Infandous Read Online Free Page B

off, my space grows sweltering. I ignore the first two texts from Marissa, tensing a little each time my phone vibrates, then relaxing again as her name pops up on the screen. But her third text— Lolly working 2day meet ASAP —gets my attention.
    Our friend Lolly attended Venice High with us until the middle of last year—our junior year—when she decided enough of that shit. Now she works three jobs, all part-time. Marissa and I like it best the days Lolly works at the Smoothie Shack.
    Back upstairs I find the green triangle top of my bikini hanging in the shower and a pair of black bottoms in the laundry basket. My gray tee is still clean enough, and I have some cutoff Dickies that aren’t too grungy, so I put those on too. Then I slip into my Vans and take my board down to the street.
    I pass a few of the local places—there’s a secondhand shop that passes itself off as “vintage,” a shoe store I can never afford to visit, and a hipster boutique that specializes in ironic eyewear. The shop owners all know me pretty well, and a couple of them let me install some of my art. There’s this owl I made from bent spoons hanging in the front window of the hipster place. People can talk all the shit they want about hipsters, but they’re pretty cool about making space for local artists.
    That owl sculpture—I bought most of the spoons at this one big thrift store where my mom and I sometimes shop. I took the whole stack of them, like twenty-five. And while I was waiting in line, this guy came in. Eighteen or maybe twenty years old. Used up kind of, already. And he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, “Do you need all of those? Can I buy one?” And I shrugged and said, “Why not?” and gave him one. Later, when I told Marissa about it, she said he probably needed it to cook his H.
    The Shack is on the boardwalk, so I have to maneuver through the tightly packed crowd of tourists. Venice Beach is its own thing. There’s nowhere else like it … at least, that’s what people tell me. I haven’t really been many places.
    What’s funny is that the whole town was built to be like the real Venice, in Italy. It was built by, like, this eccentric millionaire who wanted basically a playground for the rich. It was just a marshland with a pretty three-mile stretch of beach, but enough money can transform anything—at least for a while. The millionaire—his name was Kinney—he had the marshland transformed into a whole network of canals. He brought over actual Italians to give gondola rides. Later, people called Venice Beach the Disneyland of its day. No shit.
    But people get tired of everything, and money is fickle and water that doesn’t move enough gets fetid and disgusting. Eventually all but three of the canals were filled in, and the whole town turned into a slum.
    Marissa is waiting for me in front of the Shack. She has a cigarette tucked between her lips and pulls on it in short, hard bursts, yanking it from her mouth in between each one. Marissa has a love/hate relationship with all her addictions.
    “Finally. Fucking around in that storage room again?”
    I don’t bother answering this. Marissa knows where I’ve been. “Long night with Sal?”
    “Sal can suck it for all I care.”
    Good to know where they are in their endless breakup-hookup cycle. I don’t need any details.
    She gives them to me anyway. “I thought it was going to be just us, you know? Like, for a change? But as soon as we finished fucking”—she emphasizes the word for the benefit of a tourist couple walking by. Melissa takes the obligation to be the local color seriously—“his boy Blake called and cruised over. They spent the rest of the night screwing around on their phones, uploading pictures of each other and calling each other faggot.”
    “Good times,” I say, only half listening. I am hungry. “Is Kayla around?”
    Marissa grinds out her cigarette. “Uh-huh. She should be going on break soon.”
    We wait around for