The Dilettantes Read Online Free

dress shirt. Tucked in. In Vancouver, casual is a right.”
    Up at the registers, some kind of complication involving a gift card brought the lineup to a standstill. The girls chatted gamely on. They talked about how long the SkyTrain takes between stops. They talked about a popular TV show, wherein a group of attractive plane-crash survivors slowly discover that the island they’re stranded on is either science or magic. They talked about how both of their mothers never went anywhere without painted toenails. They talked about their tutorial, for an English class on Shakespeare’s later plays. Whentheir own drinks were finally ready, Anna spotted a pair of recently vacated stools and asked Tracy if she wanted to get a seat.
    “Can’t today, I’m afraid,” Tracy said, flashing her own smile. “I’ve got a meeting. But this was fun. Save me a spot in class next week, okay?” No doubt about it: this girl was sit-down material. She was flattered Anna felt the same way.
    Back outside, Tracy lit a cigarette. She wasn’t unattractive, and didn’t consider herself so, but whenever she talked to a girl like Anna, who actually turned heads, Tracy felt herself standing up straighter to compensate. It was a purely symbolic gesture; Tracy was five foot four, rounding up. And she only ever realized she was doing it afterward, when her lower back began to ache and she felt her spine settle back into its familiar slouch. Oh well.
Better than sticking my tits out
, she thought.
    So she was short, with thick-chic glasses and an attractively prominent stomach that she hoped gave off a subtle, second-trimester femininity. Her jeans had double-folded cuffs. She used to wear a blazer with pins all along the lapels, until one day she didn’t.
    One particular point of pride was that she didn’t try to compensate for her figure by making a barrage of hyper-filthy innuendo and constantly reminding everyone that this was a sexual creature. That sex
happened
here, whether you liked it or not.
Those kinds of girls
, she thought grimly, taking a deep puff of smoke,
are the absolute worst
. In photos they always made sure they were squeezing someone’s breast (not necessarily their own), and they only seemed to know two facial expressions: tongue sticking out; or chin angled down and mouth slightly open, looking doe-eyed into the camera. Both were meant to remind the viewer of blowjobs. You couldn’t reason with these girls.
    Tracy was emphatically not one of them. For one thing, she hated wine coolers. She thought they tasted like potpourri.
    Pinching the cigarette between her lips, she put on her headphones and cued up Hüsker Dü’s
New Day Rising
. The hackeysack circle had now doubled its numbers to eight. All guys. No surprise there. Their clothes were faded, frayed, and contained at least three times as many pockets as Tracy could imagine practical uses for. They never kept the hackeysack in flight for more than a few hits in a row, either, but guffawed and egged each other into trying more and more outlandish moves anyway. Three of them were yelling out quotes from a late-night animated series, all trying to approximate the main character’s squeaky, vaguely ethnic voice. If this was a meeting of any campus group, now it was Dreadlock Fans and Owners.
    Even optimists like Tracy had little time for the hippies.
You’ll never get anything done
, she thought with an arch smile,
not with pants that complicated and slogans that simple
.
    Just then one of the guys in the circle looked up and made eye contact with her. His eyes were Alaskan-husky blue, and he wore a long-sleeved waffle shirt with cargo pants that tied around the waist with a thin black cord. The directness of his look froze Tracy’s smug train of thought in its place. It also, she realized a second too late, froze her smug expression to her face.
Whoops
, she thought, slipping by.
You’re not supposed to let the hippies know you look down on them. Otherwise they’ll