The Museum of Intangible Things Read Online Free PDF

There’s my own romantic fantasy: Maybe Danny Spinelli will be there; he and Ethan used to play Little League baseball together, and they still hang out sometimes. And there’s my obligation to Zoe: my talent for keeping her safe and checking her outlandish impulses that began the very day I met her at age seven. I was collecting reeds for a project on papyrus at the marshy, swampy part of the lake at the end of our street, and I found her posing nude for a teenage boy who promised to give her a dollar.
    “Hey!” I interrupted him just as he was about to take a photo, and he ran like a deer through the reeds, the susurrations of his retreat rustling around him until he made it to the street.
    “That was stupid,” I told her as she pulled on her T-shirt.
    “I know. I should have gotten the dollar first,” she said, and from then on I knew I needed to watch out for her in a different way than she needed to watch out for me.
    • • •
    The girls’ locker room is so deeply embedded with live microorganisms squirming in the grout between the gray and yellow tiles, I expect one day it will become sentient, and the walls actually
will
talk. Hopefully they will send a positive message to future students:
    Girls in your underpants, I speak to you from the walls. Listen to me and to those who have come before you
 . . .
Surrender
not
your power to popular girls or to boys who cannot help but use you
 . . .
    “Hannah! What’s taking so long?”
    Zoe interrupts my reverie long enough for me to finally notice the clothes I’d been unthinkingly squeezing myself into. A lacy white push-up bra beneath a crisp, white blouse and a camel-colored merino wool pencil skirt.
    “What the heck am I wearing?” I ask.
    “We need to stop at the bar.”
    Zoe sees my breasts as an opportunity. A year ago when I developed them—I could actually feel the tingling of cells wildly dividing and creating more and more mass to push against my bra—Zoe, who will never have breasts (they are just nowhere in her family tree), did not get jealous but instead was struck with an idea.
    She squeezed them together with a push-up bra, dressed me in a low-cut business suit, handed me her mom’s reading glasses, and drove me to Mickey’s, the local dive where my dad used to take me for a lunch of maraschino cherries while I spun around on the bar stools.
    I could barely see as I stumbled in wearing the glasses and asked for a case of Corona. Seventy-year-old Mickey was too distracted by my boobs and too convinced by my professional getup to ask for any ID. He brought the beer right out and loaded it into the car as if businesswomen every day are walking into dive bars asking for cases of beer. So now I’m a regular, even though I never drink. The case of beer I’m able to acquire has gained us entry into any party we want.
    “Don’t you think these rich kids can get their own beer?” I ask.
    “We are more alike than we are unalike,” Zoe postulates.
    “Since when, Maya Angelou? Since when are we anything like them at all?”
    Zoe ignores me and rushes me out, handing me some jeans to change into when I’m done buying beer. Clicking this time across the gym in the heels Zoe has brought for me, I say good-bye and thank you to Ms. Brennan, who is playing some kind of complicated patty-cake game with Thalia. She seems to feel a little better now, about the turnout of the event.
    “It was the first one, don’t forget,” I tell her. “Next year it will have some traction going in. You can build on it.”
    “That we will, Hannah! Have a nice night!” she calls.

FEAR
    In the car, Zoe’s old Chevy Nova spotted with primer, Noah tells us his theory of extraterrestrial space travel.
    “Guess what, Hannah?” he asks. Zoe has trained him to start this way, a small prompt to at least try to engage in conversation rather than just blurting out his theories without regard for the other person.
    “What, Noah?” I ask.
    “Did you know that