To Feel Stuff Read Online Free Page A

to lose now, I think I look more mysterious from the left. My eyebrow arches upward to a greater degree.
    Then the girl began to mouth the words to the song. She was moving her lips like
“Oh-ay-oh-ay-oh
.”
    This really surprised me. I know that you never attended any of our performances, or any of any other a cappella group’s performances, but these shows were definitely not sing-alongs. If you wanted to sing yourself, then you could go to a karaoke bar or you could go in the shower and amuse yourself there. The point being, you didn’t show up to hear people who’d been practicing arrangements together all semester sing if you weren’t there to watch and listen. When I looked at the girl’s throat, I thought I could see her vocal cords working. I remember thinking to myself something like “Wait, is she singing? She’s singing with us?”
    The young woman smiled at me because she must have thought I was staring because I liked her. My next verse had started and we were singing in tandem now.
    While I was puzzling over that girl, a white Honda Civic peeled up to the curb in front of the arch. The ice on the street shrieked, and that’s when I first became aware of the car. When it cut through our performance. The passenger-side door opened.
    People in the crowd turned around, wanting to see whose car it was. I remember that some of the older members in the crowd, the earmuffed neighbors in glasses who actually came out of their houses for a show, didn’t want to grant the careless driver undeserved attention. They kept their gazes forward and concentrated on listening.
    Me, though, I really had no choice but to face the car, couldn’t help but look, and this was the moment my sense of myself suddenly unraveled.
    My whole life had been effortless up until that night. I hope I’m not being patronizing here, but I need to explain that when your life is effortless like mine used to be, you don’t realize that there are other ways. It’s like when you’re lying in bed at night, the rain is coming down, you’re comfortable and warm, and all you really think about is how secure you feel. You forget that everyone doesn’t have that, and that for some people, it’s possible not to feel taken care of.
    It was like I’d always been so tied into the world that I didn’t really feel it all around me. All the seams were invisible, and so I never realized I was actually sewn to something, if you can understand that.
    Yes, I’d read the
Daily Herald
every day in the Ratty while buttering my Texas toast bread, and I’d seen those headlines and taken in those stories. The police theorized gang initiations: “Maim a Brown student. If you can’t find one of them, then you can go for a RISD student, but you’ll have to give up sleep for three days if you puss out like this.” Everyone was talking about how the Johnson and Wales students had been left alone so far, probably because they majored in things like hotel management and culinary arts.
    But none of it ever even seemed close to home. Never once, before that night, did I see some presence in the corner of my eye and then whip around as my heart broke itself against my chest because I thought something was coming for me.
    So when I was standing underneath Wayland Arch, looking straight ahead, for the first time I understood that the guy springing out of the Civic with the crowbar in his hand had a specific relationship with me. He was sprinting in a straight line, and what’s bizarre is that I felt chosen. I’d been chosen for many things in my life, but always being the automatic selection, I’d never really realized that there were other options. Like I was chosen class president during all eight years that I ran, but there was literally never a second when I even considered someone else might win. Everything in my world was like that. Everything was
obvious.
I just