Path of Smoke by Bailey Cunningham

Author:Bailey Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

SAGITTARIUS

1

SHELBY WOKE UP AT an angle. The arm of the couch was digging into her neck, and the living room swam before her, a goldfish bowl of unfamiliar shapes. When she squinted, she could make out shelves hanging from eyebolts screwed into the ceiling. They rocked slightly in the breeze coming through the open window. She tried to read the books’ titles, but even when she could make them out, their meaning eluded her. They were all about vectors, shearing forces, and torsion. A shiny laptop sat beneath them, displaying a vintage screen saver. Toasters with wings. She hadn’t seen that one in ages. It made her think of simpler times, before DVD-ROM drives and high-speed Internet, when you still had to sweat over an AUTOEXEC.BAT file to make your game work properly. It felt like you were searching for buried treasure, as you tried to anticipate the number of file pathways to open. Would twenty be enough? Fifty?

Waking up in a strange place reminded her of sleepovers. The disorientation that you felt in the middle of the night, trying to find your friend’s bathroom. The fear of encountering her parents in the hallway, slightly disheveled and all too real in their bathrobes. All those dark kitchens and rumpus rooms that were not her own, suggesting alternate lives on familiar cul-de-sacs, yet somehow sinister as well. Because if their lives were simply mutations of her own, the difference of a few throw pillows and a larger television, what did that make her? How could she be special, when Donna Green’s parents had the same carpeting, the same terminal microwave whose glass dish also chafed in secret? All those staircases that were mirror images, as if she’d fallen into a suburban Escher painting.

But the uncanny houses weren’t the only thing that made her uneasy. There was also the long night, the hours spent with her eyes open, while Donna slept soundly next to her. Trying to be comforted by her friend’s breathing, while the acid climbed up her throat. Now and again, their elbows would touch. Shelby knew that if she rolled over, Donna would embrace her, still dreaming of Toby Fleischman and his aviator sunglasses. She would not think of Donna’s small breasts beneath her Our Lady Peace T-shirt, or the faint blond hairs on her arms. Or kissing the freckles on her back, which formed a constellation that Shelby had already named.

It must be strange, she remembered thinking, to be a boy in the same predicament. If you touched your best friend, he might kill you. The barest suggestion of intimacy was forbidden. Desire never went away, but fear held it in abeyance. Girls weren’t as brutal in their retribution, but they had a way of closing ranks against you. She was already baffled by the politics of being a girl in a small town. The rules and signs were oddly foreign to her, as if she’d missed some crucial orientation about how to communicate. Most of the time, she was faking it.

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