Apophis Read Online Free PDF

drawers.  Old essays I’d saved for God knows why; stacks of bank statements for my savings account that would remain untouched and obsolete.  Highlighters, staples, push pins.  Nothing, nothing, nothing of value anymore.
     
     
    I sat down heavily in the center of the room and caught my lower lip between my teeth to keep from crying.  I hadn’t let myself cry yet.  I wasn’t going to start now.
    Peeking out at me from beneath the dust ruffle of my bed I saw the corner of a photo album.  I breathed out a rough breath through my nose and pulled the old album out from under the bed until it was in the center of the room with me.  I remembered my mom had told me how important it was to have physical photographs even with digital cameras and external hard drives.  “You never know,” she’d once told me.
    I sat in the middle of my floor and flipped through the photo album in silence.  I didn’t know what I was looking for; I think I was just looking for something to distract me.
    I turned to a photo of my childhood best friend, Andrea, and I paused.  We had been next-door neighbors, and she had also been my first and only love.  I didn’t have to say the words, but she had known that I adored her.
    I traced my fingers along her photographed silhouette.  Her dark eyes were squinted, mouth laughing at something, head tilted up towards the sunlight, as the picture had been taken.  Her arm was thrown around my neck and we were both in bikini tops and short shorts.  I looked like I usually did in photographs – uncomfortable, trying to look at ease, trying to fit in, but just glad to have been included.
    I remembered the day the photograph had been taken.  It had been a particularly stifling summer between our sophomore and junior year of high school.  North Dakota hardly experienced weather one might categorize as “summer,” but that school break had been the exception.  My parents had made me get a summer job the moment I turned old enough to legally do so.  Most summers I worked at a Mom-and-Pop greasy spoon diner, working my way up over the years from bus-girl to dishwasher to hostess to waitress.  When I wasn’t working, I spent every free moment with Andrea and a group of our friends at a small lake that was shallow enough that it usually got warm for swimming by the end of July.
    Most of the girls never braved the water and sunned themselves instead on broad, flat boulders that dotted the shoreline while the boys, clad only in long swim shorts, dared each other to jump from the highest point into the frigid lake below.  I had always wanted to join them, preferring their company to the often dull, vapid, useless gossip of the sunbathing girls who I called my friends, but I already felt like too much of an outsider to eschew my female classmates entirely just because I worried they’d catch me staring at their bare midriffs for a second too long.
    On the day that this photograph had been taken, we’d been baking in the sun for a few hours.  The morning sky had been blue and clear, but as the day progressed, dark clouds had rolled in to choke out the sun.  We’d tried to eke out as much sunshine as we could that day, fully knowing it was just a matter of time before the rain started.  A single crack of thunder had signaled the end of our sunbathing and the skies had opened up, producing raindrops so heavy and large I’m surprised they didn’t dent our nearby parked cars. 
    We’d had just enough notice to scramble and hastily collect our things.  Laughing, shrieking, without a care in the world, Andrea and I had run to my car to hide out from the sudden downpour.  I remembered the solid thud of car doors closing behind us as I had slid into the driver’s seat and she in the passenger’s.  Everyone else in our party had retreated to their own cars, leaving us alone.  I had looked across the partition at my best friend and it had struck me that I had never seen her look so beautiful