Rose of No Man's Land Read Online Free Page B

planning on Kim’s part to make such a dramatic statement when no one was really around to take notice.
    You’re cold
, Kristy said.
Hard.
    Don’t Blame Me, I said. Blame The World.

Three
    The Square One Mall is our mall. If you think about it, it’s a crummy name for a mall. Like, “back to square one.” It’s where you go when your really big, visionary plans don’t work out. What I really like is that at the side entrance there’s a great, lit-up neon sign propped above the doors that glows, “MALL.” It’s generic, yet glamorous. Square One’s got the regular things that most malls have. There’s an Ohmigod! and then stores that sort of aspire to be Ohmigod!, places like Eternally Eighteen and Tight Knit. These stores should be embraced for generously offering cheaper versions of the crap on sale at Ohmigod!, but everyone is so frigging self-loathing it’s some sort of social crime to buy the cheaper outfits.
    There’s a Lotions & Potions for natural skin stuff anda Dark Subject that sells clothes for kids who want to make you think they’re really dark, scary people with tortured inner lives. There’s a bunch of other weird places I’m not really interested in, like a hobby store, stuffed with miniature vehicles, that I’ve never seen anyone go into. Sometimes a Mr. Rogers-looking guy with a button-up sweater stands at the edge of this shop and peers out into the greater mall. A little track of scalp is displayed by the side part of his neat, nerdy hairdo. He looks like he time-traveled into Square One from some gentler year. He stands before his hobby shop and looks over at the giant video game store where all the boys are having a big testosterone fest trying out various games in which they street fight, run over hookers, and in general make some mayhem. His little ships and gluey planes are no match. It’s too sad, really. There’s a craft store where mom-looking women shuffle around putting bouquets of plastic flowers and pipe cleaners into their shopping baskets. A dull bookstore. They have a giant shelf when you first walk in, all the covers are every different shade of pink, from the faintest fingernail-pink to a more brassy, unnatural fuchsia. Those are books for females. They have pictures of high-heeled shoes on them, or caricatures of little dogs, or ladies holding teacups or martini glasses, and the pink is whimsically accented with bits of lime green or jolting orange.
    There’s a food court in the middle of the mall with a lot of top-rate crap-ass options. There are carts throughout the place that sell really useful things like cell phone covers that have pictures of girls who look like Kim Porciatti in Budweiser bathing suits, or miniature wigs you somehowstick into your hairdo for maximum hair effect, or imitation designer pocketbooks that don’t fool anybody and still cost a bunch of money.
    I went to the mall on the evening of what should have been my last day of school, to assist Kristy in the scoring of a job at Jungle Unisex. I’d stayed in my bedroom all afternoon, going quietly crazy in my head. I was filled with rage at my jackass family and also starving, but would not go out into the kitchen and face the torn-open packages of ramen, not to mention the slack, crusty face of Donnie and his concubine, my mother. It’s true — I laid around and felt very sorry for myself. An activity I could expect to dominate my summer. When Kristy came home from her last day at the Voke we had a gigantic fight. Kristy had been working on the videotape audition that she hoped would get her onto the cast of
The Real World.
She ingeniously stole a video camera from some media room at the Voke no one even knew was there. She found it while looking for the storage room that held the bulk 40 volume peroxide. So as if life isn’t hard enough, she’s been sticking that camera into everyone’s face, filming our home, getting every single sick and dysfunctional element onto video so that some