The From-Aways Read Online Free PDF

and definitely no chance of an anonymous encounter, which is what I thought bars were for. In the movies there’s always a pretty girl with a sad face leaning against the cigarette machine, waiting for someone to save her with a scotch and soda. I’ve been living here for three months and I know every damn person in the Uncle right now.
    Rosie normally drinks beer but she says, “I want what you’re having,” so I order us whiskeys with rocks. Jethro Newkirk is a couple of stools away and perks up at Rosie’s voice. She has this effect on people.
    “Rosie, my flower!” he says. Jethro is only fifty but takes old-man liberties: afternoon drink, self-indulgent storytelling, harmless lechery. He lays a hand on Rosie’s knee. “You girls seen the new house going up?”
    “It’s a monster,” Rosie says. “Worse than Elm Park.”
    That house is going up on a lot where Rosie’s childhood home used to be. They tore her house down last summer, right after some out-of-staters, some flatlanders as Rosie says, bought her parents’ lot and four more adjacent to it. Most of them beachfront, close to the shops downtown, right near the carousel. They paid a lot of money to get everyone out. If you were Rosie’s parents, enough to get you to Florida twice over. Once a week Rosie takes a Polaroid of the construction site and sends it to her parents like a postcard. It usually reads something like: Dear Traitors, I miss you. Love, Rosalind .
    “I heard it’s going to have a two-story entrance and a three-car garage,” I say.
    “Ah-yuh,” Jethro says. “I hate to see a house like that.” He rubs his pink ears, flushed from booze. “But it’s not getting done anytime soon. I saw the crew just sitting around this afternoon.”
    “Well, it’s awfully hot to work that time of day, what do you want them to do?” Rosie says.
    Jethro leaps off his bar stool and lifts his glass. “Burn it to the ground!” he cries. “I’d like them to burn it to the ground.”
    Rosie takes a sip of her whiskey and purses her lips. I can tell she doesn’t like the taste. “Let it go,” I say, and she dribbles it back into her cup. Beautiful girls can pull off disgusting gestures like this. And Rosie is: short, pale-skinned, and big-lipped with uncountable piercings along each ear. She takes another sip and stubbornly swallows.
    We head for the jukebox. Rosie feeds quarters into its slot. She types in E32 and plays the same Guns N’ Roses song she always plays. The one about the city that has all the pretty girls in it. Rosie says when she’s a singer she’ll only sing songs like this one. I wonder if I could get good enough to play like Slash.
    No way. I down the rest of my drink.
    W E HEAD OUT hours later and the night smells like smoke and summer dying. We have whiskey coursing through our arms and arteries, making us strong and stupid. We walk the roads. We hear a humming. Tucked away among trees is the Menamon substation, the energy hub for most of Hancock County. We stare up at the transformers. There are metal towers with cables looping between their posts and coils of metal conducting insane amounts of wattage. The humming is incredible.
    From here we can see the construction site Jethro was ranting about. Rosie points a fierce little finger at the foundation of what will certainly be a monstrously big house.
    “I hate them,” Rosie says.
    “You don’t even know them,” I say.
    “No one needs a house like that,” Rosie says. “You should hate them too.”
    “Okay,” I say, because with a girl like Rosie it’s impossible to say no. I pick a stone up off the ground. There’s nothing but a foundation to throw at and the site is too far away anyway, but I hurl the stone toward where the house will be. It flies uselessly off into the dark. “One imaginary window, smashed,” I say. “Happy?”
    Rosie grins and hands me another stone. I put it in my pocket. “I’ll save it for real windows,” I say. She squeezes my