The Middle Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

yourself?” he asked, and then she put it to all her friends for the next few weeks.
    “Well do you ever think of killing yourself?”
    And they all answered yes.
    She was surprised.
    She started to think about it herself.
    She said to herself, “Suicide,” and mulled the word over, and thought, “But how would I ever do it?” And after three weeks of thinking about it, she knew how. She’d walk off a bridge. She’d kill herself just like that.
    After that month of suicide thoughts she had three of the best days of her life. She met a boy, fell in love, lay out in the sunshine and held his hand and kissed, and fucked behind a video store, and after those three days she had the worst year ever, the worst year of her whole entire life, a year she would look back on when she was eighty and still think, “Yep, that was the worst fucking year of my whole entire life.”
    Every day she was sick and green and every day she woke up with a foul smell in her nose, which ebbed in and out from morning till night, and her glands swelled up and she cried and cried, and her friends started calling more and more often, then stopped. And her belly swelled up and her hair sweated down her back, and her mother yelled about money and her future, and she ran into walls, and she fell down stairs, and she was disoriented, and lost, like a girl gone blind.
    She came out of that year very skinny and very tattered. Almost all of her bones had been broken or cracked and she had welts and bruises everywhere, especially on her face, and there were dark black circles under her eyes. And the thought of parading around campus with a joke flag made her quiver with nausea and resentment.
    That was it. She came out of it. She never had such a down as that or such an up as the three days that preceded it, not ever again in her life. The rest of her life was like a long thin line with little diminuendos and tiny little crescendos, and friends visiting from out of town.
    She had a big, bright, curly head of hair that made her look like a clown, and nobody ever told her.

THE MOON MONOLOGUE
     
    NOBODY EVER ACCUSED me of being bright, which I am glad for. You see, all the really bright people I have ever known have been involved in elaborate drug deals, and I’m not one of those people who believes that drugs are just a part of life.
    I am very much against drugs, and I think the people who do them are foolish. I have seen the way they make people act, and I am not a space case. I am a genuine human being, and I express what I’m feeling.
    So when it happened that Bobby, that night in the cellar, touched my breast with the palm of his hand and fell back as though electric-shocked and said, “You’re bright, Marie!” I thought he was the biggest goof ever, and I said so.
    “Nobody’s ever accused me of being bright, Bobby,” I said with pride and a bit of anger. I got up and went straight to my room to watch the sun rise, but there was another hour still to go. I just sat at the window then, and looked out at the lawn and thought it was a pretty confusing world, which it is, if you look at it the right way.
    So much for that.
    It wasn’t two days later before I began meeting people on the street who started asking me questions; questions about where the world was going to, what would be happening with plants in the future, and would pets be obsolete soon?
    Strangely enough, I had all the right answers for these people.
    It was like they had put the ideas in my mind with the questions they were asking. “Sure,” I said. “There’s all sorts of things that’ll happen in the future.”
    “Like what, Marie?”
    “Well, I’ll tell you. Tomorrow I’m going to a party and I’m going to be the hit of that party. I’m going to wear a dress and make out crazily with all the boys. The boys I know are pretty sly but they can’t pass anything over on me. If I see Bobby I’m just going to ignore his face.”
    Anyway, it turned out some kind of