Everyday Psychokillers Read Free Page B

lists of her favorite bands: an overall best list, a best song list and a most promising list. She wore a nightshirt that was basically two British flags sewn together.
    There’s a scene that comes up in a lot of movies where little girls play dress-up in their mothers’ closets and then later they give each other lessons with makeup and hair. I’d lie on my stomach on Julie’s bed and watch her at her dressing table. She’d show me how one kind of lipstick looked on her compared with another. She’d explain what each shade was good for, and in what ways it failed. She’d rank them. She’d mark her wrists with parallel lines of color. Her mouth would be smeary and she’d roll her eyes at herself and make sure I knew that I wasn’t seeing the full effect because she wasn’t even using liner, and really she’d never put them on practically on top of each other.
    Maybe once or twice she said, “You want to try?” into the mirror, and in the mirror I shook my head, completely content. Despite the noise, and how we must have talked and talked, and how I can see the motion of our breathless chatter like a current in the remembered room, it’s a serene and quiet memory. For one thing, memory tends toward quiet. When you do it, remember, you feel quiet. You feel quiet now , and that seeps in. The history of the depiction of memory is of quiet depiction, which catches on. It seeps into the tone of your own memories and you have to work hard to hear in the face of it.
    When Julie slept, you could really see the bruise on her cheekbone, because a streetlight shining through the blind slats lit a strip on her face. You could also see another one on the side of her neck, although it could have been a hickey. Julie had pointed it out as a hickey. It was hard to sleep in such a pink room, but it was okay to be awake, or in a sleeplike state that felt continuous with waking. There was an unexpected reasonableness to it, a kind of logic, the way the lines and lines of little white sailboats that covered the walls in Julie’s yellow bathroom held a kind of logic. All night, I felt a kind of depth of sensibility with regard to the sheets and the rose-covered comforter, Julie’s breathing, and how she slept in one and then another contortion, each revealing a new angle to her face. In the morning, Julie’s dad drove us to school. On the way out to the car he dropped his keys. When he squatted to pick them up, and fumbled for them in the crabgrass, his cut-offs were so short one of his testicles slipped out and then slid back in as he stood up, none of which he appeared to notice.
    The morning after the last of the Egyptian lectures, I was the only one at the bus stop. I sat on my French horn on the sidewalk by the road and worried. I didn’t know if I should go home. I thought maybe school was cancelled. Maybe the teachers were back on strike. Then, as the bus appeared, the boys all came running from around the side of the building and through the parking lot, swinging their backpacks and spitting. They didn’t look at me as they pushed by and onto the bus.
    I sat with a boy I knew from a few of my classes. He got out of the seat and let me shove in toward the window with my French horn, and then he sat half into the aisle because I took so much room with it, but he didn’t say what they’d all been doing back there. He looked at my face for a long time and I wondered if he was going to tell me, or if he was thinking of asking me to go out with him, but he said, “You have tiny hairs growing on your nose,” and that was it.
    So I went to school, and I have no idea what kind of day it was, but at the end of the day the boys were really anxious to get by me on the way off the bus, when usually they were patient enough, amused even, when I had my horn. They pushed past me as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, and as the bus pulled away, I set my horn down