Skin by Kathe Koja Read Free Book Online

music now a fast pop babble, she realized Bibi was talking to someone, someone sitting at their table. A man, head shaved austere and long earlobes with eighth-of-an-inch grommets glowing gold around the empty space, his front teeth missing in a surprising childish smile. Bibi saw her looking, smiled a very little but did not include her by introduction, spoke only to the man in a slangy slur of names and times Tess did not recognize or place. Her beer gone flat before her, pale gold between locked fingers; the moving dancers like a hot and living frieze before her eyes.
        And coming home, she and Bibi, to find her door broken open, its obvious gape seen from the bottom of the stairs and she scrambled, half-falling, to the landing, slammed inside; a moment's dumbstruck terror-robbed -but no, pushing past her ludicrous stall Bibi found a note spiked hard to the couchbed: evicted. And now she saw the tools jumbled in cardboard boxes, frito-lay and sunbelt juice, saw her three-suiter wardrobe balled like a bedroll and set conspicuously by the door.
        Bibi read the note out loud. " 'Tess. This is not a factory it is a store. I am charging you for all the burn holes.' What a cunt. Let's see her charge you for a fucking thing."
        Tess, still frozen, all ideas quivering now, now with no place to work. No place to go. She went to her worktable, tried sorting through, moving the tools through her hands as if their familiar heft might slow her moving mind, too fast to sort ideas, one question only like a mantra, where where where. And Bibi, drawer by drawer, pulling empty the green metal rack, looping the cables into tight circles.
        "One of Crane's friends has a truck," she said.
        For a minute this meant absolutely nothing, as if Bibi had begun to speak backward; then it made some sense but not enough. "Bibi," louder than she meant, "I have nowhere to take this shit, I don't-"
        "Raelynne's already moving." Hands balancing two rolls of solder, acid flux and a Grainger's catalog thick as a phone book. "She can just move a little faster."
        Big windows, long and thin like an old-fashioned church; they opened with cranks, cool air higher than before, third floor in this warehouse half-restored and then abandoned. Room, ventilation, wired to handle what she needed; there was even a service elevator. One of the downstairs dogs in the doorway, black-spattered beige and cocked ears and a woman calling, "Cocoa! Cocoa, come down here now! Cocoa, now!"
        The dog ignored her. Bibi silent in the window, Tess pacing out the floor space, pacing one way twice, confused: she had not slept, sat out the night guarding her broken door. Coffee, more coffee, wordless and knowing she could not afford Raelynne's place; but that could not matter, she would have to hire herself out, let the new ideas burn internally; not good, but no help for it. Bibi, helping her pack, working until near dawn, when she left for Crane's; Tess could not question this help, did not in brutal fact have time. Grace had come up with the sun to ask when she would be gone.
        "Tonight," in flat bravado, slamming the unlockable door in her face. Her stomach hot and burning, thinking, thinking.
        Now the woman at the door, "Cocoa, you bad girl. I'm sorry," leash in hand, another puppy under her arm. Her sweat shirt read I'M OWNED BY A… with a dog's head, breed indeterminate, wash-faded and huge beneath. She took the dog away. Less than a dozen of Raelynne's boxes still building-block scattered, Tess's reflection exponential in Raelynne's left-behind mirrors, cranking wide the windows to the sonata of barking dogs.
        The first few days were transformation, dance studio to workspace, it was not so hard; she used the ballet barre to hang scrap pipe; she tried not to think what she must sell to keep this place. Bibi stopped by, once, twice, perched still while Tess ran cables, hung lights, positioned panels;