Read Welcome to Bordertown for Free Online Page A

hers like a vise. Trish tried to remember what she’d read. “Some call it Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it.… So while the World ages, we’ve stayed here, young and beautiful. See? Isn’t that good?”
    Anisette leaned her head against her, dripping snot onto Trish’s blouse, but at least she was quieter now. Trish stroked her hair. Anisette
was
just a kid, like her own little Jimbo.
    “But if we go back,” Anisette sniffled, “will we get old all of a sudden?”
    “I hope so,” said Thelma Louise. “I want to be able to buy booze and cigarettes without anyone giving me shit. I want those smart-ass pimply little guys at the filling station to call me
ma’am.
”
    Trish held Anisette harder. Because if she really had lost thirteen years in her thirteen days in Bordertown, then Jimbo was all grown up by now. Maybe he was in college. He was such a smart little boy. Maybe
he’d
gone to Harvard. He’d probably forgotten her. He probably thought she was dead.
    *   *   *
     
    We’re here, in Bordertown, Rosco and me. The hike through theNevernever was hard, but we made it before our water ran out, reaching the city outskirts at last on a cracked and weedy road beside the river.
    I found my way from Riverside to Soho by following the
Tough Guide
’s blurry map, got lost looking for Carnival Street (it wasn’t anywhere near where the
Guide
said it would be), then stopped at a club called The Dancing Ferret and ordered my first Border beer. The waitress there had grass-green hair, alabaster skin, and ears with points. “Toto,” I whispered in Rosco’s ear, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
    I’m staying at the Diggers’ House on Plum, which is kind of a hostel and kind of a safe house. It’s not the Ritz. My bed’s on the floor of a dusty little storage space off the kitchen. That’s partly because the House is crowded and partly because my “scary” black dog makes people nervous. Elfin people, I mean, and I don’t get it, since he’s old and arthritic and wouldn’t hurt a fly; but Berlin, the girl who runs the House, made me promise I’d keep Rosco out of sight whenever the elf kids are around. So we sleep in the closet, which is better than sleeping out on the street, so I’m not complaining.
    We don’t spend much time at the House, anyway; it’s just a free place to crash at night. By day we’re out walking the streets as I figure out how this crazy town works, and then figure out how I’m going to find Trish. It’s a much bigger place than I thought it would be; the words “needle” and “haystack” keep coming to mind. I’ve put up signs at The Ferret, the Poop, the Free Clinic, and lots of other locations:
    Trish, I’m here and trying to find you.
Please contact me through the Diggers.
Love, Jimmy
     
    Totally useless. An hour later my signs are covered up by brand-new signs: for bands, for squats, for other missing people who do and do not resemble my sister. An hour after that, the new signs are covered. Does anyone ever read these things?
    I ask about Trish everywhere I go and show everyone the picture that I carry in my wallet: Trish and me on the day we brought little Rosco home from the pound. Now, here’s the weird thing (I mean really weird, a magic-leaking-over-the-Border kind of weird): The puppy in that picture is thirteen years old now. The boy in that picture is almost nineteen. But Trish? She’s still the girl in the photo. What I mean is, she’s
still seventeen.
I found this out on my first day in the city: that the thirteen years that have passed for us back home have only been thirteen
days
on the Border. The whole damn city did a Rip van Winkle when the Way to the Border closed down.
    That means, for Trish, it’s been only a few short weeks since she ran away from home. And I guess that’s good, since it means that she didn’t intend to leave us for all this time. But it’s freaking me out a bit all the same.