Metro Read Online Free PDF Page A

about it , her look says to him. And in the same instant, she starts thinking about it.
    It’s been awhile since we were this crazy . But m aybe it’s what I need. We won the revolution tonight, after all.
    She takes her smartphone out of her pocket and keys the screen open—there are forty-seven unread messages from just the last half hour and ten new voicemails, all from Peanut Williams and the boys in Philly. The emails have all-caps subject lines like SENATOR BOB WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT WHITE-COLLAR RAPE and SENATOR BOB ORDERS THE FILIBUSTER SUPREME, DUDE!
    It’s all about Senator Bob tonight.
    She smiles at the phone.
    And Spider-Girl is still smiling at her, Andy’s tongue running along her neck.
    Jollie sets the phone down on her desk. And she finds that her body begins to react faster than her mind can be made up, putting down the shoebox, moving quickly to the door and locking it. James T. Kirk gives her the fifty-watt okey-dokey. She tells him to shut the hell up. Then she moves herself into the waves of her bed, and the easy arms of the Boy Prince.
    This would break Mark’s heart in half , she thinks.
    If he was here to see what they are doing now, while he is off scoring.
    But this is what I need , she also thinks, as Spider-Girl’s first innocent kisses come in, sweet on her neck like honey and bitter like wicked steel, dumb like a frat chick and desperate like a gnawing rat. Smooth and wet and soothing and toothy. Exciting.
    This is what I need, not to be in love with him. I’m sorry, Mark, but I can’t marry you. I have to save the world first.
    35 minutes and COUNTING . . .
    H e’s the guy everyone wants to know in this town. But not because he’s a brilliant mind, bursting with stories and bits of knowledge collected from every obscure nerdariffic nook and cranny, not because he’s a real artist living the dream that so many dishwashers and spare changers and burnout musician-types fantasize about. No, not at all. Most people want to know Mark Jones because he’s a drug dealer.
    It’s pretty simple math.
    There are a lot of dudes in this town who deal pot from under their beds, ecstasy caps or acid squares or even H-bags when a bigger score happens, but Mark has been here longer and knows the market better than most people. He’s been here since the summer of 2005. He’ll tell you that everything you need to know comes from a zinger line in a Marty Scorsese film or some bit of wisdom uttered by Bill Murray in Caddyshack . He’ll tell you his first ambition was to be a professional screenwriter—but he found out soon enough that you have to live in Hollywood for that. Problem is, he couldn’t leave Austin, not ever. It had him by the soul—this amazing arty-farty boomtown, full of liars and losers and guys who sometimes make it really big, an overripe music scene bursting with blues cats and metal punks, rockabilly martyrs, filmmakers of every shape, size, and religion struggling in every dark corner to record their own Exile on Main St. or make the next El Mariachi . There are theater art gangs and performance groups who do their thing like you wouldn’t believe, sidewalk musicians and homeless transsexuals who’ve become local celebrities. It’s like San Francisco, only smaller. Like Athens, Georgia, only better. Circuits of trendy restaurants and soulful dives, sushi places and strip clubs, sports bars, roadhouses brimming with the blues, jazz haunts that freeze time and roll back the years, the tacky runways of 6th Street and the campus drag, glimmering and grooving, shaking to the very core of the earth with a million billion holes in the wall where you can hear every religion that exists in the spaces between midnight and one in the morning. And on Friday night, don’t forget to catch Aliens on Ice . That’s the James Cameron film, acted out live on a hockey rink by geeky drama-school dropouts with