This New and Poisonous Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

top that revealed arms and legs as smooth as stone. Of course, David stood to follow her, and we don’t know which of us dropped the white candy at his feet. All those brittle pieces, like so many broken teeth. It was awful to watch such a sure young sportsman fall. By the time David had righted himself, his sister had already opened the black door beneath the screen and stepped inside, closing it softly behind. David tried the knob. “Kitty,” he whispered, “Come on, Kit. This isn’t funny.” When she didn’t respond, he turned to look at us, searching our faces for the possibility of help. On the screen, a man with a sweat-beaded brow held the diamond as big as his fist, unaware that he was about to be struck by a poison dart.
    In the weeks before her disappearance, the Orpheum had started to become for Kitty what it was for all of us—a kind of gentle mystery, easing us along, never providing enough clues to disturb us from our sleep. She was seventeen after all, old enough to begin her awakening, and David was a sturdy vessel for her confidences. “The air inside that place goes all the way through me, but it doesn’t feel cold,” she told him, as they sat on the bench at Ray’s Creamery, both eating piles of vanilla ice cream with plastic spoons. The Orpheum loomed across the street, an arabesque palace, the evening sun turning its gold leaf a livid shade of red.
    David swatted a fly away from his sunburned leg. “It’s called air-conditioning, Kit. What they won’t think of next, right?”
    “Have you been listening to me at all?”
    “Sure,” he said.

    “Then don’t make stupid comments, David. I’m talking about atmosphere. That place has started to make me feel like it’s filling me with air from another planet. Like I’m a balloon, full of some other world. Maybe you have to be older to understand.”
    “A balloon, really? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard you say. Maybe you just have to turn your brain back on and realize it’s just a plain old movie theater.”
    “It’s not,” Kitty replied. “At least not to me anymore.”
    He turned his dusty baseball cap backward, considering the shade of his sister’s eyes that balanced somewhere between blue and green. “Okay, balloon-girl” he said. “I give up. What is it?”
    Across the street, the gaudy plastic vines wound around the theater’s marble pillars. “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think all the movies they’ve shown there over the years have given it ideas.”
    David gave her a half-smile. “So what kind of ideas does a movie theater have?”
    “It thinks that it could do better,” Kitty said quietly. “All those stories are so ordinary. It wants to show us something truly marvelous.”
    “Come on,” he said, though his tone betrayed unease. The Orpheum was better off left to silence. “I think town council should tear that shack down and give us stadium seats and cup holders.”
    “I’d chain myself to the doors,” Kitty said. “People who do stupid things like that don’t understand history.”
    He squinted at a particularly malicious-looking stone monkey that peered from one corner of the Orpheum’s jade roof. “The nut that sells the tickets—old white braids—would beat you to it,” he said. “She’d shoot Mike and Ike’s out of
every hole in her body to fend off the bulldozers.”
    “Don’t be disgusting, David,” Kitty said. “May Avalon is just—lonely.”
    “Have you heard some of that weird music she plays on her record player?” he asked. “I mean, who even has a record player anymore?”
    She scraped her spoon against the bottom of her ice cream bowl. “The thing about old music is that none of it sounds the way it’s supposed to anymore because we just don’t have the right ears to hear it.”
    After pretending to consider this, David licked his finger and stuck it deep in Kitty’s ear. She screamed and leapt from the bench. “There you go, Kit,” he