We Are Pirates: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t get herself to stop chewing the rest. It was delicious. She wanted it. She deserved it, for having to get up and for her parents’ thinking she stole a dirty magazine. She clicked her father’s car unlocked and got in. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember the keys. It was a favor she did for him, because he never remembered them. She did people favors. Where were hers? Her mother had said last night, dishing out the punishment, that Gwen was ungrateful. It was not ungratitude. She sat and waited for her ride to something else she did not want to do, bobbing her finger over and over on the thing that opened the door to the condo parking garage, three floors up, like she was poking a bruise to see if it still hurt. Down here the signal was too far away to work. It was a useless device, with a useless button. What did this longing matter, or the sky far, far above this dark place underground? What did it matter where she wanted to go? Nothing would change, and in twenty minutes she would be changing and getting stared at in the locker room, for her burn.
    The burn had been there forever, like an island on Gwen’s leg, with the odd torn boundaries of sea-smacked land. It sat there for years, familiar on the horizon to anyone who surveyed the region. But then like America it was discovered, under the flag of Naomi Wise.
    “What is that?” she said, pointing her finger as close to Gwen as she could without touching her. Gwen was taking her bra off under her shirt.
    “What’s what?”
    “On your leg.”
    “I told you about it.”
    “I never noticed it before.”
    This was unlikely. Naomi Wise noticed everything. She and Gwen had become friends, if they were still friends, when Naomi had leaned forward one day and murmured about Stacey Gleason: “That’s the same outfit she wore to the party Friday.” Gwen had not been invited to the party Friday, but she grinned anyway as Stacey stood oblivious with her face in the wind. Only the most popular had been invited. Naomi had risen to fame by inventing the fad of tying your hair up with a bikini top. At this point in her life Gwen knew that was idiotic and important. She could not afford to lose Naomi and had tagged along at a studied, careful pace since then. Gwen was not the most popular. She was somewhere between twenty-ninth and thirty-fifth, in her estimation, and in Naomi’s. Naomi was ninth.
    “I was four,” Gwen said patiently, “and I reached up for a doughnut and spilled a carafe of coffee. It was boiling hot. It was a second- and third-degree burn. I ruined my grandmother’s birthday, because we all had to leave the hotel and wait in the emergency room.”
    “Now I remember,” Naomi said, with a nod Gwen didn’t like. Naomi was her best friend. She was very excited a lot. She watched everything. She scouted, and Gwen’s role was to be there, in the right place at school or on the other end of the phone, when Naomi returned with the little secret animals she had caught, and to tie them up in the shed, or split them open so Naomi could mess around with their insides. It was often mean, but it was always fun, and there was so little fun when you couldn’t take the bus by yourself. Lately Naomi’s breathless excitement had become a little wary, and their phone calls were curdled ever so slightly around the edges of the sentences. Gwen could see the way this would go but had no maneuvering skills to make it go any other way. She had no other friends at school, really. It was complicated. Gwen watched Naomi now, staring at the burn again, and knew she would go down in this ship.
    “Can’t doctors fix something like that?”
    “Maybe when I’m older,” Gwen said, and then thought of something to say. “I’m in trouble. Grounded.”
    Naomi nodded like this, too, was something she remembered. “Why?”
    Gwen felt she could not close her eyes without seeing Schoolgirls. “My mom’s mad at me. And my dad, he took my mom’s side. As usual