Beautiful Boys by Francesca Lia Block Read Free Book Online Page A

feel better. I feel almost free.
    “Miss Thing! Now you can forget Homes, girlfriend,” one of the girls says, giving me my camera. “He’ll come back on his own. Just get yourself some tunes and a piece of chalk.”
    I put my skates back on. “I’ll send you the pictures.”
    One of the girls writes her address on the back of my hand.
    And I skate away, Charlie next to me, leaving them hip-hopscotching like maybe the next funky Josephines.
     
    By the time we get downtown it’s dusk.
    “I want to go look in the trees,” I say.
    “We’ll look tomorrow,” says Charlie. “It’s too dark now. Are you hungry?”
    “Charlie, I ate all that food before.”
    “Witch Baby, that was hours and hours ago and you danced a long time. This is the best market in town.”
    “Were you always so into food?”
    He’s quiet for a minute doing dips and circles in the air like a firefly. “Actually no. But if I were to do life again I’d probably enjoy everything a lot more. For instance, I never used to dance.”
    I could have guessed that. “Weetzie said you were kind of a grumpster.”
    “Grumpster? Maybe. You learn things.”
    The little market has piles of fruit out in front lit up so they almost don’t look real. Inside, the market’s warm and bright and jammed with single people buying their dinners. There’s a wild salad bar with Christmas lights all around and flowers frozen in the ice between the food. Charlie is flickering from the rainbow pastas to the stuffed grape leaves, from the egg rolls to the greens, between the beans, seeds, nuts, cheese, dried figs and dates and pineapple, muffins, corn bread, carrot cake, pastelpuddings, fruit, cookies. He wants me to get everything but I just take a pink sushi roll and a fortune cookie.
    In the window of the store next door there are things like huge ostrich eggs and snakeskins and skulls. I press my face up to the glass to look at a human skull, trying to imagine what my own skull looks like inside my head and what Angel Juan’s looks like and if our bones look the same.
    “Thoughts like that will mess you up,” Charlie says in my ear. I keep forgetting about this mind-reading thing.
    We cross the street to get to the subway. But I see a boutique—all chrome with high windows—and I want to stop. Boy and girl mannequins in black leather are kneeling around a man mannequin. He’s wearing a white coat with the collar turned up and white gloves. He has white hair and pale no-color glass eyes and girl’s lips.
    I feel so cold. I feel like one of those flowers in the salad bar frozen in ice. But I don’t want to move away from the window.
    “Witch Baby,” Charlie calls. “Come on.” Hisvoice sounds nerve urgent. Maybe that mannequin freaks him out too.
    “You have to be careful,” he says. “There’s some nastiness around.”
    We go down into the subway where the noise and the dark are better than that plastic face.
     
    “How does it taste?”
    “Good.”
    “I mean really how does it taste?”
    I am eating my pink sushi roll on the carpet at Charlie’s place by the light of the globe lamp. I sigh. I wish he’d just let me alone to think about Angel Juan’s bone structure.
    “Seaweed, sesame, spinach, carrot, radish sprouts.”
    “Witch Baby, remember I’ll never get to eat another thing.”
    “Okay okay.” I close my eyes to get the tastes better. “The avocado’s silky and the rice is sweetish—that might be pink sugar or something. The ginger’s got like a tang. The horseradish burns right through my nostrils to my brain.”
    “Thank you,” he says. He sighs like he’s just eaten a big meal.
    Later he goes, “What about dessert?”
    I crackle open my fortune cookie and slip out the strip of paper from the tight glazed folds.
    Make your own wishes come true.
    Oh, really helpful. I crunch the cookie in my mouth and spread out the fortune so Charlie can read it. I sit cross-legged on the carpet.
    “Do you believe in genies?” Charlie