Chapter Twelve
A Little Bit Of Truth
I walked my Back Streets neighborhood one afternoon seeing squalor around me I hadn’t seen before. Had it always been there and I didn’t notice? Or was it getting worse?
Three weeks after giving up Meyer Gustafson and his friends, I was missing the fun—though I wasn’t missing the way I felt afterwards. And I’m sure that something in me changed when I decided to pull out of the arrangement. I started to read again, checking out anything from the neighborhood library that I hadn’t already read at Brody. I was thinking different things, different words started showing up in my head and in my speech. Mama said I sounded educated, though she was the only one who noticed.
The reading brought me back to Tony—a memory of one afternoon two months before when
