Before We Go Extinct Read Online Free PDF Page B

took a night class at some old-person community center about Ancient Greece because she thought it looked “fun” but no one else signed up so it got canceled so she took knitting instead and made me a sweater with sleeves so long that I could put my legs in them and wear it like pants.
    When she’s tired, her left eye totally droops. When she sees that squint in pictures she posts them, tagged #DirtyOldManWink . She has a tattoo of a cartoon rabbit on her ankle that looks like a rat until you see the long ears. She can belt out a song like you wouldn’t believe, her voice so gravelly and huge it’ll make you think of big skies filled with stars or sex or the bottom of the sea.
    Sex, mostly though.
    I mean, come on. Seriously.
    She’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful that if you look at her in the light of the biology lab, the sun streaming in and making everything look coated with dust, she’ll look so stupidly beautiful, you’ll think sappy things like, She looks like an angel. And you’ll believe yourself.
    If you aren’t in love with her, there’s something wrong with you.
    But forget it, because she’s saving herself for college. She says high school relationships are doomed to be remembered only when you’re drunk. And when you think of them sober, you’ll cringe and die a little inside, so she doesn’t want to give herself something to regret.
    Sometimes she spits when she’s talking because she gets going so fast the words don’t have a chance to leave the saliva behind and she has that gap between her front teeth. “The spit hole,” she calls it. “Très très sexy.” She once puked on Janet Jackson’s lap at a celebrity wedding they both attended that ended in a pretty famous divorce less than a month later. (Janet said, “That’s okay, sweetie,” and patted her fluffy hair and then sent her parents a bill for three thousand dollars.)
    She totally gets irony. She loves her parents as much as she hates their jobs and money. She knows the Japanese word for when the sun goes through the trees and the German word for being sick of everything in the world.
    She makes these Buddhist sand mandala things for fun on the deck on the roof of her penthouse apartment building and waits for them to blow away in the wind because she says it’s only when they are destroyed that they mean anything.
    Who says stuff like that?
    I thought she knew everything.
    I thought she had the answers.
    I thought she was someone she isn’t.
    As in, not the person she is pretending to be lately, the one who suddenly has a reason to be interviewed. “I’ve always wanted to be an actress,” she says shyly.
    Liar .
    That’s what I say. She never wanted to be an actress. She never wanted to be one of them.
    Or maybe she was just lying to me.
    I don’t get it though. How can one person change so much, so fast?
    Love is another one of those words that has a shape and a taste and a feel and way too much meaning and a bitter aftertaste, like grapefruit or some kind of rare Asian fruit with spines on it that you can only buy in the month of February and even then, only from that one weird little grocery store hidden in the shadows of a building on Twelfth. It’s a word that sweats out of you, looking for a way to get away before anyone can really get hold of it, like a snake or mercury.
    The thing with that prickly rare fruit is that once you’ve bitten it, you can’t stop craving it. You think you’ll go crazy for it, waiting for it to come back to you again.
    I only kissed her once and it was an accident, that’s what she said after. She’s not totally wrong. I mean, sometimes when you stand too close to someone and their face is there, you have no real choice but to kiss it and anyway, you’ve had a beer and she smells good and you don’t know that just letting your lips fall onto someone