Nothing Real Volume 1 Read Online Free Page B

first, but then won’t look at me, and he starts wiping his nose, and that’s what gets me choked up. I want to tell him about me and Alan, so he won’t feel sad, so he’ll be filled with a hatred that will make him storm away, burning with the need to be free of it. I want him to pull himself together, kick me out of the house, get in his car, and drive somewhere fast. I want him to want to scour the earth for a way out of his pain, but instead he crumples. I want to tell him: This is how you change your life, stupid. Find any way out. Grab at it. Even something or someone you detest. If they are strong, grab on. If you are too afraid, let someone else do the pulling.

The Bubblemen
    The body is elastic. Today’s body not the body of yesterday. Her jeans glide over thighs, button, rest against hip bone. She is wearing a white V-neck T-shirt, and black leather combat boots, but nothing she wears diminishes her essential wholesomeness. If she took a bottle of pills, she knows she would immediately pick up the phone and calmly dial the poison hotline. Even on ’shrooms, she is somehow rock solid, thinking about her homework, her paper on Hamlet. An hour into her high she comes up with a title for it: “Hamlet, Just Like You and Me.”
    â€œHe’s too real,” she says to Val—too much like a real person, and too little like a character in a play. A character who destroys himself by refusing to be a character. “Hamlet,” she says, “is everyone you know.” She can’t shut up about it until Val puts his foot down.
    â€œYou’re killing me with that shit,” he says.
    Then they are at the park, lying on the grass, listening on Val’s iPod to Steve and Hunter’s alt-reggae version of “The Rivers All Run Dry” over and over. Val is nice. He holds her hand, and then theyboth fall asleep, and wake in a cool dew. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t called home. Her mother thinks she is with Fiona, knows nothing about Val, her first real secret.
    Her jeans are too big now by a size or two, and her mother notices. It’s okay, because she was chubby before, so no one bothers her about whether she is eating right. Her mother suggests they go shopping for some pants that fit, but Nancy doesn’t want to jinx it. It is shameful to her the way she still believes in magic. Do the opposite and you’ll get want you want. Don’t think about Val; then he’ll call. Pretend to be invisible and you’ll be beautiful.
    Today she is driving over to Val’s for the first time. She’s had her license for only a week, but took the old Fiat, ancient stick shift and all, to school the day before. She stalled twice at the light. To get to Val’s, she has to drive through town—how many stop signs is that? How many hills? At least she knows the way. Now that she can drive, she is surprised by how many places she doesn’t know how to get to. She didn’t admit to Fiona on Saturday that she couldn’t get to Indian Lake on her own; she just didn’t go. Not that Fiona didn’t know about her driving issues. Everyone drove before her, even some of the juniors. “Someday you’ll just need to drive,” her mother said. She cried the second time she failed the road test, and it would have been a scene, if her father permitted any. “Just get the damn license,” he growled, and left the room. She didn’t have a choice.
    Now she has the used, midnight-blue Fiat as an early graduation present, to take with her to Boulder in August. It isn’t where girls in AP English go to school, but that’s another story, the only blot on herrecord, the only tangible sign of her resistance. She’d almost vomited the morning of the SATs, not out of nerves, the way her mother thought, but from a hangover. That was back when she’d first met Val. He’d dropped her at home early enough, but when