Nothing Real Volume 1 by Claire Needell Read Free Book Online

week before finals, when she gets the email. She isn’t sure how Val found her, at first, but then it occurs to her that she is not exactly living incognito, just like a normal college freshman a continent away.
    At lunch, she shows the email to her best friend, Alex. Alex is from Reno, which she pronounces Weno : baby talk, whore talk, a joke Nancy doesn’t get. Alex has a retro style, wears white patent-leather loafers, lime-green pants. She is prematurely gray, but people think she dyes her hair that color. It isn’t a color, she tells them when they ask, and this makes Nancy laugh, reminds her of things back east, things Alex can’t know about coming from Reno, like the steel frame of the bridge, like the creek that ran orange with iron sediment in the back of her house. Things were fucked up out west in a completely different way, made obscure by enormity, by beauty.
    â€œThis is a diseased person,” Alex says when Nancy tells her about Val’s letter, but Nancy knows these are her own words coming back to her.
    â€œHe says he’s going to Columbia, some kind of degree program for older students, living in New York.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œWhat do you mean what else?”
    â€œWhy get in touch with you?”
    â€œHe says I am the star on which he is pinning all his hopes.”
    â€œOh my God, where?”
    Nancy looks at Alex quizzically. “Beginning or end,” Alex wants to know. It matters whether hope is something he starts with or finishes with, though Nancy can’t understand why.
    She doesn’t tell Alex that she is saving the email, the phone number included, for when she goes home over break. She knows what she had with Val wasn’t real, but now she knows nothing else is either. Not Boulder. Not the shroudless sky, nor the frat boys in their Ray-Bans. Not the neopunks, the hipsters, or the Rastas, and certainly not the hippies. All of them in a movie, or a play, or a song someone once heard and thought to copy into endless strands of variation, all replication of endless replication. The town shouldn’t exist, is a continuation of either city or mountain, rock or pavement.
    The corner of Amsterdam and 106th has nothing on it. A Laundromat and an unstocked bodega, nothing to keep the punk kids from congregating. He has to toss the keys out a third-floor window—either that or run down all those steps—to let her in. She catches the keys, and a guy from the corner with a dark hoodie under a red parka gives her an appraising stare, then a nod. As if she’s cool, though she knows she’s not. She opens the outer door with difficulty. There is a hole in the glass and she doesn’t like to think what made it. Val has a roommate, a sign of normalcy. He’s like her, a student, in student housing. Theroommate is a neat freak, which makes Nancy laugh, to think that Val has to bend to the roommate’s need for a clean, wiped-out sink and a bath mat free of stink.
    Val looks younger. His hair is close cropped, and he is thin again—not thin like Nancy, whose elbows poke through the worn wool of her sweater, but in shape, like a guy who goes to the gym. He is wearing a gray T-shirt with the indistinct name of a bar on it, so that seems like Val at least. She is nervous, and keeps talking even though he is silent, staring at her, and his eyes have a shielding darkness to them. She tells him how she dislikes Boulder, but tries to make it funny, not depressing, not a crisis of some kind. She says there’s too much light, the air is too dry, her hair practically stands on end from static. She tells him how confusingly polite Coloradans are, how it’s hard to tell when someone is giving you shit, because they almost never do. Everyone just says what’s on their mind, except for maybe the frat boys, but who cares about them.
    She feels light-headed, thirsty. She wants to touch him, but it’s not affection. It’s