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

"You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock and leave the people's world for people."

Something snapped in Alan. "Canada for Canadians, right? Send 'em back where they came from, right?" He stalked to the railing that divided their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.

Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.

"You think you can make me feel like a racist, make me guilty?" His voice squeaked on the last syllable. "Man, the only day I wouldn't piss on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak."

Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.

He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.

Then he grabbed Krishna's wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried spider's nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.

"I'm every bit the monster my brother is," he hissed in Krishna's ear. "I made him the monster he is. Don't squirm," he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. "Listen. You can stay away from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world of terrible hurt. It's up to you. Nod if you understand."

Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan broke it by cracking him across the ear again.

"Nod if you understand, goddammit," he said, his vision going fuzzily black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now, he would struggle free and they'd be in a clinch.

He remembered kneeling on Davey's chest, holding the rock over him and realizing that he didn't know what to do next, taking Davey to their father.

Only Davey had struck him first. He'd only been restraining him, defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. "Nod if you understand, Krishna," he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.

Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the Market.

He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second, Alan harbored a germ of hope that he'd bested Krishna and so scared him into leaving him alone.

Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he'd just amassed, what it would take to pay it off.

He picked up Alan's wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn't one of the cheapies he'd bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather Irish crystal that he'd found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.

Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.

He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps, like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound, leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that it hurtled straight for Alan's forehead, moving like a bullet.

Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him, disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back into his house.

The taste of blood was in Alan's mouth. More blood coursed down his neck from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of crystal.

He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.

The mountain path had grown over with weeds and thistles and condoms and cans and inexplicable maxi-pads and doll parts.

She clung to his hand as he pushed through it, stepping in brackish puddles and tripping in sink holes. He navigated the trail like a mountain goat, while Mimi lagged behind, tugging his arm every time she misstepped, jerking it painfully in its socket.

He turned to her, ready to snap, Keep the fuck up, would you? and then swallowed the words. Her eyes were red-rimmed and scared, her full lips drawn down into a clown's frown, bracketed by deep lines won by other moments of sorrow.

He helped her beside him and turned his back on the mountain, faced the road and the town and the car with its trunk with its corpse with his brother, and he put an arm around her shoulders, a brotherly arm, and hugged her to him.

"How're you doing there?" he said, trying to make his voice light, though it came out so leaden the words nearly thudded in the wet dirt as they fell from his mouth.

She looked into the dirt at their feet and he took her chin and turned her face up so that she was looking into his eyes, and he kissed her forehead in a brotherly way, like an older brother coming home with a long-lost sister.

"I used to want to know all the secrets," she said in the smallest voice. "I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water, your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterward with lemon-juice they won't stink.

"I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken -- a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: To be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them.

"I don't want to learn secrets anymore, Andrew. She shrugged off his arm and took a faltering step down the slope, back toward the road.

"I'll wait in the car, okay?"

"Mimi," he said. He felt angry at her. How could she be so selfish as to have a crisis now, here, at this place that meant so much to him?

"Mimi," he said, and swallowed his anger.

His three brothers stayed on his sofa for a week, though they only left one wet towel on the floor, only left one sticky plate in the sink, one fingerprint-smudged glass on the counter.

He'd just opened his first business, the junk shop -- not yet upscale enough to be called an antiques shop -- and he was pulling the kinds of long hours known only to ER interns and entrepreneurs, showing up at 7 to do the books, opening at 10, working until three, then turning things over to a minimum-wage kid for two hours while he drove to the city's thrift shops and picked for inventory, then working until eight to catch the evening trade, then answering creditors and fighting with the landlord until ten, staggering into bed at eleven to sleep a few hours before doing it all over again.

So he gave them a set of keys and bought them a MetroPass and stuffed an old wallet with $200 in twenties and wrote his phone number on the brim of a little pork pie hat that looked good on their head and turned them loose on the city.

The shop had all the difficulties of any shop -- snarky customers, shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of it. He'd never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last.

Until his brothers arrived.

He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he'd wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he'd inspire them to see what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they'd gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon, as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George's hangdog expression at the thought.

They'd walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a Bakelite coffee carafe.

The arguments went like this:

George: Look, it's a milk container!

Ed: I don't think that that's for milk.

Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable.

George: Why don't you think it's for milk? Look at the silver inside, that's to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold and fresh.

Fred: Put it down, you're going to break it.

George: Fine, I'll put it down, but tell me, why don't you think it's for milk?

Ed: Because it's a thermos container, and that's to keep hot stuff hot, and it's got a screwtop and whatever it's made of looks like it'd take a hard knock without breaking.

And so on, nattering at each other like cave men puzzling over a walkman, until Alan was called upon to settle the matter with the authoritative answer.

It got so that he set his alarm for four a.m. so that he could sneak past their snoring form on the sofa and so avoid the awkward, desperate pleas to let them come with him into the shop and cadge a free breakfast of poutine and eggs from the Harvey's next door while they were at it. George had taken up coffee on his second day in the city, bugging the other two until they got him a cup, six or seven cups a day, so that they flitted from place to place like a hummingbird, thrashed in their sleep, babbled when they spoke.

It came to a head on the third night, when they dropped by the shop while he was on the phone and ducked into the back room in order to separate into threes again, with George wearing the pork pie hat even though it was a size too big for his head and hung down around his ears.

Adam was talking to a woman who'd come into the shop that afternoon and greatly admired an institutional sofa from the mid-seventies whose lines betrayed a pathetic slavish devotion to Danish Moderne aesthetics. The woman had sat on the sofa, admired the sofa, walked around the sofa, hand trailing on its