Free The Murderer's Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers Page A

thought I might fall asleep, and stayed here to play Scrabble. Once she’d dragged me around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which actually soothed me. I’d like a life as peaceful as the Japanese section there.
    I made my cot up as tight as possible, using the hospital corners Mrs. Parker insisted upon, tucking in the wool blanket, working carefully to avoid the iron ribbing on which the mattress rested. They’d given me enough scrapes over the years. I didn’t feel like running to the housemother to beg for Neosporin. However, I would, and did every time my skin broke, because germs loved Duffy-Parkman. No matter how hard Mrs. Parker made us scrub, you’d always find some Duffy girl puking or wiping her snot on a chair. Blood poisoning lived a scratch away here, and before they brought you to a doctor, you had to lose your leg or have a temperature of 105.
    I’d debated between being a doctor and being an anthropologist for a long time. As a doctor, you were always doing the right thing, saving and healing people. Doctors knew what to do no matter what happened. You had to take care of disgusting things, but almost nothing made me sick to my stomach. When Olive was afraid to tell Mrs. Parker she thought she had lice, I checked her. I even got Grandma to buy the stuff to get rid ofthe bugs, and I took care of Olive secretly in the bathroom, with Merry posted as the lookout. I combed out every single nit.
    Anthropologists made sense of people. I read
Coming of Age in Samoa
when someone threw it in a bag with other donated stuff for Duffy. It made me think that where you live can make all the difference. I’d have liked to be an anthropologist like Margaret Mead, but I didn’t know how I could ever travel that far from Merry.
    I beat my flat pillow in an attempt to bring it to life, but the dead feathers had their own dead mind. I dusted and lined up my books in size order, positioning my crayoned “D O N OT B ORROW W ITHOUT P ERMISSION ” sign smack in the middle. No one here read much, but stealing was the Duffy sport of choice. Luckily, no one cared enough about books to want mine, except Olive, and although she was spooky, she was a rare spot of Duffy honesty.
    I put my brush and comb into my small and only drawer. Leaving my room without neatening my three shelves until they were perfect, with everything lined up and all the fold sides of my clothes facing out, could ruin my day. I had the neatest shitty stuff in Brooklyn.
    I checked myself in the mirror through slitted eyes, trying to imagine what the college girls thought of me. Most Duffy girls dressed like whores, but I rummaged through every bag of donated clothes searching for shirts, pants, and skirts as not-Duffy as possible.
    When people dropped off old clothes, the housemothers dumped the bags in the middle of the family room, and we’d eye the bulging sacks as if we couldn’t be less interested. The moment someone made the first move, we all pounced.
    The toughest and meanest girls wore the best clothes. That’s why Merry looked scruffy. I tried to pull out decent clothes for her, but try looking for two sizes while girls knee you in the chest. I had one advantage, though. While the idiots here searched for hot pants that showed their butts, I fought for Levi’s and oxford shirts.
    Today I wore a blue button-down shirt. I thought my complexion looked almost pretty in that color. Not that anyone cared, but at least I didn’t have pimples. Most Duffy girls’ skin oozed so bad you wanted toclose your eyes. Maybe it was our greasy meals, so I tried to eat the best stuff Duffy served. Of course, I couldn’t do that every meal, otherwise I’d have been limited to bread and water. My good skin was probably just luck. Tall and no pimples; these were my big blessings.
    Merry burst into the room, her mouth turned down and lonely. Sunday mornings it was as though we were the only people left in the world. “When are you coming back?” she asked.
    “I have