Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien Read Free Book Online Page A

a sign from Paula. Not everyone believes in signs. But themore you need them, the more you see and the more you believe. I found a white hair today and pulled it out. I call that a
     sign. After all, sixteen is young.
    In school we’ve been learning about time. How human beings have hardly put a dent in it. If the history of the earth were
     mapped against a single year, we would only show up on December 31, at 4:11 in the afternoon. I would have told Paula that,
     and we would have mulled it over late at night. We would have laughed and said that, in the history of the earth, she and
     I, her father and mother and Jonah, were nothing. They would fall away from us without a bruise or a scratch. We could blow
     them off our bodies. We could say, with confidence, that in the grand scheme of things, in the long run, they meant as little
     as dust. “Less,” Paula would say. And I would say, “Less.”
    Paula’s mom worked downtown at the Hotel Vancouver. She was a housekeeper and smelled of fresh sheets and mild sweat. She
     always came home first, hung her coat neatly in the closet, unbuttoned the first three buttons of her blouse, and started
     cooking. Paula’s father was a gruff yet caring man. He fixed cars for a living, came home with grease under his fingernails
     and the smell of oil on his skin.
    I preferred Paula’s home to mine and so I stayed over at her house most nights. At dinner, Paula’s dad once said to me, “Do
     you know how much it costs to keep an extra body, Miriam? Tell your parents to pay up.”
    Her mom made a noise like, “Ssss, shush.” Paula stared at her plate, motionless. Her dad shook his head, apparently hurt,
     and picked up his knife and fork. “Eh, Jesus. I’m kidding, okay? Can’t I do that in my own home? Any friend of Paula’s is
     welcome here.” The four of us ate quietly. Paula’s mom brought out drinks, cola for me and Paula, Molson’s for her dad, water
     for herself. She brought out dessert, a Boston cream pie, leftover from the hotel kitchen that day.
    Afterwards, in the bathroom, I stood back while Paula threw up dinner. Her hair, bleached blond, stuck to her face. She rinsed
     her mouth and said, “I only throw up dinners. You only have an eating disorder if you throw up everything.” Paula told me
     that there were four kinds of bodies: the X, the A, the Y, and the O. “You’re an X,” she said, “small waist and evenly proportioned
     chest and butt.” She turned sideways. “What do you think I am?”
    “An X.”
    “Wrong,” she smirked. “Nice try. I’m more of an A. Heavy on the bottom.” She picked up my wristand measured it with her fingers. Her thumb and index finger touched. “You’re lucky. Everyone wants to be an X.”
    We stayed up late, talking about Jonah and how the halls were empty because the senior boys had gone away to play basketball
     and about how our math teacher had hair growing on his back. If you stood behind him, you could see it push past his collar,
     a hairy finger. Paula and I pressed our faces into the pillows and laughed. A breeze came and blew her curtains back into
     the room, light from a passing car travelling down the wall, across our beds, and gone. She said, “Move in here. Why don’t
     you just move into the spare bedroom? If you hate your family so much, you might as well, don’t you think?”
    “I don’t hate them.”
    “Well, whatever. You hardly go home anyway.”
    “I’ll ask,” I said, though I knew I wouldn’t. In my home, we barely spoke. My parents had long since given up on their marriage.
     They were busy working, making ends meet, and hardly noticed whether I was home or not.
    “We could be sisters then.” Paula lay back on her pillow. “We’ll share everything.”
    Paula wanted to be a veterinarian. That meant that, after dark, we’d slip out of her house and into thebackyard, where her mom kept hutch rabbits. Once a week, at supper time, her mom pulled one or two from the cage,