Broken for You Read Online Free PDF

and bedside table, there was a cheap pressboard bookcase, a chest of drawers, a dented metal trash can, a plastic molded chair, and a beat-up desk which listed so severely (one of its legs was shorter than the others) that unsupervised pens and pencils pitched off its surface and catapulted into the corner. Several of them had accumulated there over the past two weeks. Wanda felt no need to retrieve them; she had lots of pens and pencils.
    She'd also made no effort to make the room homey in any way; her single affect had been to cover the mirror (which was bolted to the concrete wall) with a Mickey and Minnie Mouse beach towel. It was a souvenir from a trip she and Peter had taken to the ocean. She liked to imagine that it infused the air with the smell of sea water and sex.
    Wanda looked at the wall above her bed. Taped to the wall was a piece of paper. At the top was written "Peter Hartzell"—directory assistance for the Seattle area listed no one of that name—and beneath that, "Rhett Pearllze," "Halle Zepettre," "Treat Phellerz," and "Teller Heart-Pez." There were no listings in the Seattle area for any of these names either.
    "Shit," Wanda said. As bare as this room was, as empty as she had tried to keep it, it told the whole story. It couldn't keep its damn mouth shut.
    She wandered to the gimpy desk, on which rested a "Rooms for Rent" section she'd torn from the P-I several days ago. A few other entries were highlighted in yellow—Wanda had lots of highlighters, too—but Mrs. Hughes's ad was notable because the rental price, an unbelievable two hundred and fifty dollars, had been aggressively circled and surrounded with question marks and exclamation points.
    Margaret, Wanda remembered suddenly. She wants me to call her Margaret. That would take some getting used to; Wanda had been brought up to address her elders as "Mister" or "Missus."
    She felt intensely grateful to be moving into a place that was noisy with someone else's history. Margaret herself was not noisy, and she was grateful for that, too, since her work as a stage manager required her for the most part to be around noisy people: actors.
    Actors were, in fact, manageable, once you made peace with the fact that they had never really evolved into adulthood—not even the oldest and most cantankerous ones, the ones she addressed as "Mister": the Scrooges and Tartuffes and Captain Hooks and King Lears. They were players," in the truest sense of the word—at least the best ones were, in Wanda's opinion; and once you understood their love of play and cognized that they were exactly like children—children needing enor m ous amounts of attention and reassurance and, of course, limits—you mid manage them quite nicely. Actors could also provide a nice, suc cu lent, dessert-course variety of sexual diversion.
    Wanda had a lot of experience in this arena; she'd been sleeping with ac tors ever since she was fifteen, when she and Brian McConnell had su rrendered their virginities to one another on closing night of The Music M an. Brian was the sixteen-year-old star, and Wanda, having found her voc ation early in life, was the stage manager.
    Closing nights had already become something of an emotional haz a rd for Wanda; they left her feeling uncharacteristically mournful and cl ingy. So when she and Brian discovered that the rest of the cast and c rew had left for the party and the drama teacher had accidentally locked th em in the catacombs of the costume shop—where, bogged down by m utual closing night melancholia, they'd taken forever to box up the m ounds of rented turn-of-the-century costumes that had to be shipped b ack to New York—Wanda suggested that they make the most of a icky situation. They were friends, they were equally inexperienced, the f loor was a feather bed of petticoats and band uniforms, and—having b oth recently completed a semester of health ed—they knew the impor ta nce of being prepared; between them, they had twenty-four