Read All Our Pretty Songs for Free Online Page A

her feet and laughs at her own joke. “Sorry,” she says. “I never see you being, like, irresponsible. Less than focused. He’s your first boyfriend. It’s adorable.”
    “He’s not my fucking boyfriend. I don’t even know him.”
    “You wish he was your boyfriend.”
    “I don’t need a goddamn boyfriend! Jesus. You’re such a bitch.”
    “You love me.”
    “I do love you.”
    She stretches her hand across our towels and takes mine, tugs it toward her. I roll over on my side, facing her, and she stares at me with her inscrutable eyes. Like she’s going to tell me a secret. Something crucial she found out about love, or sex, or what happens to you when you feel like this and it makes no sense, when someone you’ve only talked to once takes over your entire brain until you’re twitchy with it, until you drop things in the kitchen and turn the stereo up way too loud and think about shaving your head or kicking through a wall or running out into the street and screaming because you can’t even stand yourself anymore. She widens her eyes at me and I wait for her to give me the answer.
    “I’m starving,” she says. “Let’s go eat hamburgers.”
    I work at a fruit stand in the open-air market downtown. It’s built on a hill, and underneath the open-air part there are layers of shops clinging to the steep hillside. The street level’s made up of long intersecting covered arcades full of stalls: fruit and fish and bread, flowers, ugly tie-dyed hippie clothes. Silver jewelry and amber pendants, bundles of lavender, fuzzy wool pullovers imported from Ecuador next to sandals made out of leather straps and tire rubber. Crafts for rich people, like handmade wooden children’s toys, or flavored jams you buy for relatives you don’t know very well that stay unopened in a cupboard for years until someone throws them out. Pierogi and humbow, gyros and hot dogs.
    In the winter I love my work. All the out-of-towners flee the eternal damp. We have to wear sweaters and wool hats to keep out the cold, and we drink coffee until we’re cracked-out and speedy. The cobblestoned streets are wet and foggy, the low mournful sound of the ferry horn carries across the water, and all the afternoons are dreamy and quiet. I work after school and on weekends, and it’s always a relief to come here after the crowded halls and bells marking every hour, pop quizzes on nothing, lunch in the white-tiled cafeteria that reeks of old meatballs. I’d rather be at the market, where the salt smells from the fish stand mingle with the salt smell of the air, and seagulls squawk overhead, and the goth girls at the pierogi stand trade us steaming dumplings for apples and pears.
    The lower levels are a maze of high-ceilinged hallways and big windows that look out over the bay. Creaking wooden floorboards, smells of incense and baking and cedar. Tiny shops tucked away around blind corners and in odd nooks. The Egyptian import store, where Aurora and I used to buy silver ankhs and wadjet eyes as Tutankhamun-obsessed girls. The bead store, where we spent hours sifting through wooden trays of colored glass, late-afternoon sun glinting red and blue and green among the beads. And our favorite then, our favorite still: the witch store. Walls of bookshelves to the left of the door, with titles like Goddess Divination and Magickal Herbcraft and Following the Moon . On the right, shelves and shelves of vitamins and tinctures and incenses and mysterious potions. The light in that shop has a quality to it that is thicker and richer than ordinary light, oozing across the glass bottles and casting shadows among the incense boxes. Cass took me there to buy my first tarot deck, from the long counter with a glass case that runs half the length of the store, full of cards: the Rider Waite and the Crowley Thoth deck, the Osho Zen Tarot, the Russian tarot and the Medieval tarot, goddess tarots, moon tarots, all laid out on swatches of velvet. The counter is