Infandous Read Online Free

Marissa.”
    “Going to try to find a job?”
    Mom has gotten the idea that I should spend the summer gainfully employed. Things are going to be bad enough with summer school, and since I’m leaving town for a while anyway, visiting my mom’s sister and her family in Atlanta, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to fill up the rest of my free time with some lame minimum-wage job.
    But we’ve had this “discussion” before. Mom perceives a lack of work ethic. I explain that I’d rather be broke than yoked. She shakes her head and looks disappointed, and I feel like shit.
    Instead of getting sucked into it again, I shrug noncommittally. Mom must not be in the mood for a fight either, because she just sort of shakes her head and drops the subject. She rubs her hand briefly against the side of my head, the part of my hair that is sheared close. She says it reminds her of a kitten. “Okay, baby,” she says, kissing my cheek before she reaches for her purse. “Be good.”
    “You too.” I watch her leave through the steam of my coffee; then I slide into the seat she’s vacated at the table. It is still warm, the way the bed feels when she’s just gotten out, leaving a little pocket of warmth for me to curl into.
    The sudoku is complete. My mother’s neat numbers—she crosses her sevens—fill each square. Her numbers are like her fingers, her hands, and the rest of her—elegant and ordered, near perfect without effort. I trace her numbers with my fingertip, then flip the paper over to the funnies and run my finger along each comic strip, not really paying attention to the words but instead looking at the color palette each artist has chosen. Some are heavily pastel; others lean toward bright, bold primary colors. A couple of them—those with a darker, more political bent—work in grays and blacks with an occasional fierce pop of red.
    My fingers are as colorful as the comics they trace. Layers of paint have totally wrecked my nails, which I wear short like a boy’s. Each cuticle is blackened from my charcoals. Red and yellow and green stain my nails and fingers. A thin callus runs down the inside of my index finger, and a matching one mirrors it on my thumb. They are proof of the blade I often hold. Rubbing my finger across them, I can almost hear the sound the blade makes as it pushes through cardboard, through Styrofoam, through whatever I can find, and tears a line. A Band-Aid wraps around the tip of the middle finger of my left hand where I cut myself last week in my studio.
    “Studio.”
    There is nothing neat or clean about my studio, but I can see it all when I close my eyes. A tall table runs along one wall. It is littered with bottles of paint and adhesives; little tins of brushes; stacks of newspapers; markers in all colors, which I’ve collected since childhood; and coffee cans full of shit I’ve found, like bottle caps and scratched CDs, little stones and broken cell phone pieces and beach glass. There’s a couple of X-Acto knives (the pink one is to blame for my most recent injury), half-empty bottles of glue, spools of tape (thick blue tape, skinnier black electrical tape, and one thinning round circle of shiny gray duct tape), a couple of discarded water bottles, and an old MP3 player (splattered here and there with paint but still functional). There’s a stack of whatever paper I can get my hands on for sketching—all the apartment residents hand over their cardboard boxes to me whenever they get a delivery, along with the light brown packing paper that comes inside. A few of the sketchpads I carry with me everywhere (some full, some half full, and one gloriously empty). On the concrete walls are tracings and sketches I’ve taped up over the last few weeks. They’ll stay there for a while, either developing into ideas or eventually disappearing into the bin out back. The biggest pieces of cardboard I’ve been able to find or forage lean up against the short wall at the back of my little