her office one afternoon in the fall of my senior year, all the black-and-white fabric drape of her, the wimple tight across her forehead, the heavy cross at her chest, Christ nailed there