Undressing the Moon by T. Greenwood

Author:T. Greenwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

There are a lot of people who don’t know I’m sick. Sometimes, I think about all the people I’ve ever met or been acquainted with or loved, and it is incredible to me that most of them have no idea about what is happening inside my body. And then I think about all the people I have met or been acquainted with or loved and wonder if they have similar secrets that they are carrying around with them. It makes you realize how many people, out of all the people you know, are actually important to you.

I started a list book once in which I tried to name every person I had ever known. I started with family, and then worked chronologically through my life. Elementary school classmates, family friends, the librarians at the Quimby Atheneum, girls from swimming lessons and the clerks at the Shop-N-Save. When I got to fifth grade, I stopped. I had twenty college-ruled pages of names, and there were only a handful of people with whom I was still in touch. All those pages, all those people; it made me feel terribly alone.

Sometimes I’ll bump into someone at the post office or at the bank, someone I haven’t seen in a couple of years, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them, realizing halfway through that they don’t know me anymore. And that, worse yet, I don’t know them either.

A couple of days after my doctor’s appointment, I was leaving the fabric store in Quimby when I saw Richard, a friend of a friend who swept into my life one weekend four or five years before. It was one of those things, those flings, you know will amount to nothing, but you do it anyway because you’re lonely or bored, and then you forget about it after it’s all done.

I was wearing the blond wig that Becca had given me. My hair has still not come back. It might take a while, my doctor says. Normally, I just pull on a baseball cap or a bandanna, but it’s getting cold now, and I miss the way my hair used to feel around my neck. My real hair, when I had it, was brown. And curly. I always hated my hair, its willful disorder, but now I miss it terribly.

He was walking down the street, blowing warm air into his bare hands. I recognized him from almost a block away. And I considered, for a moment, waving, calling out, “Hey, Richard! It’s me, Piper Kincaid. Remember?” But as he got closer, I simply clutched my paper bag of thread and bias tape and buttons, and waited for him to pass. The funny thing was that he slowed down as he reached me, and a slow smile crept across his face. Startled, I opened my mouth to say something, but he had already passed. And I realized that what he saw was simply a blond girl with cheeks flushed pink from a cold early-winter afternoon. I was nobody he remembered in this disguise.

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