Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

that phony black that rubs off on the
pillowcases and stains my good shirts in the wash. He smokes Cigarettes—Lucky
Strikes,” Father said with distaste. Nothing saw the pack of Vantages poking
out of Father’s breast pocket. “He throws away the clothing we buy him or rips
it to rags before he’ll wear it. Now he’s stealing from us. Things are going to
CHANGE—”
                 “Rodger.
We’ll talk about it, among ourselves. Don’t worry, Jason, you’re not in
trouble.”
                 Mother
positively floated from the room, pulling Father after her. Father slammed the
door. A stack of books fell over, spilling Plath and Bradbury and William
Burroughs across the floor in an unlikely orgy of paper and dust.
                 In
the hall Father’s voice rose. “What the hell was that supposed to mean, he’s
not in trouble … he goddamn well is in trouble …. ”
                 Nothing
closed his eyes for a moment and watched red spangles swirl away behind his
lids. Then he got up and stretched his lithe naked body, shaking his hair and
his hands to cleanse himself of Mother’s touch. Father had taken away the good
whiskey, but Nothing had his own bottle of brainrot hidden in the closet. A flask of something called White Horse. He’d gotten his
friend Jack to buy it for him because of the name: Dylan Thomas had drunk his
last eighteen whiskeys at a pub called the White Horse in New York City.
                 Nothing
lay in the dark and sipped from the neck of the bottle, blinking up at the
stars on his ceiling. After a while the constellations began to swim. I’ve got
to get out of this place, he thought just before dawn, and the ghosts of all
the decades of middle-class American children afraid of complacency and
stagnation and comfortable death drifted before his face, whispering their
agreement.
                 In
Nothing’s English class the next day, Mrs. Margaret Peebles plunged her
hypodermic of higher learning into Lord of the Flies and sucked out every drop
of its primal magic, every trace of its adolescent wonder. Nothing knew haft
the class hadn’t even read the book. If they were judging it by what the
teacher said, he could hardly blame them. But he’d read it three years ago, one
summer afternoon in bed with a fever, and when he had put the book down, his
hands had been shaking. Those wild salty-skinned little boys had tumbled
through his head, and he had cried for them, so young, grown old so fast. He
looked at the blank page of notebook paper in front of him. Pink and blue
lines, neatly ruled. He began to count them but lost track of the number. The
clock said 9:10. Twenty more minutes left of class. His head ached from last
night’s whiskey, and he wanted to sleep. He began drawing in his notebook.
Swirls. The first vestiges of a face.
                 An
eye, green because his pen was green. A tooth.
                 “Jason–”
                 Outside,
far away across the wide green front lawn, past the pink granite sign that
looked like a gravestone except for the snarling tiger carved on top (Gift of
the Senior Class, 1972), a black van sped by. The road past the school was long
and straight, and the van was going too fast for Nothing to catch more than a
snatch of the singing that blew back on the wind out the open windows of the
van, borne on the wings of the sweet September day. But he was sure it was
Bowie. Someone in that van was singing a song by David Bowie. The voices were
clear and loud and drunken. Nothing watched the van disappear and wished more
than anything else in the world that he were going with it, going with those
happy singers, drinking and singing and going away on the open road.
                 “Jason.”
                 He
sighed. Peebles was staring at him. The rest of the class paid no attention;
they were elsewhere too, in their own worlds, driving away