Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands Read Online Free PDF Page A

the “black” zone. And Barton and Lowell were in something she was calling the red zone. But then there was the issue of the rivers. There were three of them, the Clyde, the Coburn, and the Black. In theory, they all flowed north into Lake Memphremagog. But it’s impossible for people outside of the Kingdom to look at a map of Memphremagog and not assume that all that water is flowing south. And so when people were talking about the Exclusion Zone in the beginning, they often talked about the plume and the rivers. In the end, it was mostly the plume that mattered. Besides, no one was going to fish in those rivers again: everyone figured the trout would all have three and four eyes and glow in the dark.
    As far as I know, the fish never did glow. But by the next spring there would be some super-scary, super-gross mutations. There were frogs with three legs. There were turtles with shells as soft asdamp pastry dough. There were fish with strange, funky lumps. I saw the photos on the web and one day in a newspaper—which, you can bet your ass, I hid from Cameron.

    The word for the kind of window on my family’s woodstove was “Palladian.” I told you, I’d look it up.

    One night Andrea showed me her kit, and the first thing I thought was this was a really twisted version of my old babysitter’s bag. I didn’t watch her slice herself, at least not that night, but she showed me the cuts. I think she thought it would turn me on and then, maybe, I would cut myself, too. You know, join her or something. Which, I guess, I did.
    We were sitting on the mattress we shared on the floor at Poacher’s, and she was wearing nothing but her underwear and a T-shirt that said “War Is Over” and had one of the Beatles and his wife on it. She’d lifted it from the Urban Outfitters on Church Street the day before.
    “This is what you do,” she said, and she sounded like a very confident kindergarten teacher.
Children, this is the way you clean up your blocks. This is how you do it
. You know the tone of voice. She was sitting cross-legged, and she pointed to the insides of her thighs. It was like a cat had scratched her over and over, or maybe a much bigger animal with much bigger claws. Long, swollen red marks, some pretty new and some pretty well healed. There were some scars, too. Most were on her left leg because she was right-handed. One of the cuts was infected: it was straight like the others, but bloated and raw and there was a pretty gross discharge. Her kit had old-fashioned razor blades and an X-Acto knife and Band-Aids and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There was a roll of gauze. There was a tube of Bacitracin. There was a pair of scissors. She kept hertools in a very elegant Estée Lauder cosmetics bag she stole from Macy’s. That was her kit.
    I make it sound like we were always stealing stuff. I guess we were. Sometimes we stole things just because we wanted them, like that T-shirt with the Beatles guy on it, and sometimes we stole stuff because we had to. Either we hocked it for money for food or drugs or we hocked it for money for Poacher. Sometimes if we didn’t feel up to fucking the guys he brought over, he wouldn’t make us if we gave him roughly the same amount of cash. Then he’d have another girl do the john—you wouldn’t think Vermont guys are gross because the state is so “peace, love, and tie-dye,” but I’m telling you, they can be as gross here as anyplace else—and he’d have twice the money to feed us and get us whatever drugs we wanted.
    Andrea’s mother and father used to deal out of their apartment in the North End until they were both arrested and sent to jail. She told me that when her mother was badly strung out, her dad would make her do seriously creepy stuff before he would give her a fix. Once he made her do another drug mom while he watched—just for kicks, he did that. Another time he brought her out to some physical therapy place and had her fuck his cousin. (At least