Ferocity Summer Read Online Free PDF

left me in the awkward position of playing the useless enabler to Willow’s downward-spiral-spinning dope fiend. We were quite a pair.
    The bead curtains clinked again. I looked up quickly, but unless Willow had suddenly grown a three-day shadow and a beer belly, this was not her.
    â€œYou want a beer or something while you’re waiting for your friend?” the man asked.
    â€œNo thanks,” I said.
    He took this as an invitation to sit down and chat with me. “Crappy weather, huh?”
    â€œYeah, I guess.”
    â€œMy name’s Craig. I’m the artist.”
    I think I giggled. The way he said it, it was like he was the only artist in the entire world.
    He winked at me. “You got a name?”
    â€œScilla.”
    He was giving me the look. Apparently he thought he had quite a lot to offer me, and that for some insane reason I would be very much enticed.
    â€œI should go look for her,” I said to Craig the artist, and quickly got up and passed through the curtain to the other side. I found a hallway with a bunch of closed doors. “Damn it,” I said. She had to be behind one of them. I flung open the doors one by one. Tattoo room. Office. Closet. The fourth door, a bathroom, was locked. I knocked once, quietly. Nothing. I pounded a few more times.
    â€œJust a minute.” It was Willow’s voice from the other side of the door, but it was weak and faint and sounded impossibly far away.
    â€œIt’s me.”
    I heard movement inside. The lock clicked open and the door opened a crack. I pushed it the rest of the way and went in, closing it behind me. Willow was holding a tissue up to her nose, her head tilted back. I saw her face reflected in the mirror. There was blood smeared under her nose, and more on the tissue.
    â€œIt’s nothing,” she assured me.
    Her streaky hair was stringy and damp. It hung limply, and in the light of the bathroom looked faded and discolored. Her face looked weird, all ghastly pale and almost gray. Only her eyes had color, but they were that too-bright blue, glassy like junkie eyes. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, and for a moment I thought she was going to pass out.
    A few small puddles of blood dotted the powder blue tiles of the bathroom floor. I wrapped a wad of toilet paper around my hand, tore it off, and began mopping up the little red puddles. Willow watched me. She made a strange noise and shook her head as if to tell me not to, but I didn’t pay any attention to her. Looking at the red stains on the floor and, out of the corner of my eye, at Willow’s gaunt form on the toilet, I had a vision of her with bobbed hair and a pleated skirt hiding a diaphragm under a bench in Washington Square Park. I couldn’t suppress the giggle that found its way into my mouth.

    That night we made our way to a small beach party where our classmates were gathered to toast the coming summer with beer, wine, and any other alcoholic substances they could get their underaged hands on. It was probably more difficult to get ahold of than the narcotic substances Willow had purchased that afternoon.
    As luck would have it, tomorrow was Baccigalupi Day, the not quite officially sanctioned day when upperclassmen skipped school. It made our suspension seem almost ironic.
    Willow had taken it upon herself to play the role of life of the party. She had surrounded herself with a group of guys and girls, all of them drunk/stoned/high enough to find her amazingly entertaining.
    I wasn’t in much of a celebratory mood. There had been the incident of Willow’s bleeding nose, of course, and then there was the wrath of my mother that I would need to face sooner or later. Finally, there was my life stretching out before me, an endless blank canvas. The only colors I had to paint with were gray and brown and black.
    I lay on the sand watching a boy and two girls risk death by hypothermia by swimming in the too-cold spring water