Down the Shore Read Online Free PDF Page B

after door, encountering disembodied voices that told us to fuck off, that the room was taken. The hall ended in double doors, and I watched Kelsey press her cheek against the wood to listen. She knocked and tried the handle.
    â€œLocked,” she said.
    I waved her aside and dug out my wallet. With my palm pressed against the seam between the doors, I slid my Lawrenceville ID under the strike plate, feeling for the angled latch. My mother taught me how to pick a lock. There was a sharp snap and the doors broke open. We slipped inside and Kelsey shut us in while I felt along the wall until I found the lights.
    It was the master bedroom, complete with a California king and a wall of windows obscured by heavy blinds. I ran my hand along the varnished surface of a long, low dresser, stopping at a brass ashtray filled with gold cuff links and foreign coins and collar stays. I had worried about leaving everything exactly as we found it, but the solidity and sparseness of the room made me think of a line from the Gettysburg Address, something about our poor power to add or detract. I wondered what the owner had done to acquire all this weight and space. And then I saw Kelsey in the mirror over the dresser, her image like a portrait framed by the double doors. I tried to decide what made her look at home here, but she reached behind her without looking, almost out of habit, and turned the light back off.
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    She was sitting Indian style in a crater in the comforter by the time my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I was lying on my side. The stiff denim on my shin was inches from the smooth curve of her knee, and I thought I could feel the heat from her skin, but that was my imagination. The house was nicely chilled.
    â€œAre you an EMT or something?” she asked.
    â€œNo,” I said. “Are you experiencing a shortness of breath?”
    â€œYou just seemed like you knew what you were doing with that girl.”
    â€œI’ve picked up drunk girls before.”
    â€œThink about what you just said.”
    â€œI mean I’ve helped them up,” I said, laughing.
    â€œThat’s a better story. It was nice of you to make sure she got home. Every girl should have someone like you around when she gets that fucked up.”
    Something tightened in my chest when I realized this was personal history disguised as praise, that she hadn’t been that lucky once. She returned my stare, unblinking. The drugs I had taken were making sense to me in a different way now—a self-administered anesthetic for the invasive things that she was doing with her eyes.
    â€œWhere did that little adventure take you?”
    â€œRidgewood,” I said. “That’s where she’s from.”
    â€œAnd you live in Princeton with your parents.”
    â€œWith my mom. Who told you that?”
    â€œMy cousin. Do you have siblings?”
    When I was nine or ten, my mother would sometimes use her sous chef as a babysitter. I would sit by the stove while he made stock and sauces and talked to me as if I were his age. One day after school he told me something I never forgot: Pay attention when a woman asks about your siblings. The desire to know about your brothers and sisters, he explained, signals a curiosity about how the genes that made you might express themselves in another manifestation of the self. He had long blond dreadlocks, and I remembered their earthy, oily smell mixed in with the smell of shallots over heat. It means she really wants to know you, he said, splashing wine into a pan, and it’s because she’s thinking about fucking you and, by extension, about having your kids. My mother used to call him Professor Horseshit. I was praying he was right.
    â€œIt’s just me,” I said.
    â€œI didn’t think you were an only child.”
    â€œIs that a good thing?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “It is.”
    â€œSo when was your eighteenth