All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison Read Free Book Online

the cranes are all gone.”
    In time, our language evolved into a written form, and the vowels were symbolized by pictures of cumulous clouds, and planets with glowing rings like Venus, and spotted mushrooms, and fi elds of rippling wheat, and cows jumping over moons. There existed no word in our language for suffering, or cancer, and there was no word to symbolize the number one, although there existed a word for zero and a word for two, in fact there were a 118 words for two. And there was no word for apart, but there was a word for together, and when you saw it written down it was the most beautiful word you ever saw, and to hear it aloud was to hear a chorus of angels singing. And it didn’t matter that I was motherless and forsaken and wore oversized glasses, or that nuclear holocaust seemed imminent. None of that mattered so long as there was Lulu to keep me warm through the nuclear winter.
    “Even though I’m not going to get married until I’m at least thirty-two,” she told me in the pampas grass, “that doesn’t mean I’m not ever going to get married, you know. And it doesn’t mean you can’t always be my boyfriend until then, as long as you don’t mind traveling around the world at least three times. My mom says that’s the test. Traveling around the world with someone. She says that you can always see a person’s true colors that way. But I doubt it would make any difference for us. Besides, we’ve already been to Australia, and that’s halfway around the world. It’s just a matter of whether you want to travel around the world three times. If you don’t, that’s okay.”
    “Don’t worry, I do. At least three times.”
    “That’s good. I fi gured you would. I think it would be better that way, with both of us. That way we’ll always have four eyes.”
    “Six,” I reminded her, tilting my glasses.
    And the truth is, I doubt whether I would ever have seen much of anything if it weren’t for Lulu, because, no matter how corny it sounds, she really taught me how to see. She taught me not to look past things, not to take them for granted. She taught me to look at things until I saw them differently.
    “Things are changing all the time,” she told me. “If you look hard enough, you can see it happening.”
     

     

 

     
     

    The Hot Dog of Despair
     
     
    Lulu went to cheerleading camp in Vermont the summer after sophomore year, which was perhaps the most un-Lulu thing she ever did, and, I suppose, in that respect, the most quintessentially Lulu thing she ever did. She was going to stay with her grandparents in Burling-ton for the better part of the summer.
    “It’s not like I’m never coming back,” she told me in her bedroom the afternoon she found out. “It’s just summer.”
    “I know. But what am I supposed to do? It’s not fair.” I was alluding to the fact that while Willow was planning to fl y out and join her for a month, I was being forced to stay behind without any good reason.
    “Sit down,” she said.
    “Look at me.”
    I looked at her.
    “Quit moping and think of the adventures we’ll have to talk about later.”
    “I don’t want to have my own adventures.”
    “Then we can talk about mine.”
    “But I want to be there for them.”
    She smiled, a little sadly, I thought. She brushed my greasy bangs off my forehead and gazed into my Martian eyes. “Don’t worry, you will be.”
    I was sentenced to six interminable weeks at the gym that summer watching Big Bill take yet another run at the Olympia. The fallout from the ’80 contest had soured me forever to the charms of bodybuilding. Even if the summer of ’84 had promised some form of rekindled intimacy with my father, I probably wouldn’t have wanted it. I argued that at fi fteen I was old enough to stay at home alone, but he made me go to the gym anyway.
    A lot of the old faces had disappeared from Gold’s. Waller was gone. Corney and Padilla were gone. Platz was still holding on, but something was