Lightning People Read Online Free

who came from extreme privilege and unlike someone tied to the responsibilities it obligates, Dash carried a reckless confidence that she had never seen in a man her age. She was used to settling for the occasional half-hearted orgasm with one of the cerebral loners who didn’t have her work-study obligations, waking up at seven on weekend mornings to pack bags of fetal pigs in the biology freezer, which she favored to churning out collated
color copies for the junior faculty. Dash claimed her as his girlfriend right away, picking her up most nights in front of her dorm on 114 th Street, placing his gray wool fedora over her head, and taking her to underground clubs on the Lower East Side that he had frequented since he was thirteen. She couldn’t believe this side of New York had always existed without her ever tapping into it. Somehow, like most Columbia undergrads, Del had been left stranded inside the wrought iron of the Upper West Side, living on the cool sophistication of subway rides down to Soho for student-teacher cocktail parties in renovated lofts with Abstract Expressionist prints the color of urine on the bathroom walls.
    Dash was naked so often when they were together, the red curls covering his nipples and matching the flaming tuft above his hooked erect penis, a part of her felt detached when running into him on campus and seeing him dressed in camouflage pants with absurd yellow handkerchiefs tied around his wrists—like he was dressing for a world outside of the one they shared. Yes, she considered herself a feminist. Yes, she held a lit candle on the march down Amsterdam Avenue to take back the night and attended seminars on the brutality of fashion magazines and female genital mutilation in remote West African villages. But Dash could hand her a blade of grass that he picked on his way to meet her and she’d keep it preserved in the gold locket she wore around her neck. He played bass in a band called Splatter Pattern. She had briefly tried out as a backup singer, but, as Dash himself said, “You sing like you’re being electrocuted for a crime you didn’t commit.” Instead she sat behind the curtain at their shows smoking a dozen cigarettes and throwing death glances at the girls who assembled around the stage—models or junkies or wannabes of either camp who looked pretty and lost under the colored lights. Alas, she’d found her type: He was an artist. He bought Marcel Breuer metal chairs and twisted them into useless piles of junk.
    Del and the red Viking had fallen so hard for each other that the morning after they graduated—she magna cum laude in biology, he a “walking degree” until he finished a full summer semester of classes and a mandatory gym requirement—he asked her if she would
consider living with him and having a baby. “Isn’t that what all this money I’ve got is for?” he asked, while kicking a combat boot toward the ceiling fan that circled slowly above his bed. “Let’s make a child because we have so much love it needs to spill into something else.” What he didn’t know—and what she did—was that her stomach was already carrying a dark secret. What she didn’t know—and what he did—was that he was about to embark on a two-month tour with his band. They were both twenty-one.
    Her parents were a furious chorus of answering-machine messages. She tried to stop drinking the scotch in his apartment for the baby she hadn’t yet told him about. She had moved her clothes into his closets and spent evenings camped out naked on his balcony when she received the news that Dash had been with his two bandmates in a blue Mustang at 12:30 AM on Summerlick Highway outside of Boston when they were hit head-on by a semi traveling at seventy miles per hour. The driver was alive but in serious condition. The man in the front seat had been beheaded by the truck’s grill. The passenger in