You Remind Me of Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

was looking at him expectantly, and so he nodded.
Yes, I’m hungry.
A few strands of hair adhered to the sticky gloss on her lip, and she used the edge of her pinkie fingernail to dislodge them.
    “I’ll bet I look like shit,” she said, in a musing, almost contented voice, and Troy wasn’t sure whether she was addressing herself or him. He shifted as she lit a cigarette. She glanced him over lightly, then turned away to blow a line of smoke into the air above their heads.
    “Oh, come on, Troy,” she said after a moment. “You should know this. When the girl says, ‘I look like shit,’ the boy is supposed to say, ‘No, you look great!’ That’s the way it works.”
    “Oh,” he said, and fingered his spoon. The smeared makeup made her eyes inscrutable, and he couldn’t gauge her expression. “You look great,” he said softly.
    “You lie,” she said. She smiled secretively, then let forth another stream of smoke, her lips puckered like a child blowing soap bubbles. “You’ve got to be a better liar if you’re ever going to get a girl to kiss you.”
    “Yeah, right,” he said, and frowned. This was a game that people sometimes liked to play with children—“How many girlfriends do you have?” they would ask, or “I’ll bet those little girls chase you all around the playground!”—and he didn’t have much patience with this kind of teasing. He turned his attention to his cereal, sinking his spoon into the soup of milk and floating apple-flavored O’s intently, ignoring her, expecting her to lose interest and move on to another room.
    Around them, the trailer was silent. He could hear the hum of the fish tank’s bubbler, the insistent awakening chirp of sparrows nested in the eaves and awnings of the trailers, or in the trailer court’s single cottonwood tree. He made a slurping sound when he brought his spoon to his lips, just to annoy the quiet, and noticed that Chrissy was still observing him expectantly.
    “Can I have a bite of your cereal?” she said at last.
    He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, but when he started to push the bowl toward her, she did something unnerving. She pushed her hair behind her ears and leaned forward, closing her eyes lightly and opening her mouth. She wanted him to feed her.
    It was weird, he thought, and he hesitated. But she sat there with her mouth open, and after a moment he held his spoon out. He watched as she slowly closed her lips over it. Her eyes opened as she swallowed.
    “Mmmm,” she said. “That tastes good. Thanks.”
    “Uh-huh,” he said. He set the spoon back on the counter, not sure what to do with it now that it had been inside her mouth. He had seen the inside of her lips, which were slick and pink and glistening. And her tongue. He wasn’t sure what to think about it.
    But she didn’t act as if anything unusual had happened. He watched as she lifted her cigarette, blowing on the tip of it so that the ember glowed orange through the gray crust of ash. Then she stubbed it out. She smiled.
    “Can I ask you a question?” she said. He just shrugged. Her attention was not particularly welcome, but it was also hypnotic in a way he didn’t quite understand.
    “I heard from Bruce that you’re adopted,” she said. “Are you?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “So?”
    “So nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I was adopted, too, so I thought that was interesting. I mean, you don’t meet many other people who are adopted, do you?”
    “I guess not.”
    “You guess not,” she repeated. She regarded him steadily for a moment, her expression hooded. Then she smiled. “You’re funny,” she said. Then: “So what do you think about it? About being adopted?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. The truth was, he
didn’t
think about it very much, and certainly never talked about it. He’d always regarded this fact about himself as both unimportant and private, like people’s belly buttons. He was adopted.
We adopted each other,
his mother had