Anonymity Read Online Free PDF Page A

you.”
    On the way back downtown Emily passed big boxes—Costco and Target and Sam's. As a child, fifteen minutes of every shopping trip had been spent swimming oceanic parking lots of SUVs looking for a space. Juniper people ate in chain restaurants where neon signs called from both sides of raised super highways. They drank shocking green cocktails from the spouts of margarita machines bought at deep discount price clubs. They had theater rooms and game rooms and patios with built-in barbecues.
    Everyone in her childhood had lived by the law of acquisition. She'd learned early that most of Juniper parents lived leased lives, even hers. Juniper families didn't own their homes or their cars or their children's cars. These people took alcohol-fueled Corpus Christi vacations, drove pricey, gas-guzzling vehicles, and when it came time to send their entitled children to college, they took second mortgages on their suburban homes.
    Her parents would say she was unappreciative of a perfectly lovely childhood, but Emily had grown up feeling like just another one of their projects. Another task they had to manage in their hectic lives. They exhausted her with their perfection and expectations.
    By the time Emily graduated from high school, all she really wanted was a way out of the pancake flat crescent of planned living that fanned the edges of Austin.

Lorelei
    SHE SLEPT hard, not waking until nearly noon. Tucked into untamed shrubbery, her back against the cool stone foundation of the church, she was invisible, actually comfortable except that she had to pee. She rolled her blanket tightly and trussed it to her pack with a dirty string she kept twisted around her wrist for just such a purpose. She used another string to tie back her hair before she pulled her hood forward over her face.
    A line of people had formed along the sidewalk that snaked around to the back of the church. She was relieved to see a gate open that had been closed the night before. She wouldn't have to scale the fence a second time and chance being noticed.
    Although her need to urinate was painful, she walked to the end of the queue to wait. She didn't want to cut line and risk a confrontation. Inside the church, she slipped into the bathroom and found an open stall. The prickle of relief rushed her. Somebody banged on the door, but she took her time. The toilet paper dispenser was one of those irksome kinds that stopped short of a full rotation. She doggedly yanked it around and around until she had collected a thick wad of grainy paper that she shoved into her pack.
    She washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth with her new toothbrush. She spit and was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when the girl next to her met her eyes in the mirror above the sink.
    “Wow. That's a wild tattoo.”
    Lorelei had come to expect the stares. The questions.
    She raked her things off the sink's edge into her pack and pushed out the bathroom door. There was a lull in the food line. A tired looking guy plopped a large scoop of spaghetti on her paper plate. Farther down the line, she filled the rest with torn lettuce in some sort of yellowish dressing. At the end of the table she drained a glass of orange juice and picked up another to take with her.
    Outside, she went around the corner of the church and sat back against a wall. An adult approached with a girl about her age. She'd been spotted. This was usually how they worked it, using another kid to break the ice. But once Lorelei saw her up close she realized that this girl was probably older.
    “Hey,” the girl said. “You're new.”
    It wouldn't get her anywhere to be rude to these people.
    “Did you get enough to eat?” the man asked. He looked like Santa Claus, in shorts and sandals. He wore a T-shirt that had the Tumbleweed Young Adult Center logo over his heart.
    “Name's Steve. This is Fiona.”
    Fiona had a nose ring and dirty white-girl dreads sticking out from under a dusty black bowler hat.