The Secret Society of Demolition Writers by Marc Parent Read Free Book Online Page B

testify? The boys looked at her as though—well, as though she’d just announced she’d murdered her parents. One of the boys laughed a sudden run of nervous silver laughter: a giggle really. He put his hand to his mouth. “C’mon,” he finally said to his friend. “Let’s book.”
    But they didn’t turn and leave. Instead, they walked past Connie as though she’d become invisible. So invisible, in fact, that one knocked into her on either side, a girl in their way for whom there was no reason to expend any energy whatsoever, not even to step around her.
    “Pharmaciss!” called the old woman. She hailed Babe like a cab. “Pharmaciss!”
    Connie leaned on the end-aisle display of on-sale contact lens solution. The old lady stroked her arm. “Tugs,” she said. “Common tugs, sweetheart.”
    “I know,” said defeated Connie. The circles beneath her eyes looked like tarnished silver.
    “You’re a goot girl,” the woman told her.
    “That’s not true. You know, I did it.”
    “Not you, sweetheart.”
    “
Me
. I killed my parents.”
    “So long ago,” said the little old lady. She looked as though she were about to crawl into Connie’s lap. “Not you. Someone else, so long ago. You know? Ziss is life. Pharmaciss,” she said to Babe. “Cheer up the girl.”
    “What a command!”
    “Yes, please,” said Connie, and then she added, “pharmaciss.”
    “OK,” he said.
    “Good boy,” said the little old lady.
    HE THOUGHT OF dark-haired breasty serious Samantha, his kind, late wife. He heard her make fun of him:
you have a crush
on a Christian murderess.
    “Go away,” he thought, for the first time.
    A person who can do that is not a person. It’s not a crime of passion, a person who can do that feels nothing, least of all passion.
Think about her grandparents: they lost their children, and even so
they tried to save their grandchild. Can you imagine what that feels
like?
    No.
    She’s not more saintly for having been so bad before, you know.
Real saints start out saintly and stick with the program
.
    Oh, Samantha, let me have this. Surely this is the exception to every single rule. She wants to save me. I promise I won’t let her do it, but let her try. Let her do her best.
    Sam—
    Promise.
    Promise.
    HE TOOK HER to the spinning restaurant on top of the Holiday Inn, another childish pleasure for childish Connie, the definition of a place that would cheer you up. The place revolved once an hour. Every table was its own minute hand: you could keep time by yourself, quarter past, half past, quarter of. The diners couldn’t tell they were turning, they only knew that the scenery changed. In his pre-Samantha youth, Babe had waited tables there, a disaster considering his sense of direction. Eventually he took to wearing a compass around his neck, though how did that help? A four top would be pointing north for the appetizers, south-by-southwest for the entrées. He took Connie there for the same reason doctors prescribed Ritalin, a CNS stimulant, to hyperactive patients to calm them down. He figured they’d be less disoriented there. Sometimes they’d look out and see the downtown. Sometimes the highway. Somewhere there was a universe where her parents were alive.
    He thought the scenery, north, northeast, east, southeast, all the clockwise way around, would distract them. Where’s the mall? Where’s my house? Neither of them knew where the other lived. Mightn’t this be a way to explain your life in a place, up above and rotating. There’s where I was born, there’s where I get my car fixed, there’s where I met my wife, there’s my opticians, there’s where I cried, they tore down my parents’ house, there’s Mal’s Donuts, there’s where you and I met, there’s where I lost my wife, you can’t really see it, but right there, you see, left of the green neon, right of City Hall.
    But they scarcely looked out of the window, as though the universe were rotating around them, instead of