Read The Wonder Bread Summer for Free Online

we have the upper hand.”
    “Yeah, yeah, fine.” Beth gave a little smile. The smile, Allie was relieved to see, dissolved the persistent bird beak that had started growing once more. “Come back in, like, two hours—I’ll have it all settled by then.”
    “Okay. So tell him I’m just going to take out what he owes me.” Allie was panting. She consciously shut her mouth and breathed in deeply through her nose.
    “Yeah, I get it.” Beth waved her hand. “Everything will be fine. Jonas is like a total pussycat at heart.”
    “He owes me!” It took tremendous force for Allie to say the words clearly and slowly. “Remind him of that. Marc owes me, too. I just want someone to pay me for once, okay?” There was an explosion of light in Allie’s head—a crackling power surge.
    “Allie, fucking relax! Now get out of here, go for a drive and come back in two hours.”
    “He owes me!” Allie said, and she walked out the door.
    “WAIT!” Beth ran down the exterior hall after Allie. She put her hand on the bread bag. “Can I have another hit before you leave?”
    Allie took off the twisty and let the bag spin until it unwound. She held it open toward Beth. Beth looked around to make sure no one was out, then stuck both her hands into the bag. Her fingers looked long and twisted, like licorice. When Beth pulled out two pinches of coke, her fingers had magically transformed again, now flickering back and forth between human fingers and lobster claws.
    “Done?” Allie asked.
    “Yeah. I’ll see you in two hours,” Beth said.
    B eth had a brand-new 1983 Honda Prelude with a moon roof. It had power windows and locks, a tape player, air-conditioning, everything. It even had a license plate that Beth had picked out when she registered the car: CAL GRL. California Girl. Or Cal—the common moniker for the University of California, Berkeley—Girl. Allie almost thought she couldn’t be friends with Beth after she had first seen that plate—the amount of attention it brought, the showiness, was too much. But eventually Allie saw that in spite of all the things Beth owned (all of which Allie would have gladly taken), she was not a thingy person. She had a nice car, but she’d let anyone borrow it. She had a nice apartment, but she’d let anyone crash on the couch. She wasn’t a hoarder, and this, Allie believed, was a good quality in a friend.
    Allie placed the Wonder Bread bag on the seat beside her. It appeared to be punching out sporadically as if there were a kitten in the sack. She shifted the car into reverse and backed out of the parking space slowly—her fear of bumping the cars on either side of her was equal to her fear of Vice Versa and Jonas.
    The yellow wooden arm that would allow Allie to exit the garage seemed to take hours to lift (the pocket watch, now floating on the ceiling of the car, ticked off thousands of seconds). As it was rising, Allie examined the cassette that hung out of the player like a plastic white tongue, pushed it in, and changed the song seven times. Peter Gabriel. Beth loved Peter Gabriel. When she and Allie went to the Peter Gabriel concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Beth started crying every third song. Allie had been bored senseless. She had tried to make the time pass quickly by entering into a daydream in which she was married to Billy Idol and they lived half the year (when he wasn’t on tour) in a hillside villa in Cannes, France. She had been so immersed in the fantasy that she had been shocked when Peter Gabriel took his final encore bow. She and Billy Idol hadn’t even finished decorating the villa.
    Allie hit eject, threw the tape on the floor, and looked up to see where she was. Somehow she had managed to get herself down the street, toward University Avenue, near the freeway entrance. She popped open the glove box, reached in for a different tape, and blindly shoved it into the tape player.
    The cassette turned out to be Prince. Much better. Prince was