All the Anxious Girls on Earth Read Online Free Page A

customers were mostly pleasant—clean, pleasant people with lots of money. No deranged artists threatening to set themselves on fire.
    The green-haired girl dragged three fingers through the vat of apple-mint face mask and then, looking right at Lewis through a cluster of very blonde private schoolstudents in hiked-up kilts, she pulled her fingers down her right cheek and then her left. As she turned to leave the store, Lewis felt a little tribal beat in the vicinity of her heart. Something deeply carnivorous and sinewy. Something to do with meat and flames. A clue to her secret city? Or heartburn from the onion flan from Meinhardt’s she’d had for lunch?
    Lewis wished she’d said something. Later that night, lying in bed, it came to her, what she should have said.
    “Don’t smile or it’ll crack.”
    Several months back, Lewis had had what most people would consider a great job. She was one of the programmers at the film festival the city hosted each fall and all of her friends envied her—
imagine getting paid to watch movies!
But it wasn’t long before earnest student filmmakers from the city’s four (four!) film schools started descending on the festival office, like infant spiders parachuting out of their pods, demanding to know why she had rejected their mini-mockumentaries or Tarantino rip-offs. At least half of their films were about people who go through a whole bunch of bad shit and then wake up to find out it’s all just a dream. If only life were like that, Lewis often found herself thinking.
    One guy even tried to bribe her with a descrambler. He had a little goatee and long fingernails. He snapped a
TV Times
open and shook it at her. “Look at all these channels,” he said. “All these channels could be yours.” She moved down the hall and he followed, flapping the TV listings at her and wailing, “My movie’s only threeminutes long!” Three minutes too long, Lewis thought. She tried picturing him as someone’s son, the cream in some doting mothers coffee. She tried feeling sorry for him because he was already growing jowls. Too late. Her heart was forming a thin, but impenetrable crust like the one that covered the earth while it was still young and fragile and lava bubbled just below the surface. When she asked him to leave, he started crying.
    Then there was the fidgety young man who showed up on his skateboard. He whooshed right through her office door, then braked abruptly. The skateboard, an orange goat painted on it with X’s for eyes, shot straight up into the air. He caught it in one meaty paw and stuffed it under his armpit.
    “You didn’t answer my phone calls,” he said. She thought the stud drilled through his tongue should have caused a slight lisp, but it didn’t.
    “And you are?”
    “Justin.”
    “Justin what?” They all seemed to be named Justin.
    “I made the film about the dude who goes through all this bad shit and then wakes up and finds out it was all just a dream.”
    Lewis sighed.
    “Watch it backwards,” Justin hissed, his eyes startlingly like Charles Manson’s. “What?”
    “Just watch it backwards.” And he was gone, wheels grinding down the corridor.
    Paul is dead?
Lewis thought.
    “Shouldn’t we get a security guard,” she asked the festival director, “or a Doberman or something?”
    But nothing could have prepared Lewis for the woman who showed up on her doorstep at home on that Saturday morning. She wasn’t a kid, either. She was about Lewis’s age, early thirties, but with this real lived-in look in her eyes. Her eyes were a living room of despair, full of mismatched furniture and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, dripping all over the place, a syringe under the wicker chair, a Ouija board on the coffee table. She held a tin can with a plastic nozzle in one hand and a Bic lighter in the other. Her neck was dishpan-hand red and streaked with sweat. Tiny neighbour kids trundled back and forth across the common area on their trikes,