Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t know what to get him. He only liked two things, and there was no sense trying to find a better pot connection than the one he already had, so I went to the record store. He had nearly a hundred tapes by this point,but a lot of them were incomplete or fuzzy recordings, and he—a late-comer but a purist—owned almost nothing on CD. There wasn’t a lot of Phish to choose from, except for one double live album I knew he already had, but there was a ton of Grateful Dead stuff. Studio albums, “official bootlegs,” best-of comps. Then I saw it: 2/11/69 at the Fillmore East in New York City. They’d been opening for Janis at the time, and this package had two discs marked EARLY SHOW and LATE SHOW . The eleventh was his birthday. I wasn’t sure if he would already have the show on bootleg, but if nothing else it’d be a sound quality upgrade from the tape version. I bought it, took it home, thought about wrapping it, didn’t, switched it from the clear plastic bag it had come in to a brown paper one, pulled it back out of the brown bag, dug around in the kitchen junk drawer, found a Sharpie. I pulled the shrink wrap off so I could write directly on the case. Fifteen years later & there you were, I wrote, and put the thing back in the brown bag.
    On the day itself, Mrs. Beckstein picked him up from school an hour early to go take the test for his restricted license. I waited at the house with Angela. We were on the living room couch, side by side, staring at the TV, unaccustomed to afternoon sobriety. She was flipping channels, paused briefly on MTV, a video for some angry song the old her would have cherished. “Stupid,” she said, to herself I was pretty sure, then went back to flipping—CSPAN, Jesus station, Spanish Jesus station, Home Shopping.
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Huh?” she said.
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    “No, I mean what’s the question?”
    “Well, you’ve like, changed.”
    “That’s not a question.”
    “Yeah, I guess not.”
    “I don’t really know how to explain it,” she said. “It feels a lot like traveling. Movement. Some urge like birds get.”
    “Whales. They go far, right?”
    “I don’t know, maybe, yeah. I like birds better. I want a tattoo of a bird. Something that flies over the ocean.”
    “Don’t get a seagull,” I said. “They’re scavengers. They smell.”
    “Something else then.”
    Her lips were dry and not as soft as I’d imagined. She exhaled through her nose, a tickle skittering across my face. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “They’ll be back any minute.” And they were.
    Kenny had passed the test. He had his learner’s permit. I congratulated him, then gave him his CD. “Hey cool,” he said. “Let’s go throw it on.” I knew the songs now, some by their opening riffs and others not until I heard the lyrics, but I got there, usually. Kenny told me the names of the ones I’d never heard.
     
    I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself because lunchtime was when Kenny did most of his dealing. It was the end of March. I had forgotten my lunch that morning, and was eyeing the line, trying to decide if it was worth getting involved in. Dawn plopped herself down next to me. She smelled like sour sweat and old smoke. She tented her meaty fingers. “We’re losing her,” she said.
    “Who’s ‘we’?”
    “The fact that you didn’t ask ‘who’s her’ just proves how right I am.”
    “So Angela Beckstein’s too cool for us lately. What do you want from me?”
    “I have a ritual—”
    “Oh Christ, here we go—”
    “But I can’t do it by myself.”
    “Aren’t you a little old for playing pretend?”
    “It’ll bring her back to us.”
     
    But what was there, really, to bring Angela back from? She was a person who had made a decision, a change, probably for the positive—at least if measured by any standard other than our warped own. I’m sure her parents, for example, were sleeping better than they had in