Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Online Free Page B

hacking in the silence. “I have asthma, but it’s not so bad,” I told her, trying to subdue the coughing fit and mopping up a medley of fluids with my shirtsleeve. I was still hunched over, my hands on my knees. She gently touched my upper back with one hand, and used the other to carefully pick the smoldering filter from my fingers.
    “You might catch on fire,” she said in a tone that I wanted so badly to interpret as seductive.
    “I swear, I’m fine. Really.” Her hand grazed my rusty corduroys just above the knee. One of her Echo and the Bunnymen pins fell from her denim jacket, and whether she noticed it or not, she made no effort to pick it up. I distracted her with an outrageously dramatic cough, and with the firm but gentle precision of a hen setting up shop on her egg, I covered the pin with my foot. It was the first time I had been touched below the waist by a female who wasn’t a relative or in the medical profession. And I had the badge to commemorate it. (I still have it.) She kept her hand on my back for a minute, rubbing me lightly while my breathing evened out.
    “You really shouldn’t smoke,” she said sympathetically, though sure of herself. I loved the complexity ofher tone. The sleeve of her jacket worked its way up her arm and collected in a bunch near her elbow, exposing an orange day-glow Swatch. “Jesus, I’m fucking late for Bloody’s class. She has it in for me already. Fuck, she’s going to fuckin’ kill me. You’re sure you’re okay, right?” she asked, flicking her butt and scrambling to collect her bag.
    “I’m great,” I assured her, which was partially true.
    “See you in Calc,” she said anxiously and was gone. I scooped the Echo pin up off the ground of The Lung and held it in my hand for the rest of the day and for a lot of days after that. I looked at it in bed at night. I studied it. I smelled it for traces of her. I threaded it through my callused fingertips after long hours of practicing bass in my room, and pulled on it until it broke free through my bloodless skin. I scratched a small A on the inside of my right thigh and picked at it so that it wouldn’t heal before she might see it.
    Few things were certain in my mind, but one of them was that I had to start a band.
    * * *
    Death, more precisely suicide, became the hot topic with the kids. Some of the girls in school cried a lot in the hallways, and they decorated Denise’s locker with all sorts of notes, flowers, stickers and mementos untilit too looked like a refrigerator door. Some genius saw the parallel and stuck a phony suicide note to the locker with chewing gum. It said something about going to the big auto body shop in the sky. (I have to admit I thought it was funny in a way, but wasn’t exactly sure why.)
    A Spanish teacher named Ms. (Margaret) Kirkwood took the note down without making any big deal of it. Very cool and very unlike your typical high school teacher who would have pursued it like a wolverine until someone, if not everyone, paid. Kirkwood was probably in her mid-thirties, and she knew full well we were all fucked. The guys stood around and watched her crumple the note, then looked at each other, nodding our heads up and down in accord. Yes, we agreed without speaking, Kirkwood was cool.
    Later that day I was in the front row of her conversational Spanish class. She came running in a few minutes after the bell, and everyone was going berserk. Kirkwood was in no mood and took charge of the room. Her put-on disciplinarian’s tone got me fantasizing about her.
    As she spoke passionately about irregular verbs, I slowly looked her up and down through the sweaty headrest of my fingers—as if I needed any more unsettling stimulae. My eyes scanned her left leg bent slightlyat the knee—Audrey Hepburn/
Roman Holiday
style—and stopped at her calf.
    The sanitary napkin was stuck there but dangling, crimson side up. I stiffened in my seat, repulsed, nervous and intrigued. My eyes caught