A Secret Word: A Novel - Softcover

Paddock, Jennifer

 
9780743247078: A Secret Word: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743247078 ISBN 13: 9780743247078
Verlag: Touchstone, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Jennifer Paddock's incandescent debut novel spans fifteen years in the lives of friends Leigh, Sarah, and Chandler, beginning one fateful day in high school that forever connects them. While Leigh remains stuck in dead-end jobs in their Arkansas hometown, the more privileged Sarah and Chandler move to Manhattan, where Sarah seeks acting fame and Chandler struggles to make sense of her failed relationships, only to be sent reeling by an unexpected tragedy.
Sweeping from the Deep South to New York and interweaving each girl's distinctive voice into a seamless narrative, A Secret Word is a luminous story of friendship and family, sex and secrets, growing up and growing apart. It is about how well you can ever really know another person and the secrets we keep from our friends, our families, and, most important, ourselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Paddock is the author of A Secret Word. She lives in Point Clear, Alabama.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: The Ones Who Are Holding Things Up

November 1986

Chandler

Leigh is the kind of girl who hangs around girls who get in fights. Not that she wears rock-concert T-shirts, but she does smoke. She and I are different, but we are friends. She's been to my house, three stories with woods and a lake in back, a game room, halls you can do cartwheels down. And I've been to her house, dark and small and sad.

Sarah is beautiful and theatrical and is my best friend and has been since the day I almost killed her. When we were eight, she talked the assistant golf pro into letting us hit range balls, and she walked right behind me on my backswing. There was screaming and blood and an ambulance, and seventeen stitches to the back of her head in the shape of a C, my own initial. Then we began taking tennis lessons and now are known as those tennis girls. A tournament can get us out of school for a week. We go to a public school and make good grades without studying. We are on the outside of the inner circle of cool kids but are cool enough.

I'm in Spanish class zoning out, not listening to the scratchy record of a Mexican family having a conversation at breakfast. I'm thinking about my plan for lunch today with Leigh and Sarah, maybe at the country club, and wondering how that would go.

My father tells me that where we live, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, used to be called "Hell on the Border." It was a place people passed through: Cherokee Indians on the Trail of Tears, gold miners to California, trappers canoeing upriver, ranchers headed to Texas, outlaws seeking freedom.

I imagine there are worse places to grow up, and I am lucky to be rich and to love my parents, but I do not love it here. I will pass through.

Between first and second period, at my locker, I see Leigh at her locker, tapping a pack of Camel Lights, and when she catches my eye, I start to walk over, but somebody, a real genius of slapstick, comes up behind me and pushes the back side of my right knee, causing my leg to buckle, and I almost trip. I turn around with a little agitation and find Sarah smiling her coy Sarah smile.

"Falling apart at the seams, Chandler?" she says. Then Trey, the running back, rushes Sarah, taking her in a headlock, holding her like he's in love, and I wonder if Sarah notices this, and when he lets go, there is purple dye smeared across his white jersey. Sarah is always dying her hair. She probably just did it thirty minutes ago, staying home during first period, using one of the drawerful of late notes her mom has written for her.

I watch Trey pushing Sarah down the hall.

"Trey's walking me to class," Sarah yells back. "I'll meet you on the court."

Second period Sarah and I have gym, and so does Leigh, but Coach McGavin lets Sarah and me play tennis, while Leigh and all the other girls have to square dance with the PE boys. I look around for Leigh. I know she has a car today because I saw her pulling into the lot in her mom's old Chrysler, a two-tone two-door.

Sarah and I aren't sixteen yet like Leigh is, even though we're all in the tenth grade, so every day we try to find an older kid with a car to take us off campus for lunch. We've never asked Leigh to take us because you never know when she's going to have her mother's car. Mostly we ask this sweet guy who's a senior in the band, a trombone player, and sometimes we go with this swimmer girl who's a junior with a Bronco. If we ask guys, we always ask guys we would never want to go out with. It would be too humiliating to beg for a ride from a senior on the football team like Trey. But I don't see Leigh anywhere.

