Free Beautiful Girls by Beth Ann Bauman Page B

It’s not her own spirit that concerns her, it’s Adam’s which has attached itself to hers. His ghostly residue is as useless and cumbersome as an extra foot. He’s living inside her, infecting her dreams, her thoughts, her every second. That’s the way it is with Eve. It’s an ancient story. How she wishes she could knock him out with the heel of her hand, like water from her ear.
    So she does what she can. She spends the day swimming in the Arabian Sea, bobbing in the waves. She walks along the shoreline and catches glimpses of shells as the tide rolls out. Digging, she discovers finger-long snail shells—purple and gold—slender tornadoes. Some are broken, most are perfect. Such treasures. As the light begins to change, she lies on the sand near the cows while her taxi driver sits on the hood of the car, reading the newspaper.
    Later she asks him to drive, to just drive. They ride through twisty tree-lined lanes. She stares out at houses the colors of Easter eggs, where chickens, dogs and cows wander through yards. Sparkly clothes hang on clotheslines and catch the last of the light. The taxi zooms with the windows wide open,and the flotsam of Adam embedded in her crocodile brain begins to shed itself like dandelion fluff until she imagines she might be free and clear.

STEW
    M RS . A LLARD CALLED J.D.’ S MOTHER EARLIER IN THE day and asked if he could babysit since their regular girl had the flu. His mom said, of course.
    “Ah, Ma,” he groaned, when he came through the back door and she told him the news.
    “Have a heart, J.D. honey. They’re stuck, and they’re going to some kind of dinner party,” his mom said, looking delighted, the way she often looked, even now as she rooted through the refrigerator, opening lids and sniffing brown saucy things.
    J.D. wasn’t sure he ever looked delighted. In recent Christmas photos he noticed he looked glazed, not with boredom exactly, but with something dull and gloomy, and he wondered about his mother, radiating goodness and luck. He stuffed a Twinkie in hismouth and thought about objecting to the babysitting, but he liked the idea of getting out of the house.
    “It’s money in your pocket,” his mom said.
    “I’ll be loaded,” he said with his mouth full. “All right. I’ll do it,” he added, as if he had the final say.
    J.D. had occasionally babysat the girls, Annabel and Sophia, when the Allards lived next door. But last year they had left their three-bedroom ranch and moved across town to—according to nosy neighbors—a tiny two-bedroom on a lumpy piece of property, and J.D. hadn’t seen one of the downwardly mobile Allards since. J.D. was now a high school freshman with bad skin and a meager social life and no real Friday evening options; sometimes he’d go to one of his friends’ houses and they’d listen to music and toss a tennis ball against the wall, passing the time. Soccer was his thing, but it was January and the streets and tree branches glinted with ice.
    J.D. plopped in front of the TV and stared at an old black-and-white movie. The remote didn’t work and since he was too lazy to get up and change the channel, he watched a young woman with a hairdo in the shape of an ocean wave embrace a young man under a street lamp. “I would do anything for it not to be true,” the man said, pulling away from her and holding his hat over his heart. “But what we had here is over, dollface. We’re through.” J.D. watched their eyes glisten, he saw their sadness. He had his own littlestorage bin of strange, sad feelings he tried to keep under lock and key. He felt something like heartache when he thought about the mysterious girls, walking the hallways of his school. There were so many new faces since the graduated eighth graders from both the town’s junior highs and at least half of the Catholic school spilled together to make up the freshman class. His drama class was filled with many of these exotic girls. There was Susan Steen with her