A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett

Author:Casey Plett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

Not Bleak

Nobody wants to fucking be here except me. I love it here. I could work on that floor for decades and I wouldn’t mind. Shelve and talk about books all day—honestly, most days that seems okay. I used to have this whole set of dreams, but now, I dunno, so many of those dreams ended up wrong or impossible. After a few years at this store I still like going to work every day, and sometimes I figure, well, isn’t getting to say that a good dream enough? Most people here want to leave; everybody’s looking for a better way up. But me, even this morning, when all my body wanted was to look at the shadows on my ceiling and listen to podcasts with the volume low and curl up in my headachey ball in bed, even then I was kinda jazzed to go to work. I know. That’s weird.

You know that kind of hangover when you wake up and you’re shaking a little. Like you get up for water and when you lie back down your heart’s beating like you sprinted three blocks and your skin’s worming around. I always feel so connected with my body in that moment. It’s so fragile and frail. I feel every part of it. Like when it’s putting barricades up against shutdown is when I’m least detached from my body, the most aware and tuned I am to its existence, that all my systems are present, intricate, working beneath my skin. It’s not like I like hangovers. But it is a part I don’t mind.

It was still the chilly part of spring, and I put my robe over my pyjamas when I got up. In the living room, the guy we were putting up was still sleeping on the couch. He had broken eyeliner around the side of his face—not smeared so much as, like, little sections of it had fallen off. Zeke, his name was.

My boyfriend Liam and I are always putting up people he meets on the internet. Like a queer couch surf for kids he knows from forums. Sometimes friends of friends, but generally randoms. Kids kicked out of their evil families, kids just trying out small-town homo life. Sometimes kids just going between coasts since we’re not too far north of the interstate, just up Highway 52. I really love that Liam’s gung-ho about that, though once some girl stole our bathroom sink. That was stupid. Turns out bathroom sinks are worth money, who knew.

Once I’d showered and shaved, the kid was awake and stretching and looking around. Most people can’t fit on our couch, it’s small, but he was pretty short, and beyond that, his body was small, almost unnoticeable. I don’t mean that in some stupid ha ha turn sideways and he’d disappear! way; he didn’t look malnourished or emaciated. More like inherently unobtrusive.

Do you want tea or coffee or anything, I asked him.

No. Thank you very much though, he said earnestly.

Okay. Well I’m going to work, but Liam should still be here for a while.

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