Caring Is Creepy Read Online Free Page A

websites. Beneath each picture was a handwritten explanation of the photograph: name of the rock star, band, date of the photograph, location, and the name of the magazine or fan site it came from. She had subscriptions to about eight music and movie magazines. Sometimes she also added a personal note like, “Eddie has looked much better in other pictures, but this one shows off his wrists. They are amazing and tan and strong here. However, those dark circles under his eyes make me worry about his health. Drugs?” The binder we were looking at that day was volume two. She’d been collecting rock stars since before I met her, and by the end of eighth grade, she had filled upher first binder. Nearly three hundred pages, back and front. She hardly looked at the old one anymore since she believed her taste in music had matured a lot since then. The first volume was mostly filled with boy bands from the nineties. “I only put men in the new collection,” she’d told me. All in all, there must of been at least two hundred pages and ten times that many pictures in volume two. You could spend a whole day looking at it, and we often did.
    “Look here.” She turned to the Eminem section, which had grown to almost twenty pages. “I’ve got a couple of pictures where you can just barely see his roots and they’re brown.” She jabbed at a photograph of him crouched down by a burnt-out car. He glared at something outside the frame that seemed to make him very angry.
    I took a big gulp of beer and narrowed my eyes for a better view. “I don’t think I see.”
    “Look closer.” She tapped Eminem’s head with her thumb and clucked at me. “At home I use a magnifying glass, but I forgot to bring it.”
    We bent our heads together, noses almost touching the page.
    “Do you see it now?” she said, her forehead wrinkled up in serious concentration.
    “Yeah, I think so.” I didn’t.
    “It took me a while to find that one. I can’t tell you how relieved I was. I’d started to worry he might not be my type.”
    “But he is?”
    “Definitely.”
    “How do you find out what your type is?”
    “The most important thing is they need to look similar to you, but they can’t look exactly like you. So, like with you, you’re a dishwater blonde with light brown eyes. Your type can have darker or lighter hair or eyes, but they can’t be the same. Also, they’ve got to be at least five inches taller than you.”
    “Why five?”
    “Well, the actual rule is your head can’t be taller than his nose. Five’s just a nice round number.”
    “Oh,” I said, wondering whose rule this was. I picked two of my mother’s cigarette butts out of the ashtray. Mom had a tendency to smoke four or five drags and then jab them out like she was killing something, so there were always a lot of smokable butts. I used to be able to steal a pack now and then, but I’m pretty sure she figured out I was doing it. About two months earlier, she’d started hiding her cartons.
    “Give me one without the lipstick, please,” Dani said, pointing to the ashtray. “This is gross enough without having to feel like I’m kissing your mom.”
    We swapped cigs and I opened up another beer. I’d drunk two over the last hour and already I could feel my tongue getting thicker. A cloud passed across the sun and the kitchen darkened for a moment. The sudden change of light made me dizzy.
    “Your type,” Dani said, moving her frown from my peeling purple toenail polish up to my nose, “also has to be at least three years older than you.”
    “So, could Andy Tyson be my type?”
    Andy was a senior when we were freshman. I’d had a thing for him since Christmas last, when I saw him buying a paper sack of screws at the hardware store. Those tight jeans he wore really clinched it.
    “Hell, no!” Dani scrunched up her face. “For one thing, you’ve got almost the exact same nose. I mean exact.”
    “I do?” This made me feel good and I must of looked