The Devil You Know: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

I reached out for the book. Friend of a friend?
    Of a friend of a friend, my mother said. I imagine it was all lies. She went back to browsing.
    Think we live vicariously? I said. Reading it, I mean.
    Sometimes I just throw this shit out there because it feels good. Because, hey, look at us, out for a Sunday stroll and chatting it up about gruesome murders and whatnot. I dug into my purse for fifty cents and reached the coins over to the book vendor, a tall guy with a comb-over and baby-fine gray stubble. He clicked open his cash can and threw the money in. There was a hundred-dollar bill Scotch-taped to the inside of the lid and I asked him what for.
    Counterfeit, he said. So I remember what they look like. He leaned across the table and straightened the little rows of books. He had long, elegant fingers.
    Your serial killer name is The Librarian, I told him.
    I slid Helter Skelter into my purse and we moved on to the next booth, old paintings and ponchos hanging from a wire.

    M y friend David Patton moved me into my bachelor. He borrowed his mom’s minivan and we packed it with all my stuff: books and papers and Goodwill buy-the-pound vintage. My mother had given me a plastic laundry basket filled with packaged food: spaghetti, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, applesauce. In the housewares department I owned three coffee mugs, a teapot that I thought was an antique but later turned out to be from Ikea, and a cast-iron fry pan. This paucity of assets must have seemed strong evidence that I didn’t need help moving, and my parents didn’t offer any. I think they were instead offering subconscious discouragement regarding my plan to live all by my lonesome. I could have moved all my worldly belongings in two cab rides—maybe even just one. But David had his mom’s Caravan. So.
    The original plan had not been for me to live out in Parkdale on my own. My friend Melissa and I were meant to share an apartment up in the Annex. She had a line on a nice one at College and Borden. Her father owns a bunch of cosmetic surgery clinics, so she comes from money. Only then Melissa quit her summer job to go see a few Grateful Dead shows and never came back. Her dad found her in a parking lot outside of Nashville, painstakingly carving I Need A Miracle signs into some shim wood she’d found. This is a thing she was doing for money, and I guess it’s better than some of the alternatives. She had some kind of breakdown on the way home and ended up in the hospital on lithium. When I told David that, he said the same thing happened to his cousin Helen when she was twenty. Just the lithium part, unrelated to Jerry Garcia and his timeless music.
    It’s really common, he said. Girls go crazy all the time.
    As it turned out, I loved bachelor life. You walk into your own tiny space at the end of the day and everything you see here is yours. There’s no joint decision making and no explaining anything. On Saturday mornings I turned off the answering machine until 2:00 p.m., to feel independent of social connections. Sometimes it kills you. It’s excellent to force your own hand. Then you know for sure you don’t need anyone.
    You think David’s my boyfriend, but he’s not. He’s been my friend since forever. He’s been my friend since we were kids. David Patton was just this kid I used to babysit. He’s still got the same mess of dirty blond hair over his eyes all the time—back then because he was a kid, and now because he’s trying to look hard-edged and a little broken. He wants his hair to make a girl think of Kurt Cobain, and maybe get the two of them, Kurt and David, confused for a moment. He’s also still got the same five freckles across the bridge of his nose, plus a few extra in the sun. These detract from the grunge persona and a girl (me) is careful not to mention them too much. The year David turned thirteen he grew about seven inches in two months and did nothing but eat sandwiches. So today he stands six-foot-two, which