The Sharp Time Read Free Page B

floor to jitterbug in stacked heels, and my own shoes on the gleaming floor of the Pale Circus make the soft, golden click of the compact snapping shut, over and over and over.
    So maybe my own life is not so drastic and dreadful … maybe I am just like all those other girls who have come before me with their oily T-zones and random terrible days and bittersweet triumphs, the world billowing out behind them.
    I glance again at the boy—I am but a foot from the cash desk—but then, on the circular rack to my left, I notice a white leather jacket with a fat silver buckle at the waistline and then—whoooosh—I’m riding down Carnaby Street on the back of a skinny boy’s Vespa, my eyes teary and squinting from the cold wind, curtained with waterproof Cleopatra eyeliner. My mother appears and waves madly at the lovebirds on the Vespa; she’s mod as you please in a Quadrophenia -style army jacket and black leggings. I’m not in the Pale Circus, I have left Kansas City and now live in the London of my dreams for ten sweet seconds and of course I’m not paying attention; I’m daydreaming the lost future my mother and I had planned. When I finished school in May, we were going to sell the house and spend a year traveling in Europe. College could wait, she said. Her own freshman year had consisted of arguing with her bitchy roommates and mooning over her biology TA. She believed my own dorm-room dramas could be put on hold for a year or two while we grooved on life in Europe. But of course, nothing could wait, and now the world sparkles on without my mother.
    When I look back up at the real boy, we have five more seconds of Coolfest USA, but then it’s as if we’ve both been tapped by the same lightning rod of goofiness. We suddenly smile at one another, not proper social smiles, but wide, stupid ones: gums prominently displayed, throats wreathed with impending laughter.
    “Hello,” I say. Closer, I see that he might be older than me. Not by much. A few years? He has charming crinkles around his brown eyes that hint at copious nicotine consumption and … could it be? … tanning beds.
    “Hello,” he says, imitating my soprano tone, my congeniality. And so I have my social cue to let the games begin.
    “I think I am a new employee,” I say, employing a musical accent of no discernable origin.
    “Indeed,” he says, “you are the new girl.” On the desk in front of him are vintage valentines, hundreds of them, scalloped and sepia along the edges. Sweet Jesus, Valentine’s Day! Next month’s doomsday holiday. But compared to Christmas, Valentine’s Day seems good-hearted, communal: there will be many, many blue people eating chocolates by themselves and watching bad TV.
    He gently stacks the valentines and puts them in a shoe box. He very officiously claps his hands, then takes a circus peanut out of the bowl next to the cash register, holds it up to me, Communion-style, and smiles. “Greetings, new girl.”
    And so I am the new girl, pierced with—well, I’ll be goddamned—happiness as I think of my fellow students, my “friends” at Woodrow Wilson High School, who are already in class and wearing their jeans and T-shirts, their bright sweatpants ensembles and their flat boots with soles like pork cutlets that are currently the rage among the blond and dullardly masses. Oh, if they could see me now, that old gang of mine! My nails are perfectly arched blood-black roses, and as I reach out to take the coral candy, what I think is this: the aesthetic of my life has improved about one hundred and five percent.
    But then the boy yanks the candy back and whisper-shrieks: “Never, ever touch one of these. Seriously, you’ll get hepatitis B. Or C. You’ll get the goddamn alphabet of hepatitis.” He returns it to the bowl with a shudder, then gives me a brilliant smile. “People think: Hotmotherfuckin’ damn, free candy, circus peanuts, well, holy smokes. My parents loved circus peanuts when they were