Read Online M. T. Anderson by Feed - Free Book Online Page A

at the tops of all the suburb pods? And all over the top of them, it looked like it was moving, like there was a black goo? So I turned up the brightness, and I went down, and I shined it more bright, and it turned out the black moving goo was all these hordes of cockroaches. There were miles of them, running all over the tops of the domes. They kept on trying to get out of the light, so wherever you shined it, there would be this —”
    “I’d like to mount the light on my belly,” Violet said. “Would that be possible?”
    He looked at her funny. “With a swivel head?”
    “Sure. Then I could swivel it.”
    “What’s this for?”
    “Something special,” she said, in this low voice. She rubbed my arm up and down, sexily.
    He was like, “Whoa. I can’t even think.” He gave me the thumbs-up.
    She winked at me. It was kind of a turn-on.
    She got him to send her all of the feedstats for the lamp, but then she didn’t buy it. She didn’t have it mounted. Instead, she thanked him a real lot, and then she took me out of the store, and I was starting to get the picture and think it was all pretty funny.
    We kept going from place to place, asking for weird shit we didn’t buy. She took me to a rug store, and a store with old chests and pieces of eight and shit, and we went to a toy store and she asked them to explain the world of Bleakazoid action figures, which is a dumbass name if I ever heard one, but they explained it all. It was mainly they were these muscular people from a parallel world, which is usually how it is. We didn’t buy anything.
    We ran through the big hallway with her tapping her head and saying, “Hear that? The music?” It was pop songs. “They have charts that show which chords are most thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles. Step lively. Over here.”
    We went to a clothing store and she held up all these stupid dresses, and the girl there was like,
I’m helping a weird kid, so I’m going to be really fake,
so she kept smiling fake, and nodding really serious at all the dresses Violet held up, and she was all, “That will look great,” and Violet said, “I don’t know. D’you think? He’s pretty wide in the chest.”
    The girl looked at me, and I was frozen. So I said, “Yeah. I work out.”
    Violet asked me, “What are you? What’s your cup size?”
    I shrugged and played along. “Like, nine and a half?” I guessed. “That’s my shoe size.”
    Violet said, “I think he’d like something slinky, kind of silky.”
    I said, “As long as you can stop me from rubbing myself up against a wall the whole time.”
    “Okay,” said Violet, holding up her hands like she was annoyed. “Okay, the chemise last week was a mistake.”
    I practically started to laugh snot into my hand.
    We went to some more clothing stores, and we looked at all these dumb sweaters and pretended we liked them, and we looked at makeup that she wouldn’t wear, and a gravel-tumbler, and we went to a DVS Pharmacy Superstore, and she comparison-shopped for home endoscopy kits.
    We were looking at the endoscopy kits when she started whispering to me, “For the last two days, okay? I’ve been earmarking all this different stuff as if I want to buy it — you know, a pennywhistle, a barrel of institutional lard, some really cheesy boy-pop, a sarong, an industrial lawn mower, all of this info on male pattern baldness, business stationery, barrettes . . . And I’ve been looking up house painting for the Antarctic homeowner, and the way people get married in Tonga, and genealogy home pages in the Czech Republic . . . I don’t know, it’s all out there, waiting.”
    I picked up one box. “This one is the cheapest. You swallow the pills and they take pictures as they go down.”
    She said, “Once you start looking at all this stuff, all of