Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (graded readers TXT) 📕

"Is that it?" she said.

"That's it," he said. He pointed. His father was green and craggy and smaller than he remembered. The body rolled in the trunk. "I feel --" he said. "We're taking him home, at least. And my father will know what to do."

"No boy has ever taken me home to meet his folks," she said.

Alan remembered the little fist in the dirt. "You can wait in the car if you want," he said.

Krishna came home,

(she said, as they sat in the parked car at a wide spot in the highway, looking at the mountains on the horizon)

Krishna came home,

(she said, after he'd pulled off the road abruptly, put the car into park, and stared emptily at the mountains ahead of them)

Krishna came home,

(she said, lighting a cigarette and rolling down the window and letting the shush of the passing cars come fill the car, and she didn't look at him, because the expression on his face was too terrible to behold)

and he came through the door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine under one arm and two bags from a ravewear shop on Queen Street that I'd walked past a hundred times but never gone into.

He'd left me in his apartment that morning, with his television and his books and his guitar, told me to make myself at home, told me to call in sick to work, told me to take a day for myself. I felt...glorious. Gloried in. He'd been so attentive.

He'd touched me. No one had touched me in so long. No one had ever touched me that way. He'd touched me with...reverence. He's gotten this expression on his face like, like he was in church or something. He'd kept breathing something too low for me to hear and when he put his lips right to my ear, I heard what he'd been saying all along, "Oh God, oh God, my God, oh God," and I'd felt a warmness like slow honey start in my toes and rise through me like sap to the roots of my hair, so that I felt like I was saturated with something hot and sweet and delicious.

He came home that night with the makings of a huge dinner with boiled soft-shell crabs, and a bottle of completely decent Chilean red, and three dresses for me that I could never, ever wear. I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as he pulled them out of the bag, because I knew they'd never go on over my wings, and they were so beautiful.

"This one will look really good on you," he said, holding up a Heidi dress with a scoop neck that was cut low across the back, and I felt a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I'd never wear that dress in front of anyone but him. I couldn't, my wings would stick out a mile.

I knew what it meant to be different: It meant living in the second floor with the old Russian Auntie, away from the crowds and their eyes. I knew then what I was getting in for -- the rest of my life spent hidden away from the world, with only this man to see and speak to.

I'd been out in the world for only a few years, and I had barely touched it, moving in silence and stealth, watching and not being seen, but oh, I had loved it, I realized. I'd thought I'd hated it, but I'd loved it. Loved the people and their dialogue and their clothes and their mysterious errands and the shops full of goods and every shopper hunting for something for someone, every one of them part of a story that I would never be part of, but I could be next to the stories and that was enough.

I was going to live in an attic again.

I started to cry.

He came to me. he put his arms around me. He nuzzled my throat and licked up the tears as they slid past my chin. "Shhh," he said. "Shhh."

He took off my jacket and my sweater, peeled down my jeans and my panties, and ran his fingertips over me, stroking me until I quietned.

He touched me reverently still, his breath hot on my skin. No one had ever touched me like that. He said, "I can fix you."

I said, "No one can fix me."

He said, "I can, but you'll have to be brave."

I nodded slowly. I could do brave. He led me by the hand into the bathroom and he took a towel down off of the hook on the back of the door and folded it into a long strip. He handed it to me. "Bite down on this," he said, and helped me stand in the tub and face into the corner, to count the grid of tiles and the greenish mildew in the grout.

"Hold still and bite down," he said, and I heard the door close behind me. Reverent fingertips on my wing, unfolding it, holding it away from my body.

"Be brave," he said. And then he cut off my wing.

It hurt so much, I pitched forward involuntarily and cracked my head against the tile. It hurt so much I bit through two thicknesses of towel. It hurt so much my legs went to mush and I began to sit down quickly, like I was fainting.

He caught me, under my armpits, and held me up, and I felt something icy pressed to where my wing had been -- I closed my eyes, but I heard the leathery thump as my wing hit the tile floor, a wet sound -- and gauzy fabric was wrapped around my chest, holding the icy towel in place over the wound, once twice thrice, between my tits.

"Hold still," he said. And he cut off the other one.

I screamed this time, because he brushed the wound he'd left the first time, but I managed to stay upright and to not crack my head on anything. I felt myself crying but couldn't hear it, I couldn't hear anything, nothing except a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.

