#20

Nancy Springer

Description

Little Veronica likes hanging out at Mrs. Life's porch. She can see the whole town from the steps, and Mrs. Life is fascinating in the way that she keeps track of all sorts of numbers and information in her little spiral-bound notebooks. So it's surprising to Veronica when the always-nice Mrs. Life has an argument with Mr. Quickel, the school health teacher and wrestling coach, about the cost of mowing her lawn. Soon, Mrs. Life has started to insinuate things about Mr. Quickel, his marriage and what he might or might not have done with a boy who ran off from the town to live life as an openly gay man. Soon, the entire town is turning on Mr. Quickel with rumors and threats and destroying his sanity. Before too long, Veronica starts to see what Mrs. Life's real motivation is, and what dark secrets she keeps in one of her spiral-bound notebooks. A short story.

Sujets

• Short story
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Untreed Reads
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611873122
• Langue: English

Extrait

#20
By Nancy Springer
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1990.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
http://www.untreedreads.com
#20
By Nancy Springer
There’s a big lilac bush growing by Mrs. Life’s porch, and I used to hide in the hollow under the leaves like big green hearts, between the bush and the cinder-block porch pillars, to play that I was Pony Queen of the Universe or just to get away from the neighborhood awhile. But I don’t go there anymore, because I’m going to die on account of what I heard there.
Not that old Mrs. Life was not a nice lady. She sat on her porch all day every day from April to October, and she spoke to me like a friend every time I passed. “Veronica” she called me, because she said “Ronni” was a boy’s name. Most people as old as her don’t seem to like kids much, but Mrs. Life would invite me up on her porch to sit by her and talk and see what she was doing. Sometimes she was crocheting an afghan, and she would say to me, “I’ve put in a hundred and ten hours on this one so far.” She would say, “I’ve crocheted sixty-six afghans since 1987.” And she would show me her notebook. She had a little spiral-bound notebook like they sell in drugstores, and she had marked in it everything she had crocheted since she had learned how to crochet, and how many ounces of yarn each thing took, and what colors, and how much the yarn cost, and how many hours it took her to make it, and who she gave it to when she was done.
Or sometimes she was reading a book, one of those real fat paperbacks about the Civil War or something, and she would say to me, “I’m on page five hundred and forty-seven.” She would say, “I read twenty-two books last year. I have read a total of one thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine books in my adult life. Eleven more and I’ll be up to two thousand.” And she had a notebook for keeping track of all that, too. She had been a schoolteacher way back when my mom and dad were in school, so maybe that was why she had those notebooks and kept track of everything in very, very tidy thin handwriting. Her handwriting made me shiver like having a fishhook caught in me.
She lived right in the middle of town, next to the church, across from the tavern. From up on her porch a person could see practically the whole town, because Pleasantville isn’t very big.