Caring Is Creepy Read Online Free

looked worn and grumpy. No song-and-dance numbers, just kids crying. It came as a surprise, then, when the album grew on me. I sometimes found myself humming along without realizing it.
    “So,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “what’s your type?”
    “I’m not sure I have a type,” I said.
    “Of course you do,” Dani said. “Everybody has a type. You might not know what it is yet, but you’ve got one. Believe me.”
    Dani and me were sitting around the kitchen table at my house drinking stolen beer and looking at her rock star collection. My mom worked a double shift that day and wouldn’t be home until seven the next morning, so we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. In this case, doing whatever we wanted meant drinking my mom’s beer and talking about boys. The week before, my mom had come across a sale at the Quik & Eazy convenience store inStatesboro, which everyone called the Quick & Sleazy. They were getting rid of their whole stock of a beer called Wanker. Each bottle had a different picture of a girl in a bikini on the label. For some reason they were selling it for $8.23 a case. I imagine there must of been something wrong with it, but it tasted alright and it gave you a buzz. My mom went ahead and bought ten cases of Wanker and stacked them up in the carport. She had to make two trips in her little ’89 Ford Festiva to get it all home. So now we had hundreds of beers, but no cereal or bread. For breakfast I’d roll pressed ham and American cheese into little tubes and eat them with my fingers.
    “So what’s your type, then?” I said.
    “I have complicated taste, so I actually have more than one type, but all my men pretty much fit in the same category.”
    “All your men?” I laughed hard enough to make beer fizz into my sinuses. Dani frowned. “Alright,” I asked, “what category?”
    “Well, for example, I only like men with brown hair. The darker the better. But not black hair, because you don’t want someone who looks too much like you do, and not blond hair, because I’m a Leo almost on the cusp of Virgo.”
    “But, wait, I thought you liked Eminem? How’s he fit in if you only go for brunettes? He’s got blond hair.”
    “See, that’s where it gets complicated. Eminem has blond hair, but it’s bleached blond. His actual hair color is brown, so he fits into my type.”
    “How do you know he has brown hair? Whenever I’ve seen it, it’s always yellow.” I opened another warmish beer. It foamed over and made a mess of the tablecloth.
    “It’s
so
not yellow,” she nearly yelled. “It’s platinum blond.”
    “What do you go by then? The eyebrows?”
    She calmed herself with a sip of beer and settled into the vinyl cushion on the kitchen chair. “That’s a good clue, but you can’talways tell for sure from the eyebrows. Sometimes they’re lighter or darker. Look at my eyebrows.”
    I did. She’d plucked them into arches that gave her face a startled look. When she really was surprised, they looked like hand-drawn rooftops over her eyes. There was nothing realistic about them. In fact, one was just the tiniest bit higher than the other. But I saw her point—her eyebrows were a couple of shades lighter than her head hair. With the August sun pouring through the window onto her face, they seemed almost brown while the hair pulled back into pigtails was shiny black. The color of wet tires.
    “Do you see?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “They’re almost brown.”
    “Exactly. If my hair was bleached and you didn’t know any better, you might think my hair was brown.”
    “So how do you know then?”
    “I’ll show you.” She opened her rock star collection and flipped through it.
    The rock star collection was a three-ring binder filled with sheets of heavy black construction paper. She organized it alphabetically by band, and then by the individual members of the band. Each page was covered with photographs of rock stars clipped from magazines or printed up from