Pain & Wastings

Pain & Wastings by Carrie Mac Read Free Book Online

Book: Pain & Wastings by Carrie Mac Read Free Book Online
Authors: Carrie Mac
Tags: JUV000000
to object—andhead down to the basement. The pool table is neatly racked up and waiting for a new game. Kelly always leaves it like that when she finishes playing.
    I put the laundry in and go back up to find something to eat. Kelly is sitting at the kitchen table, doing the crossword that comes in the paper. She looks up. “Thought you might want some company.”
    I am suddenly acutely aware of the seven chest hairs I was so proud of until this very moment. I shuffle into a chair, wishing I’d put on a T-shirt.
    â€œI have a plan.” Kelly sets aside the paper and lays her hands on the table. “We can go hang out downtown until you have to be at the station. I can get us into the movie theater for free.”
    â€œSo long as it doesn’t involve either of us giving anyone a blow job, I’m in.” And then I realize what I’ve just said, and that if it involved her giving
me
a blow job, I wouldn’t mind at all. Of course, my cheeks go very, very red. I leap up from the table and fling open the fridge and stick my head in there, pretending to look for something to eat until it passes.
    â€œNo.” Kelly is suddenly beside me at the fridge. She puts a hand on my bare back. I swear that single touch is sending hot flashes to every available synapse, and it takes everything I’ve got not to shove her to the floor and get on with what I was dreaming about half the night. “No blow jobs. What’re you looking for?”
    â€œSomething for breakfast.”
    â€œNever mind Marshall’s whole wheat toast and natural peanut butter.” She pats my back and then straightens. “I’ll take you out for breakfast.”
    I am all too eager to get out of the house and into the safety of the day. We get on the bus and take two seats side by side, which I can honestly say I haven’t done since I was a kid and my mom made me sit beside her. We don’t talk much on the bus. We’ve never hung out outside of Harbor House, so maybe she’s as weirded out about it as I am. In the heart of the Downtown Eastside, with the downtown core and its high-rise gloss and efficient bustle only ten blocks away, she pulls the cord for the bus to stop.
    â€œWhat’s here?” I say with venom.
    She grabs my hand and pulls me out of the seat. “Only the best breakfast in the city.”
    We cross the street against traffic in the middle of the block, like everyone else does down here, and walk another half a block until we’re standing in front of the Ovaltine Café. I’m not sure what we’re doing is a date or just two wards of the state killing time, but because it might be a date, I don’t want to be a freak and tell her I don’t go to the Ovaltine. Not anymore. In fact, I haven’t set foot in it since that day ten years ago.

Chapter Thirteen
    â€œWhere your mom?” the grandmotherly Chinese lady who runs the Ovaltine asks me. She had just rushed out onto the street and stopped me, clamping her hand on my bare shoulder. “Why you alone? Where Ella?” I’m in my pajamas... the ones with the fire trucks and Dalmatian dogs. This lady always scares me. She’s nice to me, always telling me to call her Popo, but she has long red nails and arching penciled eyebrows and a wart that makes her look like a witch. My mom’s name is not Ella. She only calls herself that onthe street, after Ella Fitzgerald. “Fitzgerald was going to be your middle name,” she sometimes tells me when we’re listening to her singing. “Or Ella, if you were a girl.” Sometimes the songs are cheerful, but sometimes they are sad. The Chinese lady shakes my shoulder. “You too young to be out by yourself. You come in. I give you hot chocolate, okay?”
    â€œEthan?” Kelly is pumping my hand like we’re a couple of businessmen meeting for the first time. “Hey!”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYou totally

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