The Songbird Thief by Skye Allen

Author:Skye Allen [Allen, Skye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: young adult
ISBN: 978-1-63477-004-0
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2016-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

I SPEND the next twelve hours doing things that even under the haze of distress I’m conscious I’m going to regret. First I go into the café next to the art movie theater on Balboa and sit down at the scratched upright piano with the stained glass panels and sing “Adieu, Notre Petite Table” until all the old guys playing Chinese checkers and the surfers with their hair still wet get up and leave their breakfasts behind. It’s a sad aria from an opera, but all I need is the first few lines, “Good-bye, little table,” and they’re gone. I get a whole untouched fried egg and half a bagel with chunky apricot preserves, and I go behind the counter and make myself a king-sized latte with four shots, since the kitchen staff has also wandered outside. I stop singing and watch everyone snap to their senses, like the drugs have just worn off. I guess that must be how it feels to them. Poor them. My brain is too far away to care.

I go back out to the street and sing a song about waiting for someone who’s in jail, and that makes the morning commuters late. I get a spurt of vicious joy when a woman in a too-tight suit stumbles on her high heels running behind a bus, and again when an earbud-wired hipster slaps the bus door but can’t make it open. Sonja flashes across my brain. I hope she’s miserable right now. I hope she’s regretting what she did.

I walk alongside the traffic on congested Geary Boulevard and break car windows by singing “Heart of Glass.” A chorus of car alarms backs me up in every key. I peek in the windows to see if there’s anything I want, but all I find is old towels and pathetic CD collections and weed stashes hidden in soda cans, and I’m not interested in weed.

Once, in the glove compartment of a truck, I find a neat little box of razor blades, the kind house painters use. I stop at the top of the hill on Masonic, where a lake of tents fills the parking lot of an old shopping mall that has long since been disemboweled by Internet retail, and I run my fingers over the corners of the tiny blue box. The eager blood leaps up to all the vulnerable places on my body. Wrists and throat and inner thighs. I could make this day end. I could make this pain end. Nobody I care about would have to clean up the mess.

I slip the box in my Army coat pocket and jump off the low concrete wall I’m sitting on. I go find the fanciest bakery downtown to steal cannoli, right on the edge of North Beach where the tourists start bleeding into the stream of high-finance workers, and even though the pastries taste like glue in my mouth, I’m still frantic with whatever is taking me over, and I eat them until I’m sick.

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