Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever Read Online Free PDF

because why? Because fuck you, is why, she’d have said if anyone had asked her. But who would ask? I loved the sound of the old family car yowling like an agitated cat. We’d pick up drive-thru burgers or Taco Bell, head back to their place, and get ripped. Her fat friend, Dawn, another goth, drove a black Suburban. She’d follow us back to the neighborhood, drop her car off at her house, then walk over.
    Dawn was loud. She caked her face in some powder that couldn’t hide the craters in her cheeks; instead it cast them in white relief. Her eyeliner, black, ran in the heat. She believed she was making progress in the study of witchcraft and was objectionable on more or less every level. Angela said she believed in Dawn, that the fat girl did know magic. They would hang out with us as long as Kenny didn’t put his music on, which he inevitably did, because he hated Dawn fiercely. Indeed, she was one of the few subjects he allowed to trouble his easy-does-it-no-sweat veneer, I think because she reminded him of his old self. She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.
    Kenny and I never talked about—even mentioned—the old days. I knew that to do so would be to betray him all overagain. It was a shame, though, because Angela was attached to Dawn, and I was hard-fallen for Angela, and I think on some level Kenny knew this, and in our whole lives he was never anything but kind to me. He would hold out on the music for as long as he could stand to.
     
    It doesn’t get cold in South Florida until after New Year’s, and it doesn’t even get that cold. No scarves and gloves. A few weeks of sweater weather is about it. But November? Forget it. You could go swimming. We should go swimming, I thought. I was standing in the Beckstein kitchen, stoned to the gills, pouring myself a glass of orange juice.
    “That’s stupid,” Dawn said.
    “I don’t know,” Angela said. “Sounds kinda nice. Swimming high. Like the womb or something.”
    “I don’t have a suit,” Dawn said.
    “Go home and grab one,” Angela said. “We’ll wait for you, or if you want I can come with.”
    Dawn gave her friend what was clearly intended to be a withering look, but Angela didn’t. This was to all of our surprise, including, I think, Angela’s. She said, “Well, I’m going to go change.”
    Kenny loaned me a pair of shorts. I put them on in the guest bathroom, then helped him move the stereo out back. Dawn was sitting upright on one of the lounge chairs, smoking a clove. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. She was already sweating.
    “Not even gonna dip your toes?” I asked.
    “Better not put on any of that hippie shit,” she replied.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to her, “do you live here?”
    “Neither of us lives here,” Dawn said to me.
    “Hey Dawn,” Kenny said, “why don’t you shut the fat fuck up?”
    Angela came out of the house. She was wearing a black bikini with string ties that rode low on her notchy hips. Her legs were a bone-white mile. There were freckles on her chest and face, a mole on her left shoulder. She seemed to catch fire as she stepped out from under the overhang and into the undiminished autumn sun. Her toenails, I saw, matched her fingernails, and both matched the bikini. Okay, I remember thinking, I’ll just be in love with them both then.
    Kenny lazed in the shallow end, floating on his back. Dawn lit another clove off the butt of the old one and sulked, watching her friend do laps. She didn’t want to be there, but it was a long time before she left.
     
    Over winter break, Angela tore her Nine Inch Nails posters off her walls. Her fishnets, her black boots, her goth makeup—all down the memory hole. When we went back to school, she was in blue jeans with plain tee shirts and looked like she belonged in a public ser vice announcement.
    Kenny’s birthday was in February. He was fifteen too, finally. I