Free The Tutor by Peter Abrahams Page B

some unlucky reason. A game of running back and forth on a pattern of squares and rectangles, huffing and puffing, calling out the score in a crazy language, getting jolts up and down your arm, arguing, losing over and over to Kyla the lob-lob-lobber. Not to mention Erich, with his blond-tipped back hair curling over the collar of his polo shirt, his year-round tan the color of Dad’s distressed-leather briefcase from Orvis, and those eyes, practically sharing a socket.
    And archery, which was her own. No huffing and puffing in archery, no lobbing, no disputes. And the word itself, one of her very favorites.
Tennis
sounded like a disease, but
archery
the word, first encountered in a coloring book of myths and legends she’d had as a little girl, on the page with Diana the huntress—blue tunic, yellow hair—had got her interested in archery the sport. A very cool word, just the sound, and then that double arch, the arch in the bow and the arch in the flight of the arrow. Plus all the other cool words:
nock
,
fletching
,
cock feather
,
quiver
. Instead of boring ones like
in
and
out
, and nasty ones like
fault
,
double-fault.
Dumbest of all,
love
meant nothing.
    Ruby stepped up to the shooting line, took one deep breath, let it out slow, the way Jeanette said. She loved the whole routine: nocking the arrow, not too snug, the cock feather—hers was yellow, the other two feathers blue—making an L with the bow; then the draw—hand, wrist, forearm, all straight, lined up with the arrow, point resting on her knuckle, string barely touching the tip of her nose, grazing her lips, anchored. The anchor position: she could make a list of the things she liked about just that one part of archery.
    1. The strength of the bow before she even fired, like a living thing in her hands.
    2. How her fingertips on the nock united the bow and the arrow, made it all possible.
    3. Everything so still, the distant sight of the target over the top of the arrow stillest of all.
    4. The center circle of the target, gold like the pot at the end of the rainbow.
    5. Best of all, that little kiss good-bye of the string against her lips at the moment of release.
    Ruby released.
Just let go, let the string slip away.
That slipping away part was pretty good too.
    Her arrow flew, the blue and yellow of its tail blending together, blue for the sky, yellow for the sun, which was why they were her colors—not favorite colors, but colors like a knight’s. Also good, the flight of the arrow, when she’d done all she could and now whatever happened happened. One New Year’s Eve before she was born, when Brandon was four, Adam had tossed him a tennis ball on the very last second of the old year and Brandon had caught it on the very first second of the new. The flight of the arrow was something like that.
    Thwack.
Not
thwack
because Ruby couldn’t possibly hear the arrow striking the target, forty yards away; but there her arrow was, in the gold. Gold, yes! In the outer, close to the red, but not touching, definitely gold. She gazed at her final six of the day, not what you could call grouped, but still: one black, one blue, two red, two gold, one of them an inner.
    “You go, Ruby,” said Jeanette. Jeanette ran the kids’ program for the archery club. Once Ruby had actually seen her split an apple from the men’s seventy-meter line.
    The kids walked down the range, pulled their arrows out of the straw targets. Jeanette rolled up behind them in her pickup, hoisted the targets into the back two at a time, said, “Hop up.” The kids hopped up. She drove them over to the line of parent cars, waiting by the old practice field at West Mill High, a mom or dad motionless behind every wheel, engines running, heaters on.
    Ruby got in the Jeep. “You must be freezing,” Mom said.
    Jeanette heard that through the open window of the pickup. “Never too cold for shooting, right, Rubester?”
    “Right,” said Ruby.
    “Keep ‘em sharp,” Jeanette said.
    “You