Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida Read Free Book Online Page A

floor of the merry-go-round. Christian grabbed my left hand and put it on his crotch. He’d unzipped his pants. We were slowing down now, slow slow slow. I tried to pull my hand off, but he held it there, on him. I used the fingers of my free hand to poke him in the eye, the way my mother had taught me. Then I stuck my foot out and stopped the spinning; I pushed him off me and jumped.
    As I ran through the park, I heard Christian calling after me. “Hey, crazy girl. You’re fucking insane.” I almost fell into the pond. Sleeping ducks awakened and scattered—the sound of a hundred decks of cards shuffled at once.
    The next day, I walked by the psychic’s storefront window,

    with my seductive bedroom eyes. I hoped she would see me and know she’d gotten me wrong. Try to recognize me now .

16.
    I went looking for my mother once, the summer before my senior year of high school. I convinced Virginia to drive to Texas with me.
    “Texas?” she said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s where my mom lives now.”
    Virginia looked at me, head tilted. “Okay,” she said, and picked something from between her small teeth.
    I had convinced myself that my mother had gone to join Mr. Wells. I had kept the envelope in which the DON ’ T MESS WITH TEXAS shirt had been sent. The return address was in San Antonio.
    Virginia and I saved up from our summer jobs, and at the end of August, we packed her brother’s Camaro. We brought a tent, sleeping bags, a cooler, old yearbooks, and a road map I’d gotten from AAA. Our route was highlighted in orange.
    Every time we crossed a state border, we gave each other a compliment. “I like that you’re a loyal friend, a constant friend,” I told Virginia when we entered Oklahoma.
    “I like that you think the best of me,” she said in return.
    When we got to San Antonio, the sky was mustard-colored and heavy with impending rain. We bought baseball hats and big, dark sunglasses and parked across the street from the address I had for Mr. Wells. We sat there for two days, sipping Diet Cokes

    and watching. Virginia had her disposable camera ready, though I wasn’t sure what she was going to document. If we saw my mother entering or leaving the house, I didn’t need it on film.
    On the third day, Virginia suggested we knock on the door. “We don’t have all the time in the world,” she said. “School starts next week.”
    We rang the doorbell. We heard furniture shifting inside. “Jesus,” I said. “He’s home.”
    The door opened. “Can I help you?” said a young man. “Do you live here?” Virginia asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Alone?”
    He nodded. He had curly black hair and dry lips, and he was all the better-looking for not being Mr. Wells.
    “Do you know a Mr. Wells?” I said. “Yeah, he’s my landlord.”
    He asked us to excuse him—he had the flu. He’d been in bed for days. How sad, I thought, no one came to take care of you. We were watching, and no one came.
    He gave us Tim Wells’s address, and that evening, we went to his house, in a different, less appealing part of town. Virginia rang the doorbell while I stood at the bottom of the steps. A redheaded woman answered the door, said she was Mr. Wells’s wife. He was at a meeting but would be home at nine. “Can I help you girls?” she asked. She was the kind of woman who asked questions with her hands on her hips.
    “That’s okay,” Virginia said.

    We waited on the neighbors’ steps. By ten, he still hadn’t shown up. “Maybe his wife told him to come in the back door,” Virginia offered. “What kind of meeting would he be at this late?”
    “He used to drink,” I said.� “Oh, right.”�
    At ten thirty, we saw Mr. Wells get out of a dented Datsun. � His hair was thinner now; he wore a striped jacket over a striped shirt. I was outraged he had made us wait so long. I intercepted him before he made it to the stairs of his house.
    “Where were you?” I said. I felt emboldened by the days of