The Wangs vs. the World Read Online Free Page B

pictures of dead people.”
    “People die. Deal with it.”
    “Yeah, people die, but that doesn’t mean that you have to plaster them all over our walls.”
    “They’re your walls now, aren’t they.”
    “I’m just saying, I know why you put them up and I think it’s creepy. You can give up pretending that’s not the reason.” Rachel took everything so seriously. That’s what happened when you were a total drama nerd.
    “Why don’t you give it up, Rachel? Rachie Pie? Oh wait, I forgot. You’re saving yourself for, like, Andrew Lloyd Webber or something. You’re too good to just have s-e-x.”
    “That’s not what this is about! Why does everything have to be about sex with you?”
    “I thought that everything was about death with me.”
    They faced off for a moment, then Rachel spoke. “I’m . . . I’m sorry for you. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do? Like, do you want to borrow some money or something? Or, um, we could . . . steal you some food from the cafeteria? That you could take with you?”
    Grace stared at her roommate, who was kneeling on the ground, greedily feeling up a pair of her jeans. She could kick Rachel in the face right now and never even have to deal with it. A satisfying crunch in her annoying, curly-haired face. She’d aim straight at the zits that always piled onto Rachel’s forehead, a bubbly constellation of them, and Rachel’s head would snap back and she’d have to shut up and Grace wouldn’t even get in trouble. Or maybe she’d have to go to jail, but what would it matter?
    She turned back to the board.
    “Isabella Blow,” said Grace, untacking a photograph of a thin woman quivering in profile, a crazy confection of a hat perched on her dark chignon.
    “Elliot Smith.” She untacked another torn-out photograph, the singer’s Frankenstein face staring straight at the camera, pockmarks unretouched, holding his fist over his heart.
    “Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.” Two photo-booth shots side by side, the woman with half-moon eyes and the man with his sweet, sad mouth, both raising their chins and looking down their noses like rebel bank robbers.
    She looked at Rachel again. “They’re all brilliant.”
    Rachel walked over to the board bowlegged, struggling to button up a pair of Grace’s jeans. “The cover of The Bell Jar. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on Sassy. And this? Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. 1963, ” she said, tearing the Diane Arbus photograph off of its tack and reading the caption. “Dead, dead, dead. How? Oh yeah, that’s right, suicide, suicide, suicide.”
    Grace shrugged. “God, Rachel, you’re boring.”
    Grace reached over and plucked a faded pair of jeans out of the pile—they were ’70s-style and high waisted, with a rope of braided denim looped through the belt holes. “You can’t have these.”
    Grace pulled them on, along with an old T-shirt that she’d cut into a tank top and shoved her feet into a pair of lace-up prairie boots with just a little bit of a heel. And the vest. Her rabbit-fur vest.
     
    Grace was raised to know that appearances mattered. If you put your Xanax in a Tylenol PM bottle, no one would care if you took four of them, and no one would judge you if, a little bit later on, you fell asleep with your head on your boyfriend’s shoulder after just two vodka Red Bulls. Not that she’d ever commit suicide like that.
    Pills were a coward’s way out. You weren’t really doing anything; there was nothing decisive about them; one call from a dorm monitor and you’d be halfway to the hospital with a tube down your throat, getting your stomach pumped out.
    Slitting your wrists was a good method, along the vein instead of across it, the steely knife following the blue-purple terrain of your upturned arm. If Grace slit her wrists, she’d use a long, thin blade, freshly sharpened, and trace a delicate V on her left wrist—but that would only work at home because there were no bathtubs at