Things You Won't Say Read Online Free PDF Page B

glanced around. Almost everyone was dressed in black, tattoos abounded, and a few folks had facial piercings. It was a young, hip crowd. Lou was wearing shorts and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt that was a little big—tight-fitting clothes chafed her skin—but she wasn’t uncomfortable. She’d long become inured to the sensation that she didn’t fit in.
    Donny and Mary Alice seemed like a good match, she thought as the bartender brought over her soda. They were both soft-spoken, with salt-and-pepper hair and silver-rimmed glasses, and Lou could picture them settling into the same easy routines she and Donny used to enjoy: walks after dinner on mild evenings, Sunday mornings on the couch with the newspapers spread out between them, the radio station in Donny’s Acura tuned to NPR while they discussed the day’s stories.
    The apartment had two bedrooms, and Lou wouldn’t have a problem with them all sharing the space, but she suspected Mary Alice might not like it. Most new girlfriends didn’t relish having old ones around. Look at the issues Jamie had with Christie, even though Jamie and Mike had been together for more than a decade.
    Lou polished off her Sprite, thirsty from her long day in the heat, and tried to puzzle out the lyrics to the song blasting through the speakers. It seemed to involve betrayal, but ennui could also be the lead singer’s main complaint. When her potato skins finally arrived, they were topped with bacon bits. Lou used another napkin to pick them off. The potato skins tasted as stale as if they’d been made the previous week and abandoned under a warming light, but she was too hungry to care.
    Was the music getting louder? A pulse in the side of her head throbbed in time to the frantic drumbeat. She ate her meal quickly, then paid her bill (Four dollars for a soda? Really? Maybe hipsters were richer than they looked) and slid off her stool. It was raining harder when she walked back outside and took a look around. A movie theater was a few blocks away, but a quick check on her iPhone revealed she’d missed the beginnings of the two shows playing.
    She couldn’t go back to the apartment this soon, and thereweren’t any libraries or bookstores within walking distance. She didn’t have a car, so her options were limited. She found herself heading toward the theater, her heavy clogs splashing through puddles. But when she tried to buy a ticket, she ran into trouble.
    “One for whatever’s showing now,” she said.
    “The next movie’s at nine o’clock,” the teenage attendant said.
    “I know,” Lou said. “But I want one for the movie that’s playing now.”
    “It started forty minutes ago,” the attendant protested. He frowned at her from behind the glass window of his booth.
    “I don’t care,” Lou said.
    “But you missed half of it,” he said. “I can’t give you a discounted price.”
    Lou leaned forward. “Look, I’m getting rained on and I can’t go back to my apartment for at least two hours because my roommate has his new girlfriend there and I’m pretty sure they want to have sex. Two hours is enough time, right? I mean if they have dinner first.”
    The attendant reared back, and Lou realized she’d probably overshared again. Jamie had suggested, more than once, that Lou didn’t always need to be brutally honest or say the first thing that popped into her head. “Most people don’t mind if you tell them a few white lies,” Jamie had said. “They expect it, even.” This particular conversation had come in their high school lunchroom, after one of Jamie’s best friends had asked if her new jeans made her look fat. “Yes,” Lou had said.
    “Jeez, Lou,” Jamie had snapped after her friend had run off to the bathroom in tears. “Think before you speak sometimes, okay?”
    “I figured she’d want to know,” Lou had protested. “Maybe she can return them.”
    “But there’s a gentler way of telling people that stuff,” Jamie had said. “You