Rose of No Man's Land Read Online Free

not like I’m going to take the stupid pill.
    Kristy learned that Kim Porciatti tried to kill herself because she does Bernice O’Leary’s hair and Bernice manages the Ohmigod! store at the mall. It is sort of sad to think that you can be the actual manager of the most popularstore at the mall and still you don’t make enough money to get a proper haircut. You have to drive out to the Voke — way out in East Bumfuck, the middle of nowhere, by a swear-to-god
lake
— and pay a stoned high school student three dollars to cut your hair. It seems unjust. There are two different hair salons at the mall: Jungle Unisex, which is sort of old, with a jungle motif; and Hair Universe, which has an outer space theme and a lot of neon. You’d think that the actual owners of Ohmigod! would pay for their managers to get a fancy haircut since it’s such a big frigging deal to work there. Ohmigod! sells miniskirts and fake-flower hairpins and anorexic-looking sandals. It’s very bright and plays old music from the ’80s and it’s supposed to be really fun, like some sort of disco circus. Everything that isn’t striped is polka-dotted, so it truly seems like a clown place, but it’s very popular anyway. More people are caught shoplifting from Ohmigod! than from any other store at the mall. Which might only mean that the girls who like those clothes are, on the whole, dumber than average and more likely to get caught. Kim Porciatti works at Ohmigod!, which is how I knew who she was in the first place. It’s how I knew she went to Saint Joan, the all-girls high school, and how I knew that everyone thought she was just the greatest. Even if you don’t shop at Ohmigod! — and I don’t, I think those clothes are nauseating plus they’re wicked expensive — you wind up knowing all about everyone who works there and what their business is. It’s the sort of useless information you’re always picking up in life, against your will. Kim Porciatti. I have seen her a handful of times. Her hair is always blond, maybe toobright to be real, and don’t Italians have dark hair, naturally? I’ll have to ask Kristy, who now knows everything there is about hair. Kristy is now officially a hair expert, in addition to an expert on period medications and the mechanics of getting onto a reality television show. Kim is blond and she always has a tan even when the world is nothing but dog-pissy snow and clouds and coldness and scrawny bare trees. It must be that spray-on tan but it looks pretty good on her. I’m trying to be fair about the whole Kim thing. On the one hand it pisses me off the way someone can get this whole little cult around them just because they look good in a fake tan and have a lawyer dad buying them cute shoes and stuffing them into a good all-girl’s high school where their life isn’t destroyed by guys. I mean, what did Kim do to earn all this adoration? You couldn’t even say she worked particularly hard to get hired at Ohmigod! because she was popular already when she applied and that’s exactly why Bernice hired her. And she didn’t need the job in the first place, ’cause her parents have money and she just worked there ’cause it’s cool, like being paid money to hang out in a nightclub with a bonus discount on fancy clothes. It’s just not fair. Like why not decide that MaryAnn Baxter be popular? Why not select her to fall down and hyperventilate over? MaryAnn Baxter has a really fucked-up face. She got between her mom and her dad when they were having a fight and her dad flung something awful into her face. I want to say it was hydrochloric acid because that’s the terrible thing people are always getting splashed in the face with on television, but who knows if hydrochloric acid is even a real thing?MaryAnn Baxter looks like she got hit in the face with pure fire. Her skin is a lot of different colors, like a car that’s been stripped and primed for painting. It’s sort of patchy and in certain places