Inside by Alix Ohlin Read Free Book Online Page A

whatever you want, not that you’ll find much food. I really don’t have any stuff for you to steal, but you still better not take anything. If I find anything gone when I come back, I’ll call the cops.”
    “I don’t steal,” Hilary said.
    “Sure you don’t. I’ll be back at five.”
    When she left the apartment, she forgot about the girl completely—her name, her predicament, even her shit in the lobby. It wasn’t that she was naive or trusting; only that nothing was as real to her as herself.
    After the meeting with the costume designer was rehearsal, and after that she had a drink with a guy who was putting together a production of
Equus
with a female cast, to be staged in a parking garage bythe Manhattan Bridge. She walked home through Chinatown. On the steps of a church a man was selling shoes he’d collected from who knows where, lined up in obedient pairs as if they belonged to some invisible congregation. She picked out a pair of black pointy-toed heels with rhinestone clips. They smelled faintly of sweat and smoke or fire and the leather was creased, but they fit perfectly. As a child she had played dress-up in her mother’s clothes, dreaming of the day when she’d be a beautiful, grown-up lady, and the sensation of wearing someone else’s castoffs reminded her of this childhood pleasure. She handed the man a five, and he said, “God bless you, sweet thing.”
    It was only as she pulled open the outer door that she remembered Hilary. She’d left a stranger alone in her apartment all day. She had to be insane.
    But the apartment was quiet. Hilary was curled up on the couch beneath a blanket, her stocky body surprisingly compact, and seeing her asleep somehow changed everything. Anne had been planning to charge in and kick her out, but instead found herself slipping off her boots and setting her bag down quietly, so as not to disturb.
    Then she thought, What the hell am I doing?
    She turned on the lights and served herself a plate of noodles she’d picked up at Panda Kitchen, eating at the counter. When Hilary stirred, moving tectonically to an upright position, Anne wondered if she was on drugs.
    “Could I have some?” Hilary said.
    Anne didn’t eat much; she always had leftovers. “All right.”
    Seeming to sense her mood, Hilary took some lo mein and carried her plate back to the couch. She was like an animal, observing unspoken, intuitive protocols of distance.
    Anne, suddenly exhausted, put her plate in the sink and went into the bedroom, where the sheets had been changed. In the bathroom, the toothpaste blobs were gone from the sink, the bathtub was unstreaked, and everything smelled faintly of bleach. She crawled into bed and lay there listening for disruptive sounds—Hilary tossing or snoring or even breathing too loudly. Outside she heard traffic, horns, voices; but inside, nothing at all.
    She didn’t kick her out the next day, or the day after that, andgradually they became strange, unlikely roommates. The shelter was never discussed. Hilary cleaned and sometimes cooked. She fixed the bedroom window that had gotten stuck, did the laundry, even swept the stairwells and changed the lightbulbs on the landings. Mrs. Bondarchuk, who didn’t realize where Hilary had come from, decided she was Anne’s cousin, and they didn’t correct her. The other old ladies in the building began saying hello to her and were friendlier to Anne as well, as if they had found her somehow alarming when she was on her own.
    Anne went to rehearsals, to work, and out for drinks, never once asking Hilary what she did during the day besides housework. After a while, she gave Hilary a set of keys and started leaving out some cash, twenty bucks at a time, for groceries. Now when she came home there was milk and bread and fruit. She didn’t know what else Hilary ate, but the girl had already grown even stockier; she was definitely getting enough food somewhere. Her complexion had cleared up; her hair, shampooed