Read Online Save the Enemy by Arin Greenwood - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Arin Greenwood
Ads: Link
night, the one that holds the gun, and which I believe and hope is still in my nightstand.
“I’ll come,” Pete says.
Pete puts his hand on my shoulder and steers me out the front door. We walk out onto the tree-lined residential street. It’s gotten chilly and I’m shivering. Pete takes off the leather jacket and hands it to me. I put it on. It is softer than silk, softer than velvet. I have that feeling again, of panic and elation and anxiety and family and the possibility of sex and the possibility of growing up and the possibility of losing—maybe even already having lost—everything I care about, all mixed into an alienating cocktail of a head-state.
Pete is in the here and now. He asks where we’re going.
“Georgetown,” I say.
“Then we should get a cab,” he says, raising his arm. And magically, one appears.
SCRAMBLED
Chapter Six
The cab driver is from Ethiopia and listens to NPR. He tells us that DC has the second-largest Ethiopian population in the world.
“Outside, of course, of Ethiopia,” he says.
Pete has been to Ethiopia. His mom, he says, used to be in the State Department. She was some sort of attaché. When he was a kid, she took him and his sister along on a lot of trips. He says he doesn’t remember much about the trip—he was young—but does recall eating raw beef by hand with a bunch of mid-level diplomats in Addis Ababa. Pete and the driver share information about a certain Ethiopian jazz musician who’d recently turned up in a club on U Street after being missing for some twenty years. They make tentative plans to go see him play together sometime soon. I half-listen. Pete takes my hand, keeps talking. Eavesdropping on this worldly conversation takes my mind off what we’re doing in this cab hardly at all.
I watch out the window as the city passes, from yuppie Dupont through somewhat sterile Foggy Bottom intoGeorgetown. We drive along M Street for a little bit. The gorgeous girls with glossy hair and leather boots have shopping bags, even near eleven at night. They do not wear flowered dresses. The boys have popped collars. They look like assholes. “Date-rapey,” Mom would have said. She liked to point out guys who she thought would carry roofies. She told me never to accept a drink from one of them, but that it could, in some circumstances, be acceptable to have them pay for dinner. Helpful life lessons were Mom’s forte. Oh, Mom. Were you joking? Did you mean it? Did you teach me what to look out for well enough? Did Dad teach me how to get myself out of the fixes you didn’t teach me to avoid? I look for more assholes; I look for Roscoe. I miss my parents. I have this crazy feeling of wanting to make babies with Pete.
The cab takes us up to O Street and along the street of beautiful houses. The houses here look like the ones in Old Town but somehow, without any clear visual difference (to me), they look even more expensive. The cab stops in front of a large stone house. The meter reads $14.75. I look at Pete. He pulls out his wallet.
“I’m sorry,” I say to him.
“You’re very cute,” he says, as we get out of the car, and I realize, with a sick stab in my stomach, that this is the very spot where my mother was killed. I haven’t been back to this spot since the week after she was found there, shot on the sidewalk. We kept going back to look for Roscoe. Dad made me knock on all the doors on the block to see if anyone had seen our dog, because he doesn’t like talking to strangers. No one had seen a dog. Several people invited me in to have cups of tea, though. They saw the crying and cold girl asking about the dog that went missing when her mother was killed outside on the sidewalk. I declined, since Dad didn’t want me leaving him alone outside.
I don’t know how I could not have realized we were coming back now to that same place. I suppose the world goes on, reusing the same settings. Or else that my mother being killed here, and P.F. Greenawalt’s
“I’ll come,” Pete says.
Pete puts his hand on my shoulder and steers me out the front door. We walk out onto the tree-lined residential street. It’s gotten chilly and I’m shivering. Pete takes off the leather jacket and hands it to me. I put it on. It is softer than silk, softer than velvet. I have that feeling again, of panic and elation and anxiety and family and the possibility of sex and the possibility of growing up and the possibility of losing—maybe even already having lost—everything I care about, all mixed into an alienating cocktail of a head-state.
Pete is in the here and now. He asks where we’re going.
“Georgetown,” I say.
“Then we should get a cab,” he says, raising his arm. And magically, one appears.
SCRAMBLED
Chapter Six
The cab driver is from Ethiopia and listens to NPR. He tells us that DC has the second-largest Ethiopian population in the world.
“Outside, of course, of Ethiopia,” he says.
Pete has been to Ethiopia. His mom, he says, used to be in the State Department. She was some sort of attaché. When he was a kid, she took him and his sister along on a lot of trips. He says he doesn’t remember much about the trip—he was young—but does recall eating raw beef by hand with a bunch of mid-level diplomats in Addis Ababa. Pete and the driver share information about a certain Ethiopian jazz musician who’d recently turned up in a club on U Street after being missing for some twenty years. They make tentative plans to go see him play together sometime soon. I half-listen. Pete takes my hand, keeps talking. Eavesdropping on this worldly conversation takes my mind off what we’re doing in this cab hardly at all.
I watch out the window as the city passes, from yuppie Dupont through somewhat sterile Foggy Bottom intoGeorgetown. We drive along M Street for a little bit. The gorgeous girls with glossy hair and leather boots have shopping bags, even near eleven at night. They do not wear flowered dresses. The boys have popped collars. They look like assholes. “Date-rapey,” Mom would have said. She liked to point out guys who she thought would carry roofies. She told me never to accept a drink from one of them, but that it could, in some circumstances, be acceptable to have them pay for dinner. Helpful life lessons were Mom’s forte. Oh, Mom. Were you joking? Did you mean it? Did you teach me what to look out for well enough? Did Dad teach me how to get myself out of the fixes you didn’t teach me to avoid? I look for more assholes; I look for Roscoe. I miss my parents. I have this crazy feeling of wanting to make babies with Pete.
The cab takes us up to O Street and along the street of beautiful houses. The houses here look like the ones in Old Town but somehow, without any clear visual difference (to me), they look even more expensive. The cab stops in front of a large stone house. The meter reads $14.75. I look at Pete. He pulls out his wallet.
“I’m sorry,” I say to him.
“You’re very cute,” he says, as we get out of the car, and I realize, with a sick stab in my stomach, that this is the very spot where my mother was killed. I haven’t been back to this spot since the week after she was found there, shot on the sidewalk. We kept going back to look for Roscoe. Dad made me knock on all the doors on the block to see if anyone had seen our dog, because he doesn’t like talking to strangers. No one had seen a dog. Several people invited me in to have cups of tea, though. They saw the crying and cold girl asking about the dog that went missing when her mother was killed outside on the sidewalk. I declined, since Dad didn’t want me leaving him alone outside.
I don’t know how I could not have realized we were coming back now to that same place. I suppose the world goes on, reusing the same settings. Or else that my mother being killed here, and P.F. Greenawalt’s
Similar Books
