Free Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Page A

face, weaving it into a braid that he holds on to. Then they start to walk again, Andrew holding onto her rope of hair, and she can’t stop smiling. At first she believes he is doing this because it is so strangely amusing, but his eyes search the wet beach as they walk, as if he’s looking for precious metals, and his eyes don’t meet hers for the longest time, and this somehow feels like a deeper form of looking at her than if he were staring right into her eyes. After a while, he finds a long strand of beach grass and tries to use it to tie her braid, but it doesn’t work. Finally he finds a piece of tattered kite string half-buried in the sand. He bends down low to pick it up and pulls her down with him so he won’t have to let go of her braid. The string is about a foot long, unraveling and dirty, and he uses it to tie the end of her braid, tightly and then in a bow, as if it is a length of satin. She lets go of his hand so she can reach out and stroke the golden hair on his carpenter arms, the sparkles of silver sand on his skin, and she feels she could die right then and there, climb up the reddish copper cliffs, the seashell-embedded cliffs, hold hands and fly off together so she can live with him forever.
    T HE memory stopped playing in her head at the toll plaza, and she had to ask Rosie twice to get the money out of her purse, which was on the floor in the backseat at Rosie’s feet, and you would have thought from Rosie’s annoyance that Elizabeth had asked her to run back home to Bayview for Elizabeth’s wallet.
    T HE girls won their match that day and, eventually, the trophy for the girls’ fourteen-and-under doubles. There was almost no room on Rosie’s bookshelves for any more trophies. There were already fifty or so, and she was only thirteen. Simone, nearly a year older, had just as many, maybe more. Rosie talked Simone into giving these latest trophies to Rae. “We don’t need them,” said Rosie. “And Rae is very sad.” Simone hadn’t thought twice before saying okay. Kids at school whispered behind her back that Simone was stupid, but Rosie thought she was just extremely innocent, even though she was also so boy crazy.Another thing besides her kindness that Rosie loved about Simone was that she didn’t care about material stuff, not like some of the girls in school who only cared about things like their hair and their clothes. But practically all Simone ever thought about was boys, boys, boys—oh, he’s so cute, oh, he’s such a fox, oh, he’d be a good boyfriend for you, Rosie—like all the movie-star boys in their class were going to fall in love with a skinny, ratty little tennis jock. But Simone was incredibly generous. She was like a big goofy dog with huge paws and eyes full of longing. So when Rosie explained that Rae was sad about breaking up with a man, Simone thought it was a great idea for them to give her their new trophies. They rode their bikes over to Rae’s as the sun fell slowly to earth, and they peered in the windows of her wonderful fairy-tale cottage, but Rae wasn’t home.
    They left their trophies in the mailbox, on top of the day’s mail.
    “Maybe she’ll think her boyfriend left them.”
    Rosie’s shoulders sagged. “Why would she think her boyfriend would leave two girls’ tennis trophies? I mean,
God
, Simone.”
    E ARLY in the school year, in a development bordering on the miraculous, one of the popular girls had asked Rosie to eat lunch with them. In Rosie’s eyes, this girl, Hallie Randall, was perfect, with long straight chestnut hair, dimples, a pretty white smile, and a huge trampoline in her back yard. At lunch, the girls talked mostly about the models they hated the most, and the music they loved the most. Rosie craved their company like Elizabeth used to crave Jack Daniels. Elizabeth, picking her up one day after school, found her waiting with them on the steps of the office building, attached to them like a barnacle. She watched Rosie, with