She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan Read Free Book Online Page A

said. “Here, I’ll do it.”
    A moment later she was getting out bottles of rum and gin and pouring them into the blender. She opened the refrigerator, got out some strawberries and a banana. She got ice out of the freezer. It didn’t take her long to set things in motion.
    While her drink was grinding away in the blender, Onion got out a package of Newports, stuck one on her lip Jerry Lewis style, and lit it. She did a French inhale. She held the pack toward me and said, “Smoke?”
    I took a cigarette from her. After I got it lit she blew smoke in my face, then laughed.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    â€œWell, what do you think, Boylan, you want to do it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t believe she’d just come out and say it. I figured she was talking about something else.
    Onion leaned toward me, clamped her mouth down on mine, and injected her tongue into my throat. She sucked on me like a vacuum cleaner. With one hand she reached out and grabbed one of mine and placed it on her breast. It was soft.
    â€œWell, all right,” Onion said, leaning back. She took another drag off her cigarette.
“Now
do you want to do it?”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Okay.”
    She lifted the pitcher off the blender and poured it into one of my mother’s Waterford tumblers. “Cool,” she said. “Then let’s go. Lead on.”
    We clomped up the back stairs. As we ascended she said, “I heard you’re a nice guy, Boylan.”
    â€œI guess,” I said.
    â€œNice but shy.” She paused, out of breath, dizzy. “Man, you got a lot of stairs in this house.”
    I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just nodded and blew smoke that I had not inhaled toward her. She smiled at something that seemed to be known only to herself.
    We reached the top of the stairs and passed the door of the room that had the fingernail scratches on the other side. Earlier in the evening I’d sat on a chair in that room, wearing a bra and reading
Lord
of the Rings.
    â€œYeah, I’m shy, I guess,” I said finally.
    As we walked down the second-floor hallway, she slowed again. Onion was scraping against one wall.
    â€œYou okay?” I said.
    â€œSure I’m okay,” she said. “Long day, that’s all. You’re my last stop.” She drank her daiquiri. I started up the steps to the third floor.
    â€œOh man, not more stairs,” Onion said. She looked into my parents’ room. “What about in here?”
    I thought about it.
    â€œOkay,” I said. “This is a better room anyway. Mine doesn’t have any wallpaper right now. Just plaster.” I stubbed out my cigarette on an ashtray on my mother’s bureau.
    â€œWhoo-hoo,” Onion said, sitting on the far side of the bed. She put her drink on a table, set her cigarette in an ashtray, and pulled her top off over her head. The straps of her bra traversed her broad, tanned back.
    I sat on my side of the bed and took off all my clothes except for my socks because it was cold. I got under the covers. Onion stood to take off her jeans. She took a diaphragm case out of her purse and put it on my parents’ bedside table, next to a tube of Ortho jelly—a tube, I noticed, that was rolled neatly from the bottom like a tube of toothpaste.
    I saw Onion from the back, looking at her lovely round buttocks, her smooth shoulders, the hair falling down her spine. She picked up her daiquiri and downed the whole thing in a single shot. Then she turned to me and lay down upon the sheets.
    On her right shoulder was a blue-and-green bruise the size of a man’s fist. I stared at it.
    â€œJeez,” I said. “How’d you get that?”
    â€œNever you mind,” Onion said. She looked over at a picture of my father that stood upon my mother’s bureau and said, “Some asshole.” For a moment I thought she meant my dad.
    She took