The Bookstore

Excerpt from

ROTOR

We both knew it was the shittiest carnival in the Tri-State area but we were going anyway.

During lunch, Susan and I went out for a smoke break and just kept walking. We walked through the football field and into the skeleton of the bleachers.

Underneath, in the grey coolness, Susan pulled out stolen Home Ec scissors and cut off her jeans into shorts. She stabbed the point under the faded ghost of her back pocket and started to circumnavigate each thigh, sawing the blue denim. The pale sliver of her skin slowly grew into a slice. One leg, two legs. Susan stepped out of the denim tubes like she was shedding an old useless skin, the fabric circles newly forgotten on the gravel, perpetually sticky from decades of spilled sodas.

My turn. I pulled my arms all the way inside my red Tshirt, my arms stiffened into a taut teepee, a cotton triangle. I held my breath as Susan started to snip with the stolen scissors, from my waist up to my chin. The cold tips of the scissors dotted my skin with a metallic rat-a-tat.

When she reached the neckband, my white skin burst out, like cutting into a giant baked potato. She knotted the ends under my bra line and smiled.

Susan shook a paper bag in my face. “We got this!” She unrolled it open – the bag was full of miniature bottles of booze. “I’ve been stealing them from my cousin the stewardess. Her apartment is like a bar for midgets.”

“Renee?” I asked. Renee was leggy and had hair like a magazine. She always spoke very slowly and clearly, like she was reading cue cards.

“Yeah, Renee. There’s some rum, some vodka. And a few with no labels that taste like nail polish remover.”

Susan handed me two, then she tucked a few into her back pockets and slid the rest into her white knee socks. Her ankles were lumpy like shin guards.

Susan unscrewed a tiny bottle, drank half and offered me the rest. I pinched my nose and gulped it down. It was like drinking fire.

“Ready to roll,” she said.

Excerpt from 

FORTUNE

At the library there was a football on my calculus book, a little tightly folded origami triangle. I pried open one flap of the paper package and I folded and flipped and unfolded and flipped, then smoothed the sheet of notebook paper with my palm: “The BEST thing about this place is that if I got killed here, nobody would ever notice.”

I had no idea who had left it. I looked up to see just two other people in the room. One, an old woman reading a supermarket circular very seriously, like it was an encyclopedia. Her lips mouthed “Oranges 99 cents a pound.”

At the other table was a man. From where I sat, he looked vague. It was as if a police sketch artist was told to draw a man, any man. But it was his hands that I will never forget – hands that looked and acted like someone else’s. He examined them in disbelief; fanning them, grabbing the air and forming empty fists.

He was surrounded by careful piles. In the center was a beat up copy of Fortune magazine, the April issue, with a giant calculator on the cover, and a stack of TV guides. On one side was a ROYGBIV rainbow of magic markers and on the other was a tower of graph paper, sectioned into complicated columns. He pecked and poked at the giant magazine calculator photo, using it, like a calculator, then recorded his results with the magic markers. I began to see and feel the ebb and flow to his movements.