CHAPTER 1
Authors note: Please review, this is my first fanfiction story - I would love comments, criticisms and ideas!
It was a hot summer day. The air was so sticky and humid I could feel the tiny particles weighing down on my skin. An occasional breeze lifted the hair off my face, and my neck was exposed to the seemingly cool hair, but my entire body seemed to be bathing in sweat.
I was on Miss Maudie's porch, sipping a glass of lemonade, the majority of it ice blocks that were getting smaller and smaller by the minute. Miss Maudie was in the garden, attending to her flowers.
"Miss Maudie?" All I had to do was whisper and she heard me, the air was that still.
"Yes, Scout?"
"Where is the love?"
Miss Maudie pulled her trowel out of the dry earth and turned to face me, adjusting her sun hat over her face as she did so. It cast a shadow onto her kind face as she puzzled over my question.
"Now, which love would you be talkin' about, young lady?"
"There's more than one kind?"
She laughed and went back to digging in the earth with her trowel.
"Oh yes, child, many kinds of love."
"Well I'm talkin' bout the one that Boo Radley deserves to get from the town. Do you know which one that is, m'am?"
She stopped digging.
"Boo Radley?"
"Yes'm."
Miss Maudie considered carefully. After a moment, she spoke; "Scout, people call that one different things as you will learn as you grow older, but I like to call that the love that unites the people. It's the love that we share for each other, and the love that we share for the world. You think Mr. Radley deserves that love?"
"Well yes I do, Miss Maudie. He just sits there in his dark house all day and nobody talks to him, nobody looks, nobody even thinks about how he feels. It's like they don't like him at all, m'am, they don't share the neighborly love toward him you were talkin' bout. I reckon everyone should get that kind of love."
Miss Maudie turned toward me and I could see her thoughtful eyes behind the shadow of the sun hat.
She picked herself up off the ground, and then wandered toward the porch. She sat down in her rocking chair, glass of lemonade in one hand and the trowel in the other. Miss Maudie took a long gulp of lemonade and set the empty glass on the step, wiped the sweat from her brow and then spoke to me. It was barely a whisper.
"Some people aren't loved in this world, Scout. And the funny thing is that the people who aren't loved are the ones who need the loving the most.
You've got to be very brave to love Boo Radley. He's lost Scout, he doesn't have a real friend and I know he wishes so bad he did have one. You see how he put those presents for you and Jem in the tree? He wants to be your friend. And you know why that is?"
I studied her dark eyes.
"No'm."
"Because he knows you want to be his." Miss Maudie smiled at me long and hard, then leaned back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes.
I got up off the porch step and wandered slowly down the sidewalk. I wondered if Miss Maudie even knew I had left.
I thought about what she said.
Was it true? Did Boo want to be my friend? Did he need to be loved like a human being instead of regarded as an outcast, a ghost, a terror?
I had wandered to the corner and I stood before Boo Radley's front gate, hands in my pockets, my face in a solemn stare.
Then I saw a face.
A face in the window. It was a dark face, a lonely face, staring out of the dirty window pane; staring at me.
At first I was frightened, but then I raised my hand and waved it slowly.
A hand waved back, its small bony fingers glowing white in the dark window.
The face disappeared and I heard a noise behind the door.
Before I had time to convince myself not to, I ran up Boo Radley's walkway, bounded up the steps and knocked on the door twice.
Slowly it creaked open. A white face appeared way up above my head, the eyes dark and sunken, the mouth in a tight line. He was wearing worn blue overalls and a grayed checkered shirt. He was barefoot.
The depths of his eyes gazed down into mine.
"Hey, Boo."