Read Online The Cake House by Latifah Salom - Free Book Online

where to sit that wouldn’t disrupt the obsessive order, I lingered in the center. Alex wasn’t paying attention, going through his records, taking some out, tucking others back in. I inched toward his desk, daring to sit on the chair.
    His desk was pristine—not a pencil out of place, papers stacked, and a dictionary and thesaurus ready and available. Not a speck of dust on the desk surface, with his desk calendar, stapler, and scissors all at right angles.
    I took the tape dispenser and pulled and ripped off a long strip, then taped my mouth shut, adding a second strip. The adhesive tickled my nose, but I kept adding more until the moisture from my mouth made a bubble. With my mouth sealed shut I went behind him and tapped his shoulder. When he turned around I raised my hands like claws and mumbled as threateningly as I could before I started laughing, ruining the effect.
    “Very funny,” he said, reaching to rip the tape from my face, but I sidestepped.
    On one corner of the desk stood a framed photograph of a woman who shared Alex’s distant, chilled expression.Not beautiful, or at least not the way my mother was beautiful. But perhaps she might have been pretty in the way that novels liked to call “striking” or “handsome.” She aimed her stare at the camera, daring it to take her picture and trap her in a plain metal frame.
    I picked it up.
    “That’s my mother,” said Alex.
    Stunned that he volunteered this information, I peeled away the tape across my mouth. “Where is she?”
    “New York. Paris. London. I don’t know. Somewhere else.”
    “Do you talk to her?”
    “She calls sometimes,” he said, speaking almost before I finished asking my question, and then he took the frame and stuffed it into a drawer in his desk. He crouched by the stereo and changed records, choosing a violin concerto instead of rock music, haunting and vicious and beautiful. He was like a yo-yo, landing in my hand for one second but then gone again in the next. It kept me wanting more. I couldn’t keep up. And now, as before, a subtle change occurred after he mentioned his mother—he couldn’t sit still.
    “Sing that song.” He licked his lips, twirling an album cover in his hands so that I couldn’t see what the picture was, and started humming my mother’s lullaby despite its clashing with the violin. Above our heads, reflected light from the red plastic stereo cover danced on the ceiling, not quite on beat but almost: a second too late, a beat off. It made me dizzy.
    Did he ask all the girls to sing for him? My voice picked up where his had faltered, at first humming, but then I sang the words. The violin hit a high note and drowned out my voice.
    “What does it mean?” he asked.
    “It’s French,” I said. “About a little swallow that steals three sacks of wheat and then gets hit three times with a stick.”
    We lapsed into silence, not entirely comfortable. He flicked through his records. I thought of my friends from before, Sofie and José, wondered if they wondered where I had gone. I hadn’t found the courage to call Sofie yet. Even though it had been only a few weeks, already I felt like I had been gone from my old life for years. I didn’t know what I would say to her. José had probably moved on to another girl, maybe even Sofie; she had bigger breasts, she was tall, with long curly hair. They seemed like specks of dust to me, my memories of them, my life in that apartment, all that came before. I had moved so far past I didn’t know my way back. My father’s death had pushed me out of reach.
    I slid like Jell-O onto the floor, plopping onto my back. “Are you popular?”
    He lay next to me on the floor. “Define popular.”
    I rested my head on my hand. “Who was that girl, from yesterday?”
    There was a trace of amusement in his eyes, as if he had expected me to ask that question, and I wished that I could take it back. “No one,” he said.
    I didn’t believe him. Was she his girlfriend?