All the Anxious Girls on Earth Read Online Free

cannons because in those days they all wore skirts. I
see London! I see France!
the men would tease when they saw her underwear.
    All these geniuses, all so old. I feel like the ocean is inside my belly, making gushing waves. The library looks bigger, even. Or maybe in my relief I have my eyes open very wide. There is a little boy with white hair and thick glasses reading a book with a magnifying glass. I feel sorry for him because he reads so slowly, more slowly than even me if you can imagine! I am not worried anymore about Edgar being a genius. Now I am hoping he is. One dummy in the family is enough. Ha! I ask the librarian for books about cheetahs, but she only finds two about tigers. I will have to go to the main library downtown. I will take Edgar with me and he can hold onto the bus transfers. He will hold them tight and not lose them, because I am trying to turn him into a responsible boy. Maybe downtown we will ride an escalator, something I have never done. Maybe Edgar will run up the down escalator and I will try not to cheer him on. I will pretend to get mad like a proper parent.
    I am standing on the porch with Edgar the Human Cheetah, watching the rain whack everything flat in the garden. Edgar tells me he’s decided to change his name.
    “You can’t change it to Bob,” I tell him. “Anything but Bob.”
    “Why not?”
    “It just makes me feel funny. I pictured a Bob as bald and you have such nice brown hair.” I try to smooth his hair, but he is too fast for me.
    “I wasn’t thinking of Bob,” he says. “I was thinking of changing the spelling—E-D-G-R-R-R.”
    I think he’s trying to trick me, but then he growls and I get it. “Okey-dokey, Edgrrrrrrr!”
    “Holy wow, where’s all this rain coming from?” Edgrrr wants to know.
    “It’s God’s sweat,” I say.
    “God must be even fatter than you.”
    “Maybe a whole lot fatter,” I say, and I think he maybe believes me.

City of my dreams
    S ooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour. They acted as if they should be heartily congratulated for where they lived, much the same way the contestants on
Jeopardy!
are applauded when they pick the Daily Double even though they haven’t really done anything yet. Their enthusiasm made Lewis feel small and mean. How could she hate paradise? “It gets caught in my teeth,” she told her friend Lila, “like spinach.”
    All around her, people did things for kicks that to Lewis seemed nothing short of death defying. Trooping into the wilderness with foil packets of dehydrated food, like astronauts, determined to ride the rapids, scale icefalls, bounce down mountain faces with their feetbound to fibreglass boards, Dr. Seuss hats on their heads. She shook her head and hung onto her coffee mug with both hands. Caffeine, that was her wild ride.
    She who had looked into the face of death with its tired living-room eyes and laughed.
    The little green-haired girl was back in the store, lingering over the soaps, dipping her fingers into the pots of face masks and hair creams. She had been in almost every day this week, but never bought anything.
    Lewis worked in a place that looked like a cheese shop but sold soap. A cosmetic deli. She cut wedges of soaps like Guava Nun and Rabbit Cool from huge slabs with a thing very much like a cheese cutter, weighed them, wrapped them, and stuck on the little price per gram sticker the machine spit out. The face masks and creams and shampoos were scooped into little plastic tubs like coleslaw, mashed down, weighed and priced. There were also massage bars that looked and smelled like chocolate, and shampoo bars that looked and smelled like oatcakes with raisins. The customers all said the same thing (over and over)—”MMMmmm, this smells good enough to eat!”—but Lewis kept smiling. It was all stupidly expensive and the