Lilac Mines Read Online Free PDF Page A

toward the drugstore.
    Her mother twists around to face her and says what she has probably been waiting all night to say. “I told you L.A. wasn’t safe.”
    â€œMom. Not L.A., West Hollywood.” Her side aches at the emphasis. “Do you know what that means? I mean, like, about the world?”
    Her question is only half rhetorical. If what happened tonight (last night?) can happen in West Hollywood, where is she supposed to hang out? In college she read essays about how the whole world was a construct, a big lie everyone told themselves to cover up the fact that the only truth was that there was no truth. It sounded glistening and mysterious, a conspiracy theory. Felix would trip out for a while, then close her course reader and go sing Spanish karaoke with Jia Li at a semi-scary bar on Hollywood Boulevard. They’d stop at In-N-Out for hamburgers-sans-burgers on the way home, and sometimes they would see movie stars there. All of this, too, seemed to have something to do with postmodernism. She wasn’t sure what because she didn’t read that carefully.
    But tonight (or last night), her big, colorful adventure turned sour and real and unbearably old. She’s been sentenced to walk the dangerous streets of a land that is suddenly as foreign as a dream.
    Suzy answers Felix’s question. “It means I have to worry about you! I already worry about you. I know you won’t even consider coming home and staying with us—I know that would be horribly ’uncool’—”
    â€œMom, I’m not in sixth grade. I’m not really worried about looking uncool.” Although Felix does feel very uncool at the moment. Her head and neck throb, and all she can see from the car window is a billboard inviting Korean people to move to Valencia.
    â€œSo won’t you reconsider what I said about visiting your aunt?”
    This has been a running theme of their conversations for nearly a year. Suzy wants Felix to spend time with Anna Lisa, who ran away from home at 19 to go be a dyke in some town in the elbow of California. Felix usually responds by accusing her mother of thinking that all lesbians are the same.
    â€œJust for a couple of weeks,” Suzy persists. “You’ll make her so happy. Lilac Mines is one of those safe, sleepy little towns. Nothing ever happens there.”
    â€œExactly!”
    â€œSomeone needs to help you change the dressing on your wounds,” Suzy continues. Felix hates the words ’dressing’ and ’wound.’ It makes her sound like a Civil War casualty. “And who better than your Aunt Anna Lisa? She’s a nurse, for goodness sake.”
    â€œFine,” she says. “I’ll think about it.”
    She does not think about it. She does her best not to think about any of it. As soon as she can, she goes back to work. Her regular doctor, whom she has actually only seen once before, insists that she wear a hideous plastic-and-foam neck brace.
    â€œI think maybe I should do a write-up of the summer’s hottest medical accessories,” Felix tells her editor, Renee Salt. “This would be just below ’colostomy bag.’ ” She is wearing a loose embroidered blouse, but the bandage around her ribs makes her feel fat.
    â€œGod, Felix, you shouldn’t joke about that stuff,” says Renee. She purses her fuchsia (magenta?) lips in concern. “What happened to you was really terrible. I hope you know how terrible we all feel about it.”
    Felix wants to tell her that she just used “terrible” twice in one breath. When Jessi Menaster, the West Coast photo editor, got a nose job last winter, it wasn’t nearly this awkward. Felix wishes she could tell them she was mugged instead. That would be very New York. But Crane called Renee the Monday after the attack and relayed every detail. Felix realizes that, until now, being out at work has meant being lesbian-chic. She wore leather