Inside by Alix Ohlin Read Free Book Online Page B

regularly, was shinier, lighter, and she sometimes wore it in two braids. She looked scrubbed and healthy, like a milkmaid, and this farmgirl impression was reinforced when Anne, backstage for an audition one day, stumbled on an unlocked wardrobe room and brought back some baggy overalls and plaid shirts that Hilary wore without complaining or even asking where they came from.
    Neither of them asked the other any questions. Anne assumed Hilary had run away from home, and in her experience, kids who did that usually had good reasons. And though Hilary had marched right into Anne’s apartment, she seemed to have a second sense about invading her privacy otherwise. When Anne came home from work she often went straight into the bedroom, and Hilary never bothered her. The few clothes Hilary now owned were kept in a milk crate beside the couch, with the blanket she slept under folded on top. Sometimes days would pass without them exchanging a single word.
    Anne stopped bringing men home, a little hiatus that was nice at first, giving her a feeling of astringent purity and asceticism. But she soon decided that if she could trust Hilary in the apartment during the day, then she could trust her there at night. So when she wantedto be with a man or felt it would be helpful to her career—a choice she made pragmatically, having never been foolish about sex—she went to his place instead. This eliminated married men from the realm of possibility, which was probably a good thing anyway. And she could control when the evening ended, just by leaving.
    One night, she walked home along St. Mark’s Place through the throngs of kids who flocked to the city to buy T-shirts and records and festoon themselves with nose rings and tattoos. Two teenagers, blond Rastas, with a mangy, half-starved golden retriever on a leash, sat on a Mexican blanket on the sidewalk like they were having a picnic. Anne made the mistake of looking the thin, dirty girl in the eye. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, her fingernails painted green, and though her hair was greasy, her teeth were pearly and perfect; Anne guessed she hadn’t been gone from home for long. Somewhere people were looking for her, wondering why she’d left and where she’d gone.
    “Hey,” the thin girl said, “can you give us some change? Please?”
    Anne shook her head.
    “Our dog’s really hungry.”
    Anne kept walking as the girl kept talking, her voice rising to an angry squawk.
    “What about a dollar?” she said. “What about fifty fucking cents?”
    Anne didn’t look back. You couldn’t help everybody.
    “I’m glad I don’t have a sister,” Hilary said.
    She and Anne were sitting on the couch on a Thursday night, eating spaghetti and watching reality TV. Their latest routine, whenever Anne wasn’t rehearsing, was to have dinner together in the living room. Hilary herself had provided the television, which she claimed to have found on the street. After a month in the apartment, she was cleaner, calmer, and fatter. Anne sometimes thought of her as
the cow
, but not pejoratively; it had to do with the girl’s quietness, her large brown eyes, her shifting, bovine way of settling herself on the couch.
    They were watching a show in which two sisters exchanged lives, each one now having to deal with the other’s annoying husband andchildren, thus learning to appreciate her own annoying husband and children.
    “I have a brother,” Hilary said. “He’s twelve. He likes video games. I send him postcards sometimes.”
    It might have been the longest Anne had ever heard her speak. “What’s his name?”
    “Joshua.”
    “Not Josh?”
    Hilary shook her head. “We always use his full name. My parents are real religious. I’m from the country—well, not the country, exactly, just a small town. We live right in town, but there’s not much town there. Joshua wants to leave too. I write him postcards, like I said, but I don’t send them from here. I give them to people in