Pink Smog Read Online Free Page A

and went out onto the balcony and looked down at the pool. I remembered the boy crouching over my mother, his tense shoulders and his strong hands. Maybe he would come back? I put on my sweatshirt over my pajamas, pushed my bare feet into my Vans, and left the apartment.
    I went downstairs and sat by the pool and stared at the ghostly blue water and thought about my dad. Was he gone forever? Would he call me? Would he come back? He’d gone away before, on a pretty regular basis, to do some writing or to see his sister, Goldy, in New York or after fights with my mom, but there had never been a fight like this. When he went away, he would always leave me a bottle of his aftershave to use when he was gone so that I would remember him. He also let me wear his shirts. The shirts smelled like cigarettes and the aftershave and if I wore one and closed my eyes and rubbed a piece of sandpaper, as scratchy and granular as his chin, it was like he was there with me.
    I realized that I could go get one of my dad’s shirts and wear the aftershave now—he hadn’t had time to get anything when he left. But I knew it would upset my mom. I’d have to wear the shirt at night while I slept or sneak out in it in the morning. Plus, I didn’t know if I could stand wearing that shirt. It would make me too sad, that smoky, leafy, cinnamon-tinged smell.
    I was lying on a lounge chair and the plastic slats were cutting into my skin through my thin pajamas. I shifted my weight and looked up at the sky. You couldn’t see any stars. I remember going back east with my dad, how he showed me the stars in upstate New York, above this old farmhouse with a creek where Goldy lived, and I was so surprised how many there were. In L.A. the stars look weak and forlorn like the people who come here to be famous and end up working as waiters. Except they are beautiful, too. Like this really cute guy who worked at the Great American Food & Beverage Company on Santa Monica Boulevard. My parents took me there on my twelfth birthday and the cute waiter sang me Cat Stevens songs and brought me a Cobb salad and a piece of birthday cake. And there were the cute, old waitresses at Du-Par’s in the Valley who had probably been starlets once. They wore little, ruffled aprons and pink dresses and squeaky orthopedic shoes and they all reminded me not only of the faded stars in the sky but also of the pretty whipped-cream-covered pies reflected in tilted mirrors along the very top of the walls still hoping to be discovered, if only for a tiny part in a pie commercial.
    All these thoughts made me hungry and I was getting sleepy so I decided to go back in because it didn’t seem as if the boy was going to come. I could have jumped into the pool and pretended to be drowning but that seemed too dramatic so I got up and started toward the stairs.
    I was standing at the bottom of the staircase going up to our unit when I heard this cackling laughter. It had a shockingly hollow sound.
    There was a girl about my age sitting at my front door. She was thin and pale with long, black hair that hung almost to her waist, and large, tilted eyes that looked like the eyes of the woman in number 13. The girl was wearing a childlike, too-small dress with puffed sleeves and a smocked bodice that came to just below where her fairly large (at least compared to mine) breasts were. She also had on bobby socks and old-fashioned white saddle shoes. Her lips were bright red with lipstick.
    â€œYou can’t go home again,” she told me sternly. “Don’t even try it. Home is gone forever.” Then she laughed that hollow doll cackle.
    I backed away and started running. I ran and ran into the night. It was dark and cold and empty, without even the comfort of a moon anywhere in sight, let alone stars. I thought about the cute waiter who would probably never get a record deal and how the feet of the waitresses at Du-Par’s must hurt them a lot.
    A man in