A Ticket to Ride Read Online Free PDF Page B

what that meant? Fawn wanted to know.
    “I have to go on a diet?”
    “That’s a start. But there’s more to it.” We stood at the mouth of my closet, Fawn flipping through the hangers, rejecting each item with a “No. No. Nope.” And then, “Have you been living under a rock or something?”
    It took Fawn about two seconds to declare my closet a disaster area. I would have to borrow her clothes until we could do a proper shopping. That was all there was to it.
    “You do have a great figure, though,” she said. “I’d kill for your boobs.”
    “Thanks.” I brightened. Assets were assets, and it was the only way I felt myself to have any advantage (if you could even call it that) over Fawn who, though she was nearly a year older, was too slender to have breasts.
    “Your eyes are nice too, a very pretty brown,” Fawn said, stepping closer. “But you’ve got so much hair, they get lost.”
    “I could push it back,” I suggested, securing handfuls behind an imaginary headband.
    “Too Alice in Wonderland. You don’t want to look younger. You want to look…mysterious,” she said, trying the word on, then repeating it.
    What Fawn decided on was a radical cut similar to Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby . I tentatively agreed. I understood that Fawn had decided to make me a project—like a new recipe in a test kitchen—and was flattered, of course. But would I turn out? What if Fawn thought she was making a chocolate soufflé and I was more like one of those cake mixes that come with the Easy-Bake Oven?
    “Do you have any money?” Fawn asked.
    “No. Raymond gives me five dollars allowance every two weeks, but I’m not very good at saving.”
    “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind giving us a loan,” she said, and walked down the hall to his room. I followed and stood at the door, watching, as Fawn went over to Raymond’s dresser and rifled through a pile of bills sitting on top. She came back out with a ten and some singles.
    “It’s no big deal,” she said, reading the unvoiced disapproval on my face. “I do it all the time at home and no one cares. My parents don’t even notice. I say it’s their loss for leaving money lying around. They should be more careful.” She smiled a Cheshire Cat smile and told me to grab my purse.
    To catch the bus downtown, we waited in front of Keaton Intermediate, where I had finished eighth grade the spring before. Across the street sat an empty lot filled with waist-high couch grass, end to end, broken only by the occasional tire rut and by charred-bare rounds where brave kids or those who didn’t care if they were busted by Moline’s finest, had built pit fires.
    “What’s out there?” Fawn asked.
    “Not much. Kids get drunk there and make out.”
    “There’s one in every town. Back home we go to a place we call The Cellar. It’s just this room in the basement of an old warehouse, but people have dragged furniture down there. Mattresses and old sofas. So it’s pretty cozy.”
    I tried to imagine “cozy” from these details and came up short.
    “You go out there?” Fawn asked, gesturing toward the lot with her chin.
    “Not much,” I said. In truth, I’d crossed it only once, thinking it a shortcut home, and instantly regretted it. It had looked perfectly tame, even scenic from the road. But once I was out there, I couldn’t go ten feet without seeing the smashed brown stars of exploded Michelob bottles. Crushed White Castle boxes flecked the weeds and mud holes, as well as wadded wrappers of every kind—gum, candy, condom. I even saw a balled-up pair of white panties lying a few feet off the path. If you’d have told me then that by the end of the summer I’d be utterly unfazed by this sort of landscape, that I’d know what to do with a joint, a condom, ruined panties, I’d have said you were crazy. At my middle school in Bakersfield there’d been drinking, drugs, sex, but the action came nowhere near me. I was and had always been young for