Perfume Read Free

trust a season.
    She swallowed.
    What number is our unit? she thought, lost in her own home territory.
    Even the numbers seemed identical. Too high. Too many digits. Was it 11881? Was it 11331? Was it 88118?
    She walked for some time. She could not tell if she had circled the entire complex once, or twice, or if she were only halfway around. She could not even tell if she had been anywhere at all.
    Suddenly, her heart did something anatomically impossible. It made a double beat. She looked down at her chest.
    The heart did it again.
    It was not that her pulse was going faster.
    Her heart had doubled.
    Dove set down her book bag and extracted her purse.
    Seventh grade—the first year Dove carried a purse—she had been so thrilled with the opportunity to bring necessities with her that she had used a purse large enough for her entire life: an overnight bag of a purse. The joy of lugging this around palled and now, each season, her purse grew smaller. As she drew closer to sixteen—magical number; infinitely older than callow fifteen—she was down to a slim rectangle on a thin leather rope: a bright tapestry of colors, like a pile of autumn leaves. These were not her usual bland colors, and they gave her hope that the real Dove, the bright and shimmering Dove, might emerge on that magic birthday and stun the world.
    I don’t want to be a gray old Dove Bar and blend in with the sky and the soap, she thought. I don’t want to be the kind of girl who can’t even find her own front door. I don’t want to be pathetic.
    Inside the little handbag was her emergency notification card, with her address neatly printed. She was 11844. How could she have forgotten such a crucial thing?
    Her heart double-timed again, and Dove said, “Stop that.”
    A woman Dove had not noticed, stooping over her one blossoming shrub to pluck its one remaining blossom, stared at Dove. “It’s my bush,” the woman said defensively. “I can pick the flower if I want.”
    “I meant my heart,” explained Dove. “It’s gotten away from me.”
    “Hearts do that,” said the woman. She smiled gently, remembering a love of her own.
    But there was no love involved in Dove’s double beat.
    Dove backed up until she found 11844.
    Her key fit.
    She went in.
    Like every other unit at Sky Change Hills, it featured white walls, soaring ceilings, long-chained chandeliers, and layers of narrow balconies.
    The nubbly carpet that covered the five staggered levels of floor and stair was also gray, with black and white speckles. It reminded Dove of parking lots.
    Identical twin couches were covered with white leather. A large low coffee table, like a slab of smooth fake granite, hunched between them. Two long swings of black metal arced over the couches to provide reading lights.
    How neat, how sparse, how anybody this living room was.
    If her family were to move away, nobody would know the difference. They had left no mark. The condo was more like a tin can than a house; any old vegetable or soup could be packaged in it. It could always be recycled.
    She walked as slowly as a burglar wondering what to steal.
    The stairs were a bright, space-taking well of carpeted steps. They led down to the playroom in which nobody played, and down below that, to the garage in which two cars would be parked when her parents got home from work. Up the steps was balcony one, and up more steps was her parents’ suite, then balcony two, and finally her own bedroom.
    She tilted her head to stare up the shaft that was the stairwell and skylight.
    The sky showing in the skylight was blue.
    But—
    Dove turned, frowning, to look back outside.
    Through the narrow, half-tilted window blinds, she could see the opposite matching condos and a long slice of sky.
    Gray, like a flock of lost doves.
    Sky Change Hills.
    It must have meant today. For indigo blue, thick as pudding, filled the sky in the skylight.
    Eyes locked on the blue square, Dove began climbing the stairs to the top. To