One Bloody Thing After Another Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was deaf, too. She kept snapping her fingers in front of Jackie’s face. Clapping her hands. But when Jackie got home, and her mother opened the door, the sound came rushing back.
    Ann doesn’t know about the trees. She’s seen the map in her friend’s room, though. She comes over once in a while. Jackie told her it belonged to her mother. People stop asking questions when you bring up your dead mom.
    Now, under the tree, Jackie squeezes Ann’s hand and twists both their arms. Her fingers are wet and cold. Ann puts her other arm out for balance, but it isn’t enough.
    â€œToo little, too late, beautiful,” Jackie says. She shouldn’t have said that. Beautiful. Oh god. Her foot slips. Jackie can see exactly what’s about to happen before it happens. The problem with fighting someone when you have your hands lashed to theirs is that when the loser falls, the winner falls, too.
    They hit the gravel hard. Nothing breaks. Ann rolls over on her back, and Jackie does too, resting her head on Ann. They stay on the wet gravel, Jackie’s head on Ann’s stomach, both of them looking up at the tree.
    Jackie and her mother came here on a picnic, after the hurricane. Her mother brought an old-fashioned wicker basket and lined it with a white sheet, like they were pretending to be a proper family in an old movie. They sat up on the hill over there. The city hadn’t cleaned up the trees, yet. They sat near a huge fallen tree, laid out on its side, roots up into the air. All down the hill, trees were torn up and broken in half. People were wandering through the park with cameras, stopping to take pictures of each other standing by the biggest broken trees.
    Her mother was wearing a dress. She never wore a dress, but that day she wore a dress and she packed a picnic basket and they sat up on the hill and watched everyone taking pictures.
    â€œYour father brought me here on our first date,” Jackie’s mom said. Then she said, “I guess it wasn’t really a date. But we came here, drunk, after the bars closed.”
    Down the hill, a man and a woman started yelling and fighting, and Jackie’s mother spilled a bit of juice on the front of the dress.
    â€œThis would have been a better picnic with the trees,” she said. “Do you ever wish that we’d lived out in the country? Did you like growing up in the city, Jackie?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Jackie told her.
    â€œI could have raised you out in the country. Maybe you would have been happier.” She was quiet for a while, looking down at the tree roots and the dirt and the bright, exposed wood. Jackie just kept thinking about her mother and father, sitting here in the park, falling in love in the moonlight. How old were they? When was this?
    Her mother took another drink of her juice.
    â€œYou have to go live with your father for a while,” she said. “I’m sick.”
    But Jackie didn’t go live with her father. She stayed with her mother.
    Ann’s stomach is making noises under her head, like she’s hungry, and Jackie wants to reach up and touch Ann’s face and her lips.
    Ann doesn’t say much at all. She’s been quiet, today.
    â€œDo you want to go on a date with me tonight, Ann?”
    â€œWhat?” Ann doesn’t sit up, at least. Jackie was worried that she would sit up. Or just walk away.
    â€œWe can do anything! This whole city is ours,” Jackie says. “We can go to the carnival, or up the tower. We can find the old abandoned subway lines underneath the city. Don’t go home. Come out on a date with me!”
    Ann doesn’t say anything for a long time, lying with Jackie’s head resting warm on her stomach.
    â€œI don’t want to go home,” Ann says.

16
    The roller coaster creaks while it pulls them slowly up into the sky. There’s a chain under their seats. You can hear it clicking. Click click click. Almost