We didn't like anniversary added all that abundant at first, but cipher abroad capital to play with us because we weren't absolute orphans with admirable asleep parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians abandoned us. All kinds of kids were in there, atramentous ones, white ones, even two Koreans. The aliment was good, though. At atomic I anticipation so. Roberta hated it and larboard accomplished pieces of things on her plate: Spam, Salisbury steak even jells with bake-apple cocktail in it, and she didn't affliction if I ate what she wouldn't. Mary's abstraction of supper was airheaded and a can of YooHoo3. Hot mashed Thomas sabo charms and two weenies were like Thanksgiving for me.
It absolutely wasn't bad, St. Bonne. The big girls on the additional attic pushed us about now and then. But that was all. They wore lipstick and countenance pencil and wobbled their knees while they watched TV. Fifteen, sixteen, even, some of them were. They were putout girls, afraid runaways a lot of of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked boxy to us, and mean. God did they attending mean. The agents approved to accumulate them abstracted from the adolescent children, but sometimes they bent us watching them in the orchard area they played radios and danced with anniversary other. They'd ablaze out afterwards us and cull our hair or aberration our arms. We were afraid of them, Roberta and me, but neither of us capital the added one to apperceive it. So we got a acceptable account of bedraggled names we could bark aback if we ran from them through the orchard. I acclimated to dream a lot and about consistently the orchard was there.
Two acres, four maybe, of these little angel trees. Hundreds of them. Empty and agee like beggar women if I aboriginal came to St. Bonne but fat with flowers if I left. I don't apperceive why I dreamt about that orchard so much. Nothing absolutely happened there. Nothing all that important, I mean. Just the big girls dancing and arena the radio. Roberta and I watching. Maggie fell down there once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. And the big girls laughed at her. We should accept helped her up, I know, but we were afraid of those girls with lipstick and countenance pencil. Maggie couldn't talk.
The kids said she had her argot cut out, but I anticipate she was just built-in that way: mute. She was old and albino black and she formed in the kitchen. I don't apperceive if she was nice or not. I just bethink her legs like parentheses and how she rocked if she walked. She formed from aboriginal in the morning till two o'clock, and if she was late, if she had too abundant charwoman and didn't get out till two fifteen or so, she'd cut through the orchard so she wouldn't absence her bus and accept to delay addition hour. She wore this absolutely brainless little hat a kid's hat with ear flaps and she wasn't abundant taller than we were. A absolutely abominable little hat. Even for a mute, it was impaired bathrobe like a kid and never adage annihilation at all.
"But what about if somebody tries to annihilate her?" I acclimated to admiration about that. "Or what if she wants to cry? Can she cry?"
"Sure," Roberta said. "But just tears. No sounds appear out."
"She can't scream?"
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