All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker

All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker

Author:Laura Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00


NO ÉCLAIRS

There were no éclairs at the party Apollo took me to.

We crossed Canal, passing fabric warehouses and empty lots, until we came to a loft building in worse shape than ours. The stairwell had no lights, so Apollo sang a Polish drinking song and I followed his voice up through a fuzzy black so dense it filled my mouth.

Four flights up, he stopped and banged on a metal door.

We waited, my breath coming heavy and loud in the dark.

When the door swung open, a giant woman with cheekbones painted on like knives kissed Apollo and pulled him by the hand into the squash of people behind her. She didn’t even look at me.

I could tell by the way his shoulders were set that it annoyed him how bossy she was. Apollo doesn’t like being told what to do.

He turned around to mouth something at me over his shoulder, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The door, covered in stickers and fat Sharpie, had slammed shut behind me, and Apollo had disappeared into the crowd.

A camera flashbulb popped. In the afterglow, the air was ghost-colored from the smoke. The big room smelled like armpits and spilled wine and perfume. Candles dripped onto the bottles they were set into, and the music sounded like someone shaking change in a coffee can to discipline a dog. I pushed through people laughing, their heads thrown back like something was going to bite their throats, or maybe they were going to do the biting.

This was no place for a kid.

On the other hand, it made me invisible. I could look at anything, everything. All the women were wearing boots, silver and covered in writing, or black with zippers all the way up. They were beautiful.

It was too hot.

A woman wearing tight leather pants was sitting backward on a chair like a lion tamer, legs spread, one knee up against an industrial sink, the other nearly touching a table crowded with bottles. It didn’t look like she was going to let me through, and something cold and hard curled at the bottom of my stomach. Suddenly, she clapped her knees together against the chair back like she’d been making a joke, and I slid by her fast, half expecting her to slam her knees out again to block me. When she didn’t, the thrill of a near miss shot up the back of my legs.

By the table with the bottles, there was a woman with a knob where her hand should have been. I know about birth defects because Linda is obsessed with them. This kid Kai in the second grade at our school only has two fingers on his left hand; it looks like a lobster claw. Linda always makes it sound like the claw is Kai’s mom’s fault, but she seems nice when I see her pushing him on the swings at the park.

The woman with the tiny fist wasn’t hiding her hand, like Kai does.



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