excerpt from "East of LA"
by Colleen Sutton

“Heya, what you reading there?”

I look up at the man and tuck a bit of my frizzy hair behind my ear. My hands are moist from the steam rising off the surface of the water, and the pages of my paperback are getting wrinkled. It’s just gotten dark, and I like to read like this, splayed on my belly, using the glow from the pool’s underwater headlights to see the words.

“It’s just a silly book,” I say and quickly try to hide the cover. It’s not just the heaving bosoms and the ruggedly handsome man—shirt torn open, leaning in for an aggressive kiss—that have me embarrassed. It’s also the author’s name in splashy, giant purple font. Even at twelve, I know that real authors don’t write their names in colour like that.

“This isn’t what I’m really reading right now,” I continue. “This is just ’cause there wasn’t any Steinbeck available in the library here.” Part of this sentence is true; I had just finished East of Eden and decided The Grapes of Wrath would be next. But I also really, really like reading this. And others. I’d probably finished dozens of romance novels in the last month alone. But nobody knew about that. Steinbeck at twelve is what really got the adults going.

“You read Steinbeck?” He immediately latched onto that, like I knew he would. “How old are you? Thirteen?”

“Almost. Twelveandahalf.” I say it all together, shooting it out quickly. “But I’ve read it, I’ve read all the classics.”

“Is that so?” He seems impressed. He’s old, at least thirty, and pudgy. His face looks a bit red and sweaty, but he’s wearing a nice short-sleeved dress shirt and pants, not the golfing shorts that most men here wear. He has a fancy watch on his wrist. I think about how Steinbeck might have described him: “chronically flushed but elegantly well-to-do.” I can’t figure out if he’s handsome, but he acts like he is.

I lie on the scratchy white concrete of the pool deck, in my neon orange one-piece suit. My mom won’t let me wear a bikini, but she did let me get this one with a mesh stripe, right across my belly button, so it was bikini-like. I feel very adult. And so I talk with the man. About reading, and Steinbeck, and my home-school classes. About our tent trailer just up the way, in row 3, “North Sunrise Dr.,” space 453. I’ve been trying to convince him that I’m interesting for at least a half hour, and I think he’s hooked.

 

 

 

From The Malahat Review's fall issue #228