He kissed my cheek after he'd wound a second bandage, holding a second cold compress over my second wound. "You're a very brave girl," he said. "Come on."

He led me into the living room, where he pulled the cushions off his sofa and opened it up to reveal a hide-a-bed. He helped me lie down on my belly, and arranged pillows around me and under my head, so that I was facing the TV.

"I got you movies," he said, and held up a stack of DVD rental boxes from Martian Signal. "We got Pretty in Pink, The Blues Brothers, The Princess Bride, a Robin Williams stand-up tape and a really funny-looking porno called Edward Penishands."

I had to smile in spite of myself, in spite of the pain. He stepped into his kitchenette and came back with a box of chocolates. "Truffles," he said. "So you can laze on the sofa, eating bonbons."

I smiled more widely then.

"Such a beautiful smile," he said. "Want a cup of coffee?"

"No," I said, choking it out past my raw-from-screaming throat.

"All right," he said. "Which video do you want to watch?"

"Princess Bride," I said. I hadn't heard of any of them, but I didn't want to admit it.

"You don't want to start with Edward Penishands?"

Alan stood out front of the video shop for a while, watching Natalie wait on her customers. She was friendly without being perky, and it was clear that the mostly male clientele had a bit of a crush on her, as did her mooning, cow-eyed co-worker who was too distracted to efficiently shelve the videos he pulled from the box before him. Alan smiled. Hiring cute girls for your shop was tricky business. If they had brains, they'd sell the hell out of your stock and be entertaining as hell; but a lot of pretty girls (and boys!) had gotten a free ride in life and got affronted when you asked them to do any real work.

Natalie was clearly efficient, and Alan knew that she wasn't afraid of hard work, but it was good to see her doing her thing, quickly and efficiently taking people's money, answering their questions, handing them receipts, counting out change... He would have loved to have had someone like her working for him in one of his shops.

Once the little rush at the counter was cleared, he eased himself into the shop. Natalie was working for him, of course, in the impromptu assembly line in Kurt's storefront. She'd proven herself to be as efficient at assembling and testing the access points as she was at running the till.

"Alan!" she said, smiling broadly. Her co-worker turned and scowled jealously at him. "I'm going on break, okay?" she said to him, ignoring his sour puss.

"What, now?" he said petulantly.

"No, I thought I'd wait until we got busy again," she said, not unkindly, and smiled at him. "I'll be back in ten," she said.

She came around the counter with her cigs in one hand and her lighter in the other. "Coffee?" she said.

"Absolutely," he said, and led her up the street.

"You liking the job?" he said.

"It's better now," she said. "I've been bringing home two or three movies every night and watching them, just to get to know the stock, and I put on different things in the store, the kind of thing I'd never have watched before. Old horror movies, tentacle porn, crappy kung-fu epics. So now they all bow to me."

"That's great," Alan said. "And Kurt tells me you've been doing amazing work with him, too."

"Oh, that's just fun," she said. "I went along on a couple of dumpster runs with the gang. I found the most amazing cosmetics baskets at the Shiseido dumpster. Never would have thought that I'd go in for that girly stuff, but when you get it for free out of the trash, it feels pretty macha. Smell," she said, tilting her head and stretching her neck.

He sniffed cautiously. "Very macha," he said. He realized that the other patrons in the shop were eyeballing him, a middle-aged man, with his face buried in this alterna-girl's throat.

He remembered suddenly that he still hadn't put in a call to get her a job somewhere else, and was smitten with guilt. "Hey," he said. "Damn. I was supposed to call Tropic�l and see about getting you a job. I'll do it right away." He pulled a little steno pad out of his pocket and started jotting down a note to himself.

She put her hand out. "Oh, that's okay," she said. "I really like this job. I've been looking up all my old high school friends: You were right, everyone I ever knew has an account with Martian Signal. God, you should see the movies they rent."

"You keep that on file, huh?"

"Sure, everything. It's creepy."

"Do you need that much info?"

"Well, we need to know who took a tape out last if someone returns it and says that it's broken or recorded over or whatever --"

"So you need, what, the last couple months' worth of rentals?"

"Something like that. Maybe longer for the weirder tapes, they only get checked out once a year or so --"

"So maybe you keep the last two names associated with each tape?"

"That'd work."

"You