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liking Lear jets for talking to Keith Richards on the phone.
Lindsay was still crying when she slammed herself into Sam’s backseat.
Knock knock, asked Sam.
Who’s there? asked Lindsay.
Nicholas, said Sam.
Nicholas who?
Nicholas girls can’t climb trees! Sam shrieked, grinning, That was a British joke,
for England. In honor of England. England!
She held a fist to the air in England’s name.
Fuck England, Lindsay whimpered, I need a cigarette. Can I have a cigarette?
Leave it to Lindsay to go to London and then come back crying and whimpering
Fuck England, Sam thought, punctuating her own thought with an eye-roll.
Sam wasn’t smoking today, so they stopped in at 7-11, where the baked-goods
cabinet whirred warmly. You felt warmer standing next to it. Ben waited in the car.
Get a brownie, said Lindsay.
You get a brownie, Sam shrugged, I’m getting a cherry cruller.
She picked up a cherry cruller with plastic tongs, like surgery, and slipped it into a
waxy paper bag. The bag had a clear panel down the front so you could ogle your goodie.
Ew! Lindsay squealed.
Are you ewing at my cruller?
Lindsay nodded.
A Buddhist monk once told me that the greatest injustice a human being can commit
against another is to criticize the food they put into their body.
Lindsay didn’t like that answer and she wore it on her bitchface.
How very JD Salinger of you, she clucked, and Sam thought What is this, What is
this, What has the world come to that people talk like this, using JD Salinger’s name
like this, and everyone knows what she means and we’re all so overeducated full of
nothing; this is what we use it for. Clever meanness.
Sam just couldn’t go in for that kind of thing, and she couldn’t say How dare you
take JD Salinger’s name in vain! because it would mean that she was part of it. For
real, she didn’t care about taking JD Salinger’s name in vain whether to be doing it
or damning it, or spelling your daughter Zoe’s name Zooey, so many crimes against
JD Salinger. They weren’t real problems, and she wouldn’t act like they were.
Lucy s so beautiful, Lindsay sighed as they exhaled smoke out front.
She’s not that beautiful, said Sam, Her face is too pointy.
Angular, Lindsay corrected.
No, said Sam, Pointy.
She saved her cherry cruller in her purse until she’d let them out. Before driving
away, she ripped off a piece of cruller and ate it. Her teeth cut through the crispy
icing, a crackling feeling, and the soft cake inside was freckled with drops of cherry.
WHY.
Why did Keith’s crazy hands look like that? Were there extra muscles in the fingers
from playing guitar a lot? His nailbeds were so wide it made her sick: it wasn’t
human. And then the weirdest muscly parts were the sections beneath the nailbeds,
which puffed up and flared out wider than his knuckles. The widest parts of fingers
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