The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Read Online Free PDF

Katie flinging disinfectant powder everywhere. Katie was cool, always in sweatpants, didn’t give a shit about anything.
    â€œYou know your friend is a headcase, right?” she said.
    It was the first time anybody’d called Cee my friend. We got out the mop and lathered up the floor. Everyone slipped and swore at us, coming out of the showers. Cee went skidding by in a towel. “Whee!” she shrieked.
    Â 
    You cannot feel your bug. I’ve pressed so hard on my chest. I know.
    â€œ
I
could feel it,” said Cee. “After they put it back in.” It wasn’t exactly a physical thing. She couldn’t trace the shape of the bug inside her, but she could feel it
working.
    â€œBug juice,” she said, making a sour face. She could feel bug juice seeping into her body. Every time she was going to be angry or afraid, there’d be this warmth in her chest, a feeling of calm spreading deep inside.
    â€œI only noticed it after I’d had the bug out for a couple of weeks.”
    â€œHow did your parents know you needed a new one?”
    â€œI didn’t need one.”
    â€œHow did they know it was gone?”
    â€œWell, I kind of had this fit. I got mad at them and started throwing food.”
    We were sitting on my bed, under my Mother Figure, a lamp with a blue shade. The blue light brought out the stains on Cee’s Victorian nightgown. We were both painting our toenails Cherry Pink, balancing the polish on my Life Skills textbook, taking turns with the brush.
    â€œYou should do it,” Cee said. “I feel better. I’m so much better.”
    I thought how in a minute we’d have to study for our Life Skills quiz. I didn’t think there was bug juice in my body. I couldn’t feel anything.
    â€œI’m so much better,” Cee said again. Her hand was shaking.
    Â 
    Oh, Cee.
    Â 
    The weird thing is, I started writing this after Max came to visit me, and I thought I was going to write about Max. But then I started writing in your book. Why? This book you left me, your Mother Figure. You practically threw it at me: “Take it!” It was the worst thing you could do, to take somebody else’s Parent Figure, especially the mom. Or maybe it was only us girls who cared so much about the moms. Maybe for the boys it was the dads. But anyway, taking one was the worst; you could basically expect the other kids to kill you. A kid got put in the hospital that way at a different camp—the one on the east side—but we all knew about it at our camp. They strung him up with electric wires. Whenever we told the story we ended by saying what
we
would have done to that kid, and it was always much worse.
    But you threw this book at me, Cee, and what could I do? Jodi and Duncan were trying to grab your arms, and the ambulance was waiting for you downstairs. I caught the book clumsily, crumpling it. I looked at it later, and it was about half full of your writing. I think they’re poems.
    dank smells underground want to get back
    no pill for it
    i need you
    I don’t know, are they poems? If they are, I don’t think they’re very good.
A nap could be a door an abandoned car.
Does that even mean anything?
Eat my teeth.
I know them all by heart.
    I picked up this book when Max left. I wrote: “You have to puke it up.” All of a sudden I was writing about you. Surprising myself. I just kept going. Remembering camp, the weird sort of humid excitement there, the cafeteria louder than the sea. The shops—remember the shops? Lulu’s was the best. We’d save up our allowance to go there. Down in the basement you could get used stuff for cheap. You got your leather jacket there. I got these red shoes with flowers on the toes. I loved those shoes so much! I wonder where they went? I wore them to every mixer, I was wearing them when I met Pete, probably with my white dress—another Lulu’s purchase I don’t have