Pink Smog Read Online Free Page B

a fancy, white Mercedes pulled up beside me, leaning out the window, and I ran faster, my heart calling uselessly for help inside me.
    All I could make out clearly were his eyes, catching a reflection of the streetlights beneath the white turban he wore—they looked like they had seen everything there was to see.
    â€œYou must not be afraid,” he told me, then reached his hand out the window and tossed something onto the sidewalk before he sped away.
    I stopped where I stood, breathing hard, looking at the something—it was a shiny silver envelope.
    You must not be afraid .
    The man in the car, whoever he was, was right. I’d already lost what was most important to me—my dad. I didn’t have anything to be afraid of except that he might not come back. I didn’t have anything to care about and sometimes that makes you brave.
    I picked up the envelope and opened it. There was a note inside. I unfolded it and a cascade of tiny glittery bits fell out. The words were written in cutout letters like a ransom note:
    Mirror mirror on the wall, you’re Factor’s fairest of them all .
    What the heck? Fairest of them all? Factor’s? I tucked the note in my pocket and walked home. Some of the glitter had clung to my arms like shiny freckles.
    When I got back, determined to stand my ground against the cackling girl, she—just like the mysterious boy—was gone, if she had ever been there at all. In a way I was relieved: even with the encouraging words I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to her anyway. Not yet.
    That night I lay in bed staring at the note. What did it mean? It seemed like a clue of some sort but I had no idea how to read it. I wasn’t anybody’s fairest and who was Factor anyway? I tucked the note inside my pink ballerina music box and closed my eyes, hoping I’d dream about Charlie that night.
    When my dad used to get upset and I asked him why, he didn’t talk too much about my mom. He usually blamed Los Angeles.
    He said, “Once there at least was noir and sorcerers and cults and jazz and poetry and citrus orchards, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin. Now there are just cars and freeways and vapid teenagers who don’t even know what noir means. And the music! No one has heard of the Stooges or the Velvet Underground. The singer/songwriters lock themselves up in their canyon mansions wishing for the sixties to come back. I’m sick of the heat. I’m sick of the lack of culture. I have to get out. Someday I’m moving back to N.Y.C.”
    What he didn’t say was L.A. had something else, something that didn’t exist in New York City.
    L.A. had his daughter, Weetzie. L.A. had me. In a way, L.A. was me. I hadn’t known anything else and I didn’t think I ever would.
    Even with the smog alerts, L.A. had never seemed that bad to me. I liked the light. It was always filtered by smog but I didn’t think about that. It was dull and golden. My dad said it made people lazy and passive, that light. It lulled you into a stupor. It made you dumb as a pink plastic flamingo, my dad said.
    But there was Hollywood Boulevard, starred with the names of my idols. There was the Chinese Theater like a magic pagoda. There was the Sunset Strip winding beneath the giant billboards and lined with places like Tower Records, where I liked to find all the scariest or sexiest album covers in the bins. Along the Strip were restaurants like The Source and Carney’s and Butterfield’s. The Source was an old shack of a hippie place with wood-paneled walls and an outdoor patio. They served veggie burgers and sprouts and hibiscus lemonade. Carney’s was a hot-dog place inside an old train car. Butterfield’s was a sunken garden at the bottom of the stairs, like someone’s run-down mansion where you could have elegant brunches with quiche, fresh fruit, and champagne among lacy trees. There was Jerry Pillar’s, where you could get