This Must Be the Place: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

proud of her compulsive tendencies. They made her feel older than fifteen, more in control, able to stop herself from grabbing a hunk of Dani Drake’s bangs and bashing her head-first into the kitchen table.
    “Oh!” said Dani with mock urgency, gazing heavenward. “Oh, you’re right! There’s no other band in the history of music that could possibly be more important than the Beatles! How stupid of me!”
    Wendy chuckled into his can of soda, which surprised Oneida: she never would have thought Eugene “Wendy” Wendell possessed anything approximating a sense of humor. What he did have was a reputation: he was to be feared and avoided. It was commonly known that he drank grain alcohol with every meal, kept a Bowie knife duct-taped tohis thigh, and that the white rope of scar running from his temple through his eyebrow was the result of a broken bottle fight with a hooker from Syracuse. The hooker won, but Wendy was still a badass mother-fucker. It didn’t seem right for him to chuckle, even if the joke was mean.
    “Guys—I don’t think the Beatles are irrelevant, but for the sake of argument who else could we write this report about?” said Andrew. Oneida felt a little hurt. She tried not to hold it against him; being a good leader was mostly a question of diplomacy, after all, and Dani Drake lived off the bones that were thrown to her. Andrew had become the group’s de facto leader, a position Oneida would normally have insisted upon holding herself had she not been immobilized by his physical presence in her house. In her kitchen. She wanted to run her hand through his thick black hair, wanted to will Dani and Wendy into nonexistence so she and Andrew Lu could sit and talk, just the two of them, on a Saturday afternoon, talk about anything and everything:
The Scarlet Letter
, which they were reading in English. What was his favorite movie? What had it been like to grow up in China? She wanted it so badly that she felt a little sick.
    “I vote for The Clash,” Wendy said.
    “Uh, ’scuse me—
no
.” Dani wrapped her bright blue gum around her finger and pulled a long strand from her teeth. “They’re basically the Beatles of punk.”
    “The Sex Pistols are the Beatles of punk,” Wendy said.
    “No.”
Dani leaned forward on her elbows, the better to challenge him. “The Sex Pistols are the
Stones
of punk. Want to quit talking out of your ass?”
    “Want to kiss it?”
    “Ooh!” Dani chirped. “Nice one!”
    In what was clearly an attempt to neutralize the situation by ignoring it, Andrew pulled out the assignment sheet their history teacher had passed out three days ago and studied it intently. The project required them to write their own research paper around a single theme and then give a group presentation on four “remarkable lives,” as Mrs. Dreyer had put it. Oneida’s group had at first been excited to pull musicians out of Dreyer’s old ball cap, but whether to write about four separate musicians or four members of a single band was proving difficult to decide.Oneida was torn between wanting the session to continue indefinitely—no matter how much she wanted it, Andrew Lu would most likely not stick around for cocoa and conversation without the excuse of a school project—and wanting Wendy and Dani out of her face as quickly as possible.
    “We have to write about the Beatles,” she finally said, adjusting her glasses.
    “No shit, Shirley,” said Dani.
    “Well, they’re the only group we’ve mentioned so far where there’s a lot of information about all four members,” Oneida said to Andrew. “So unless you want to get stuck writing about, you know, the
other
guys in U2, we have to write about the Beatles.” She tapped her pencil on her notebook.
    “That’s a great point,” Andrew said. Oneida felt her stomach tremble. She flushed and grinned. “I’ll take George,” he said.
    “John!” Oneida said, raising her hand.
    “Frick, I guess I’ll take Paul,” said Dani.