What is Real by Karen Rivers Read Free Book Online

you naked on the top of a grain elevator and your dog barking at the bottom. Kate hates me and she should.
    Tanis works her hand into my pocket. Her hand is tiny. Her nails are perfect, each one painted with a pattern that I happen to know is hieroglyphics because Tanis is obsessed with that shit.
    What girl has hieroglyphics on her nails?
    There is a lot to love about Tanis.
    For example, she’s a genius. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. You’d think she was kind of slutty, kind of weird, kind of tough. She’s got the look of someone who would scratch your eyes out given half the chance.
    But she wouldn’t.
    She may be glaring at you, but probably she’s not even seeing you, she’s seeing something else. Numbers, most likely.
    Ratios.
    Patterns.
    Proportions.
    I can’t really explain what it is because I have no idea. Math and I are mortal enemies, but Tanis is like this mathematician-artist freak. She does stuff with math. She makes it into art. I’m not explaining it well, mostly because I don’t understand it. I’m pretty fucking stupid in a lot of ways.
    She wants to be a model, right? But she’s borderline too-short, and there’s the thing of her face being half normal and half frozen, some family trait with a name I’ve forgotten. But she’s a girl who does what she wants and then figures everything out, so she’s studied all these models— her bedroom walls are papered with magazine pictures of gorgeous models, and on each one she has listed their proportions. Leg length to torso. Head size to hips. Like somewhere in there is a magical formula, which actually she says there is and if she can grow two more inches of legs, she ’ll have it all in the right proportions, which I believe because she really does have a fucking incredible body.
    You wouldn’t guess to look at her that she ’d ever analyze anything that closely. That she ’d know how to do statistical analysis of breast size. Or that she ’d want to.
    Or that she’s wrong, because in Tanis’s case, her perfect proportions don’t mean jack because of her face .
    Anyway, her dad is mentally challenged and her mom is gone and her life is as shitty as mine when you look at it up close, which I try not to do because I have enough problems, right? But then she measures something and calculates something and draws it, and bam , it’s in its place. She has control. The numbers and patterns and all that crap, it makes her feel okay, so whatever.
    Good for her.
    Tanis is a perfect girlfriend. She never asks too much. She never wants to “just talk.” She’s just weird enough to be interesting. And she thinks she’s in love with me.
    She thinks she knows who I am.
    As if .
    Right now her curly hair is hanging forward over her face and she really is killer sexy, even her crookedness is hot, so why do I hate her right now? Her hand is in my pocket, rubbing in a circle, and I push it away.
    â€œHey,” she says.
    â€œGotta have a slash,” I mumble and dart into the boys. I sit down on a toilet and try to feel sane, which fails. On the wall in the washroom it says, FOR A HOT HAND JOB, CALL TANIS B . I try to rub it out with toilet paper, but it’s permanent ink. I scratch at it with a ballpoint and then give up. The number is wrong anyway.
    Mr. V is a pedophile , the wall says.
    And FUCK YO MOMMA .
    The walls are this really pale shade of mucous yellow, and even though it’s the first day of school, the bathroom stinks of sewage. I press my cheek against the cold metal just for a minute and close my eyes and remind myself that this is easy.
    School is the easiest place to be.
    So why am I so freaked out?
    Olivia couldn’t possibly exist in a place like this.
    She doesn’t, right?
    I mean, how can she?

chapter 7
    By Christmas of last year, Feral was in rehab, Dad was out of rehab, I had moved back to Hell and my life was