Clown Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

showed how many hadn’t kept out, had risked the fine instead.
    I’d risked the fine a few times myself.
    The empty lot was its own back stage, the outdoor air a wilderness hidden from the street between open walls. I came to those two buildings now like old friends.
    The Ruins—they were the ruins of our courtship, the blossoming, Rex Galore and me. One night, in the middle of the Perseid meteor shower, he and I lay on a blanket on a cement slab there and watched stars fall. Meteors marked the sky like sequins on a cheap dress hitting the dance floor. Rex whispered, “Let’s go on a crime spree. Break the rules, shake things up.” His breath was soft with wine.
    “You’re my crime spree,” I whispered back. “You’re enough. My bad habit, my finest act.” I ran a hand over the sweaty muscles of his shoulder.
    Now, with nobody around, I sipped Green Drink and walked through the Ruins and it was like walking through the Parthenon, the Acropolis, Stonehenge, or the Pyramids. It was another country, an ancient place. Stray fire bricks sat in a chipped pile, red and fat and softly rounded. A midden. A kitchen. An old faucet handle rested in the dirt, a piece of cast metal now out of work. I was an archaeologist in the kicked-up dust.
    A flight of cement stairs led to the narrow platform of an old loading dock. Graffiti danced over a broad stretch of the wall. The words were stylized and unreadable, a jagged and foreign alphabet. I sat on the loading dock with my legs dangling, drinking Green Drink in the sun. A strand of morning glory made its way up through a crack and curled into ringlets. Heaven. When Rex came home, we’d picnic in the Ruins again.
    Beside the gap of a framed-in window on the next wall over, the faded paint of an old card-room advertisement was a ghost image, the trace of a sign with nothing left to sell, now shy as the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. Left alone, even graffiti would weather to this same soft glow, like gang members growing old.
    Spray-paint cans lay scattered, the remains of an unsanctioned street fair, an aerosol-fueled Dionysian bash. I picked up a can of spray paint, shook the can and felt the ball inside rattle back and forth. I pushed the button. A spit of blood red paint disappeared into the air.
    “Hey there,” a voice called, behind me. I turned. Saw the blue uniform, a heavy step on the uneven ground. A cop lumbered toward me, weighted down with his belt of tools, his bulletproof shoes.
    I threw the can on the ground. Red paint marked my finger.
    I was caught red-handed, red-fingered in a debauch of paint cans, evidence against me documented in the swirl of graffiti. Who would believe a clown? Time to disappear. I swung my bag over my shoulder, grabbed the orange jug and Green Drink, and jumped off the loading dock to the worn ground below. Green Drink spilled out the straw of my lidded plastic cup; ten cents worth hit the ground.
    I ran.
    One hand was a fist where I gripped the orange jug handle, and my fist pumped out in front, then back, elbows in close. The bigger-than-big shoes caught in the rubble; it was like running in slow motion, in soft sand. Green Drink sloshed another twenty cents on the ground. Then thirty cents, and more with each swing of the arm. My head buzzed with the hum of bees, my heart pounded but my sweat was cold. The hospital—I didn’t want to end up there again. Trespassing fines, vandalism fines—more bills I couldn’t pay! I ran faster, a dollar’s worth of Green Drink lying in my wake.
    “Wait up,” the cop said.
    No way.
    His breathing was heavy, his belt jangled. He said, “I want to talk to you.”
    Right. I’d heard that before. I turned a corner, behind a pillar, then went down into a window well that ran the length of the building, a sort of culvert lined with corrugated aluminum. I ducked low, below ground level. This was the closest I could find to offstage. Finally. Bent over double, I gasped for air. When I looked up over the