The Unnoticeables Read Free

to be any major damage. I considered a cigarette, looked at the oily spot still steaming to my left, and considered again.
    I bent and picked up the two singed gears, oddly cool to the touch, and put them in my back pocket.
    â€œHa, motherfucker!” I spat on the smoking stain. “I’ll wear your eyes for a trophy.”
    I went to check on Debbie. I had assumed the worst, from the way she’d been twitching when I first showed up. I assumed right.
    I said a quiet good-bye and left the alleyway. Please don’t tell anybody I pilfered the cigarettes out of her purse before I did.
    When I got back out front to the show, the punks were filtering inside, the sound of the next band’s guitars already clamoring into the street. Butts were being stomped out, beers were being downed, fresh air was being gulped desperately, and life was going on. I thought about going in with them—about dancing or drinking or doing some damn thing or another to forget for a few hours what I’d just seen, but the thought of all that heat and sweat turned me off.
    Our pad was miles gone and I didn’t feel like walking, but I recalled stashing Daisy about five blocks from here a few weeks ago. If she was still around, she’d get me home. I turned to leave, then Randall popped up from behind a newspaper machine, screamed, “GOTCHA, FUCKHOLE!” and slapped me hard across the cheek.
    My burns flared to angry, visceral life.

 
    THREE
    2013. Los Angeles, California. Kaitlyn.
    For the first time in a long time, I woke to find myself not in pain. A cold flood of fear washed through me. It ran down my chest and settled in my gut. I couldn’t remember why waking up without pain was supposed to worry me. The reaction was just instinctual.
    I lay in my massive, ridiculously soft bed for half an hour. A king-size memory-foam mattress that fills every single inch of my tiny bedroom, and an accompanying six-hundred-dollar down comforter are the only great and stupid luxuries that I allow myself. I was trying to figure out where the anxiety was coming from, and I finally pinpointed it: I was not sore, bruised, burned, or broken at all, and that meant I was unemployed.
    At least partially. I still had my job waiting tables, but I hadn’t done any stunt work in weeks. I guess sometime during the night, I finally shook the last stubborn bit of stiffness in my hip from that botched somersault I took while shooting The Damned Walk … Again!? So I woke up feeling physically great but with a trade-off of crushing spiritual ennui. For almost this entire month, I had been just and only a waitress.
    I sighed and rolled out of bed. I had to roll several times just to reach the doorway and then heave myself out into the hall. My bare feet slapped the cold tile all the way to the bathroom. When I sat down to pee, it really hit me:
    I was in absolutely no pain.
    Even as a little girl, I would wake up each morning with a very small but persistent ache in my third pinky. Yep. Third. I have six fingers on my left hand. The superfluous little bastard has hurt me every day of my life, except for two: the day when my kid sister died in a house fire, and today.
    I couldn’t remember anything about the day of the fire. The therapists said I’d repressed the memories, but every once in a while I got this feeling, like terrified d é j à vu, and I just knew it was some small piece of that day coming back to me. I had that feeling now, when I suddenly remembered, in perfect clarity, waking up with no pain in my sixth finger fifteen years ago. I remembered running down the stairs to tell my mom.
    It doesn’t hurt anymore! It’s all gone!
    My mother laughed, picked me up, and placed me on top of the dining room table.
    â€œAre you kidding me? Is this a joke?” she asked.
    I shook my head and wiggled my skinny, single-knuckled little digit for her.
    â€œThat’s great, baby!” she said.
    And