When Watched Read Online Free PDF Page B

one.
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    Afterward the sky outside was a gray peach. They rode the train to Lucy’s apartment with amazed expressions. Once home, Lucy lit the candles by her bed. It was as if someone had died. Kit searched her face for disgust, but there was only hurt. Lucy sat on the floor beside Curtis, mechanically stroking his muscles.
    They ordered Chinese food and stood in the kitchen, eating lo mein from take-out containers. Lucy’s glazed look of pain dissipated. She hummed and Kit hated her a little bit. For pretending to be unmarked by the last few hours. And by every other terrible hour of her life.
    Curtis hopped madly at their ankles. His cries were comically bad, as if a blade were being driven into his body.
    â€œIs he okay?” Kit asked.
    â€œHe’s fine,” Lucy said. “Those are the screams of a manipulator.” She scraped brown slop from a can into a little blue bowl and set it down on the floor. Curtis trotted over with a look of slack-jaw joy. He bent down to eat.
    â€œHe appears well behaved when he’s eating,” Kit said.
    â€œEveryone does,” Lucy said.
    Kit set her lo mein by the sink. “Am I your only friend?” she asked. “I don’t mean that in a bitchy way. I don’t have any others.”
    Lucy stared at her. “In a way you are. I used to have a lot of friends.”
    Kit had never had a lot of friends. But she’d had a few thatshe didn’t have now.
Becoming a whore is like getting very sick,
she thought.
You don’t want people and they don’t want you.
Only she did want people. A little.
    â€œNed’s daughter is dying of cancer,” Kit blurted.
    â€œHe told you that today?”
    â€œNo. Before. I should have told you. I just didn’t want you to feel sorry for him.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œI don’t feel anything for these people,” Lucy said dryly.
    Kit reached into her bag and felt around. She wondered what Lucy
did
feel. Outside an ambulance wailed by, its twirling red lights passing over the ceiling. She lit a joint and stood with it burning between her fingers. “I don’t know why I get high,” she said. “My mind is so inherently trippy.”
    â€œMaybe you should quit.”
    â€œMaybe.” Kit let herself stare at Lucy. It was a quiet, burning stare. Her eyes blazed, pouring with feeling. Lucy continued to eat, as if she did not notice. But she did.

The Underside of Charm
    Ava sat in bed with Gretchen, a woman she’d met the day before in an AA meeting. Gretchen had been sober for eight years and it was her bed, her story.
    â€œThe bigger fear was that I wouldn’t die,” she said with a glazed look, closely monitoring Ava’s responses. “It was sick, to manage and control this thing—drinking—like it was God. To prove that I was God over it.” Gretchen ran one hand over her tawny crew cut and sighed. It was a story she had told many times, a story she liked to tell. There was the version she told in AA meetings and the version she told to lovers, but both framed her as a macho street urchin, staggering through life swigging from a flask and having epiphanies. She had an aura of smugness, even as she strode across the room to open a window, she bore the expression of someone receiving a compliment and finding it to be absolutely true. Her face was broad and German, olive toned with a spattering of pale freckles. One of her eyes twitched occasionally, a consequence of abusing speed.
    It had been three months since Ava’s last drink, a vulnerabletime. Many warned against dating but she found herself completely pulled to Gretchen: her ease, her obscene self-confidence.
    â€œDo you believe in God?” Ava asked.
    â€œI do.”
    â€œAnd you feel really sure?”
    Gretchen paused, tipping her head to one side. “There will always be periods of unknowing.