All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,68
this.
While Patricia served the salad, Kevin told Deedee and Racheline about the psychology of dog walking. (Some of the times Kevin had tried to sneak out after sleeping with Patricia, he’d run into her roommates, still half-awake on the couch. They’d started calling him Mr. No-Overnight, although not to his face.)
Deedee was talking about her ska band’s latest gig, in which as usual the blue-haired, wiry singer exuded so much raw Kathleen Hanna-esque sexuality, nobody would ever guess that she identified as asexual.
Just as Patricia was fetching the bread, Taylor glanced around and said this was a nice apartment. Too bad Patricia might have to move to Portland soon.
“What?” Patricia dropped her mitt on the floor. She was standing by the open oven, so she felt frozen on one side and red hot on the other.
“Oh,” Taylor leaned back, hands raised. “I thought you knew. They’re thinking of sending you to Portland.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Kevin blinked.
“Forget I said anything. I was talking out of school.” Taylor’s smile had vanished, replaced with wide eyes and a clenched jaw. This was so like Taylor: They were so closed off you could barely tell what they were thinking most of the time, but then they would toss out these bombs just to see everyone jump.
Patricia seized the bread with her bare hands. Let it burn her. “This is bullshit. They can’t make me move to Portland.” In Portland, all the young witches lived in one group house, with a curfew, and a few older witches supervised them.
“When were you going to tell me you were moving to Portland?” Kevin said.
“I’m not,” Patricia said, choking and coughing.
“Who’s making you move?” Deedee asked from the sofa, pierced eyebrows raised. “I don’t get it.”
“Please forget I said anything.” Taylor was squirming now. “Let’s just eat.”
Everybody stared at their plates and each other, but nobody said anything. Until Racheline broke the silence.
“Actually, I think you had better explain,” said Racheline, who was older than everyone else and the master tenant on the apartment. “Who are these people, and why are they forcing Patricia to move?” Racheline was a quiet woman, a perennial grad student with wild red hair and a placid round face, but when she decided to assert herself everybody snapped to attention.
Everybody stared at Taylor, including Patricia. “I’m not allowed to say,” Taylor stammered. “Let’s just say Patricia and I both have the same … the same caseworker. And everybody worries about her. Like, she goes off on her own for days. She tries to take everything on herself, and she doesn’t let anyone help her. She needs to let other people in.”
“I let people in.” Patricia felt bloodless. Her ears were ringing. “Right now, this moment, I am interacting with people.” She should have known.
“It’s true, though,” Deedee said. “Patricia, we never see you. You live here, but you’re never home. You never want to tell us anything about your life. You’ve been here nearly a year, but I feel like I don’t know you at all.”
Patricia tried to catch Kevin’s eye, but it was like lassoing a hummingbird. She was still holding the bread, and it was burning her hands. “I’m really trying. Look at me trying right this moment. I’m having a party.” She heard her timbre rising, until she sounded like her mother. Red haze, blinding her. “Why did you have to ruin this for me?” She threw chunks of bread at Taylor, who covered their face. “Do you want some bread? Do you want some bread? Have some fucking bread!” Now she sounded exactly like her mom.
She threw away the rest of the bread and bailed out of there, crying and spitting on the dry sidewalk.
Patricia had fallen in love with Danger Bookstore on her first ever visit, and whenever she climbed the wooden staircase, she usually felt a little of the packing tape around her soul unwind. But this time, she just felt the stabbing in her neck get worse as she reached the top floor with its unsafe railing and threadbare purple carpet.
Ernesto sat in his usual chair, eating a microwaved TV dinner. He was in love with the invention of the microwave, both because it fit in with his love of instant gratification (“the lineaments of gratified desire”) and because you couldn’t leave food near him for more than a few minutes before it grew spiky white mold. He wore a silk robe, emerald pajamas, and fuzzy slippers, with William Blake’s poems perched on one knee.