I'm late to gym, but I don't mind. I actually prefer it because I hate undressing in front of the other girls. It's not that I'm overweight or ugly or anything. Though I'm cute enough and have blonde hair, I'm shorter and look younger than the others, with smaller hips and breasts. At home, everyone is always covered up. My mother wears a pink or blue cotton nightgown and a pink flowery robe, and my father wears neat Brooks Brothers pajamas with a tattered terry-cloth robe that used to be brick red, but is now pale with spots from too much washing.

Sarah likes undressing in front of other people. When I spend the night at her house, she'll walk down the hall from the bathroom to the bedroom, naked and thin, her straight past-the-shoulders hair hidden under a towel knotted in front, and when I stand there frozen, watching, Sarah says, "What?"

I see Sarah already on the court, sweatpants on, her lucky blue Fila jacket tied around her waist. She's hitting her serve so hard that it bounces in the square, then flies to the metal fence with a clang. My serve takes a couple bounces before it hits the fence with barely a rattle. I can still beat Sarah, though I know it's only a matter of time until she learns to play more consistently, eases up on her power, mixes up her shots. Right now it's a head game -- our matches are close, but I always win.

When I was nine, I went the entire summer, at least ten tournaments in all parts of Arkansas, beating my opponents, even Sarah, 6-0, 6-0. I'm so dreamy about the days when I used to kill everyone.

Sarah and I play a groundstroke game to eleven. I win, barely, by hitting the same shot, deep with topspin, every time. I really do get into a kind of rhythm, and I start thinking of myself like a Buddhist monk chanting one two three hit or like my father who meditates saying the same secret word over and over.

Afterward, we fill up an empty tennis-ball can with water and take turns drinking and talk about what we're going to do for lunch.

"We could stay here," I kid. "Get a Coke and an ice-cream sandwich and stand outside."

"Ah, Chandler baby, no," Sarah says, and I smile.

We start walking back to get dressed for third period, and I spot Leigh smoking under the stadium bleachers. She's long-limbed and awkward there in the shadows but has a pretty face, her wavy brown hair pulled back by two silver barrettes.

I twirl my racquet twice and catch it on the grip. "Why aren't you inside square dancing?" I ask.

"They don't ever miss me," Leigh says.

"Can I have one of those?" Sarah says, then sets her racquet and the tennis balls on the ground.

"Sure," Leigh says, like she's honored that Sarah would smoke one of her cigarettes, and lights it for her. Sarah and Leigh don't really know each other, only a little about each other through me.

"Hey, Leigh," I say, thinking about my lunch plan, and I take the rubber band out of my hair, letting my ponytail fall. "Did your mom call in sick?"

Leigh doesn't answer, just gives me a look like she's ashamed.

"I don't mean anything by it," I say. "I just wondered if you have the car today?"

"I have the car."

"You're sixteen?" Sarah says.

"Yeah, since October." Leigh pauses a moment, taking a drag and looking at us. "Why, do y'all want to go to lunch?"

I smile. "That'd be great. Thanks, Leigh." I reach out for a smoke, and Leigh lights my cigarette off hers, then flicks hers away.

Sarah lets her hand fall to the side and drops her half-smoked cigarette in the grass. "So, how about Hardscrabble?"

Hardscrabble is the name of the country club where Sarah and I have spent nearly every day of our lives playing tennis. I used to think the name was a golfing term, but my dad told me it's because the golf course used to be a farm, which was known, because of its rocky conditions, as a "hardscrabble" way to make a living. It seems weird to me that it's a name of a place where rich people go to take it easy.

"Definitely," I say. "Hardscrabble."

"Do we have time?" says Leigh.

"I have study hall next period," I say. "I can call in our order. No...

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Verlag
Touchstone
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743247078
ISBN 13 
9780743247078
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
AA Utrecht
3584
Niederlande