All the Anxious Girls on Earth Read Online Free Page B

oblivious to what was going on, ringing their little bells feebly with inexperienced thumbs and veering into the cedar hedges. The woman stood there on the step of Lewis’s co-op and threatened to douse herself with gasoline and set herself on fire if Lewis didn’t program her film.
    There were those students in South Korea who had set themselves on fire recently to protest unfair labour practices, and there was that Quaker who immolated himself in front of the Pentagon in a statement against the war in Vietnam. To Lewis, although they seemed insane, they were also somewhat noble. But to be willing to die for a bad, really bad, eleven-minute film in which a naked Barbie sat spinning on an old record turntable? The woman could not be serious. Besides, it wasn’t even technically a film; it was shot on video. Rules, Lewis had always believed, were rules. She wouldn’tbe forced into compromising her aesthetics, and she wasn’t about to let herself be blackmailed. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be polite.
    “Would you like some coffee?” Lewis asked. “I could make a fresh pot.”
    “Ten, nine, eight,” the woman chanted, dropping to her knees on the bristly welcome mat and holding the can above her head.
    Lewis hesitated, then tried to call her bluff. “Maybe you’d prefer herbal tea?” she asked with her best hostessy smile, which she hoped wasn’t twitching.
    “Seven, six, five.” The little kids joined in.
Ding, ding, ding
.
    Lewis found herself inexplicably laughing as the woman flicked her Bic. She looked around, as if expecting someone to step from the shadows of an upstairs balcony, aim a video camera down into the courtyard and announce, “Smile, you’re on—”
    After all the emergency crews had come and gone, a police officer took down her name. “And your first name?” he’d said, holding his pen above his little notepad. “That is my first name,” Lewis told him. Her mother had listened to a lot of Johnny Cash before she was born. As a little girl, Lewis had pretended her name was Louise. She later went through a phase at university during which, after several beers in the student pub, she’d greet strangers by standing on a chair and bellowing, “How do you
Bo-is
, my name is
Lew-is!”
No one ever got it except a pudgy, down-to-earth girl named Lila from HundredMile House up north and so they became friends.
    The policeman had asked if she wanted to make a statement. When she didn’t answer, he assured her that she had nothing to worry about, that people like this always single someone out, wanting an accomplice. “My brother-in-law was driving along Marine Drive and a guy jumped out from behind a mailbox and threw himself in front of his car,” he told her. “Just like that—boom.”
    Then the policeman left, and the neighbours disappeared inside, and Lewis had stood alone on her steps. There were clumps of dried fire retardant on the door-jamb, on the charred welcome mat, and on the cedar hedges on both sides of the steps. It was an optimistic pink, like fibreglass insulation. Like cotton candy. She went inside and in the hall mirror she saw that there was a fleck of dried pink foam on the tip of her nose.
    She had phoned Lila and got her answering machine. “I just killed somebody,” Lewis said, collapsing into the corner of the couch, the spent fire extinguisher nestled in her lap like a small, cherry-red dachshund.
    Lewis had a cousin who lived in the only residential building in the entire city that was truly earthquake ready. He travelled a lot as a buyer for a swimsuit import company and had found a lover in Seoul (and in Hong Kong and in Manila), so he was often away and let Lewis stay at his place whenever she wanted.
    The building balanced on a fat stick, like half a popsicle, and wobbled slightly when there was high wind. It had a complex suspension system and was said to beable to withstand tremors of up to 7.8 on the Richter scale. The city lay at the very edge