The Lonely by Ainslie Hogarth

Author:Ainslie Hogarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: teen, teenlit, teen lit, teen novel, teen book, teen fiction, ya, ya novel, ya fiction, ya book, young adult, young adult fiction, young adult novel, young adult book, the lonly, lonly, lonely
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2014-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Miniature Wonderland,

Day 9,330 (One Customer)

A boy with a long neck and hunched shoulders, his head mounted on his body like a stuffed deer head to a wall. Like he’s spent most of his life crammed into a box, or a cave, growing into its constricted dimensions. Long brown hair falling over one eye, a kink running through it like a recently unfolded sheet. Large ears with soft-looking lobes, warm hanging honey. Sweet. White T-shirt accentuating a small frame, yellow under the armpits, a hole along the seam, a peek at barely opaque skin. Maybe he’s lived his whole life in a cave, tucked away from sunlight. He doesn’t move his arms as he walks; they hang still at his sides like a suspended axolotl’s.

As he approached my reception desk I wanted to run away, heart fluttering as hard as a trapped bird. I was scared of him.

“Hello,” he said.

I knew he was going to say it but it startled me anyway.

Then he said, “I’m sorry for scaring you. How much to go through?”

I pointed to a sign behind me. He nodded.

“I’m Easter,” I blurted. I’m Easter and I’m an ass who lets nonsense fly from her mouth.

“I’m Lev.”

“I have to find out your name so that I can fill out your particulars in this book here. It’s got everyone’s particulars.”

“Particulars.”

Particulars? I wanted to fix the barrel of a gun to each of my eyeballs and blow my brains out in either direction. Particulars. Mr. Ungula’s idiotic words coming out of my mouth.

“Yeah, your information. Your specifics.”

“Well, my name is Lev. And I’ve seen you before, walking through the woods in town.”

“Oh?” I’d heard ladies say it in movies like that: “Oh?” I didn’t really know how someone was supposed to respond to it, but it seemed appropriate here. I waited to see what he’d do with it.

“Yeah. I saw you there. And then I followed you here.”

“You followed me?”

“I did. You seemed wonderful to me.”

I seem wonderful to him. I opened my eyes wide. Wonderful. Wonderful. He seems wonderful to me, for thinking that I’m wonderful. I might not have found him wonderful until he thought I was wonderful. And the sound of the bells filled my ears, loud and warm and vibrating. Julia would kill me if she heard this. Kill me even harder if she could feel how happy I was in this moment that she was gone. And then I felt terribly guilty; it moved through me slow as oil, coated my insides like Pepto-Bismol does in the commercials. Thick pink guilt. Now that I knew he thought I was wonderful, I wasn’t nervous anymore. My heart sucked in the wings it had momentarily grown. I’m wonderful, so who cares. The bells quieted a bit but didn’t go away.

“Well, are you going to go through or not?”

My sudden impatience caused his neck to droop further.

“What’s the rush?” he said.

“If you’re not going to buy a pass you’ve gotta leave. Those are the rules.”

“I don’t have any money,” he said.

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