Lilac Mines by Cheryl Klein Read Free Book Online Page B

says, “You healing okay?”
    Felix swallows. “I’m still kind of sore. Really sore, actually. And I think this thing on my lip is going to leave a scar, but, yeah, I’m okay.”
    As soon as she says it, though, her eyes fill up with tears. Before she can put her crumpled napkin to her face, they spill over, and she’s making gulping sounds that echo throughout the store. Is it her imagination, or does the waitress roll her eyes?
    â€œIt’s freaking me out,” she admits between sobs. She glances at the waitress and lowers her voice. “I thought those times were over. I mean, maybe not in, like, Wyoming, but at least in West Hollywood. Every place I go in L.A. reminds me of my ex-girlfriend, and now, to top things off, I’m looking over my shoulder all the time for guys with baseball bats.”
    â€œThey had bats?” Anna Lisa raises an eyebrow.
    â€œNo, but….” She’s avoided talking about any of it with her roommates and coworkers, but with Anna Lisa, it all comes rushing out. She wants her aunt to see the attack as a badge of courage. She wants to fall into her arms and be saved. “I was trying to be useful! I was suggesting some good clubs to go to, and then they just turned on me.”
    â€œYeah, well, people do rotten things,” Anna Lisa mutters uncomfortably. She squints at something outside of the window. “Don’t try to be useful, that’s my advice.”
    Felix nods. She feels like she’s just been kneed in the stomach again. When Felix catches her breath after an interminable awkward silence, she throws out a new topic. “When was the last time you were in L.A.? I must have been six or seven.”
    â€œYou were pretty little. Leigan wasn’t even born yet, and Michelle was potty training, I remember.” Felix’s sisters, now a freshman at Caltech and a hostess at a pseudo-French restaurant, respectively. “Your poor mother was so frazzled. You were in your button stage.” Anna Lisa wipes mustard from her hands with a thin paper napkin.
    â€œMy button stage?” Felix rubs her eyes.
    â€œMm-hmm. You would only wear clothes with buttons. The bigger and more colorful, the better. You had a little shirt with plastic, whale-shaped buttons that you wanted to wear every single day. And Suzy just about tore her hair out trying to get you to wear elastic-waistband pants.”
    â€œReally? I don’t remember that at all. Buttons?”
    â€œNumber-shaped buttons, fake pearl buttons, you name it. You were an obsessive kid, that’s what your mom always said. When you were in fifth grade or so, she wrote me about how you were obsessed with the Titanic. Every report you did for school had to be about the Titanic. You wanted to change your name to Molly Brown.”
    Slowly, it comes back to Felix. She used to lie awake thinking about how terrible and romantic it would be to lie at the bottom of the sea. She didn’t know that her mother thought she was “obsessive,” though. But now that she thinks about it, there were other phases. When she was in seventh grade, girls started greeting their friends in the hallway with dramatic hugs instead of shy smiles. Felix would keep a tally—small and coded in the back of her notebook—of how many hugs she could accumulate from popular girls in a given day. Her record was 13. In college, long before it dawned on her that she might be a dyke, she became obsessed with gay male culture: dance music, drag queen fashions, anything ironic. It seemed a tad pathological in retrospect. Felix is embarrassed to discover that these passionately adhered-to trends were, apparently, a lifelong pattern. “Well,” she says breezily, “I’m just Felix now. Not Molly Brown.”
    â€œAnd I’m just Anna Lisa.” She peers into Felix’s half-empty bowl. “Are you all finished?”
    Why is she in such a hurry to leave? Trying