Free Good Graces by Lesley Kagen Page A

a mean sounding snap!
    So fast, the crowd of kids goes quiet. They know the same way I do that something bad is about to happen. Like in a gunfight in an OK Corral movie, they’re watching and waiting the way the townspeople do to see whose side they should jump over to, except for Mary Lane who is rubbing her hands together, getting fired up to pound the daylights out of whoever she thinks needs it the most. She’s eyeballing Debbie.
    Troo breaks the silence by saying, “Just so you know, O’Hara, I let you win . . . ya fat cow.” She spins toward the rest of the gang. “And you . . . all of ya . . . you’re not fit to lick my boots. You’re nothin’ but . . . cookie factory riffraff.”
    Now, if we really were in the Old West, these kids would already be throwing bottles at my sister from a saloon window or from the alley next to the blacksmith’s barn and, honestly, as much as I adore her, I might pick up a rusty horseshoe and toss it at her, too—when she wasn’t looking, of course.
    My sister gets a kick out of my imitations every so often and it’s all I can think to do before a rumble starts. These factory kids know how to fight.
    I lower my voice as far as I can, and say just like John Wayne does to his sidekick when they’re in trouble, “I got your backside, Troo.”
    Mary Lane and a couple of the other kids in the crowd chuckle, but my sister doesn’t. She shoves her beret to the back of her head and tells me very ornery, “What did ya say?”
    She’s got excellent hearing, so I don’t get what she means at first, but then I do. I waddle around the pole the way Mr. Wayne would, like he’s wearing a diaper that needs changing. “I mean . . . I got your derriere , Leeze .”
    For the longest time, all I can hear is my fast breathing and my heart knocking against my ribs, but then my sister starts hunh . . . hunh . . . hunh ing and yells, “Fuck all a ya and . . .” She elbows me.
    “And . . . and the horses you rode in on,” I say the way she taught me, and then I loop my arm through hers and we mosey toward the playground gates, and ya know, just for that second, that precious moment in time, everything is coming up roses.

Chapter Eight
    M other called to me from the backyard this morning and told me to run up to the Five and Dime and get her a Snirkle bar. She has a gigantic sweet tooth. It seems like a lot of us in the neighborhood do. I think it’s because those chocolate chip cookies bake night and day over at the Feelin’ Good factory so that smell is part of our every breath and we want more, more, more! That’s why the O’Malley sisters are skipping down the street where we used to live before we moved in with Dave. Vliet Street is the way we always go to North Avenue because a lot of stuff that happened on this block was bad, but some of it was good, so it’s sorta like walking down Memory Lane if it had a bunch of potholes.
    Right after we moved here, Mother would play the name game with me and Troo so we could learn about all the different kinds of people who live in the city. “You can know just about all there is about a person when you hear their last name, so be sure to ask it” is what she told us. Wops, who have mostly vowels in their names, are loud but great cooks. And the Polacks have names that end in ski and brains that run on the small side, but noses that run larger than normal. I’m not sure where bohunks come from but they are thick-ankled and wear babushkas . And if someone has man in their last name they are probably a German who loves kielbasa and polka music. (I could never tell Mother that the name game is right some of the times, but not always. I am friends with a Kraut who loves music by a man named Mozart much more than she likes Lawrence Welk.)
    The people who live in them might look different, but most of the houses on the block are the same shape and size and made out of wood or brick and always two stories high, maybe three. They’re enough