Read Online What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin - Free Book Online Page B

in the middle of the night, just like Santa Ana season, even though it had only been February, the Santa Anas months away . . .
    Or maybe that was just the way Kelly remembered it. Maybe it hadn’t been warm out at all.
    Kelly was on the sidewalk now. She heard someone making kissing noises at her out the window of a car, the blast of a horn. A girl on a Hollywood sidewalk never gets ignored, no matter how ignored she is everyplace else.
    Kelly kept up a fast pace and forced her eyes down until she saw pink stars under her feet. Hollywood Boulevard. She’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, but it didn’t matter. Her mother wasn’t working today and the last thing she wanted to do was see Mom, with her questions and her disappointment and her sad, headachy eyes. So she couldn’t go home either.
    She couldn’t go anywhere.
    â€œYou there,” said a hoarse voice. Kelly turned and saw a shirtless man with a stained yellow beard, leaning against the window of a dirty magazine store, twitching. He was beyond broken—as though some huge monster had chewed him to bits and swallowed him and spit him back up again. “You’ll die soon,” he said.
    Kelly’s stomach dropped. She whirled away from him and stepped into the crosswalk. She heard the screech of wheels and froze and closed her eyes, not caring as much as she should have cared. Not caring at all.
    But there was no impact. No crushing pain. Just Kelly’s own name, yelled at her. She opened her eyes and saw the red VW rabbit, Bellamy behind the wheel, hair wild around her face, black-framed Ray-Bans guarding her eyes. “Are you deaf or what?” Bellamy said. “We’ve been chasing you for blocks. We were honking.”
    Kelly stared at Bellamy, then at the spiky-haired boy in the passenger seat.
    â€œWell, don’t just stand there, dummy,” Bellamy said. “Get in the car.”
    â€œWhere were you? It’s been three days.”
    Bellamy sighed. “You go to school too much.”
    It wasn’t until Kelly had squeezed into the tiny backseat and Bellamy had lit a cigarette and started driving again, flipping on a British bootleg tape of a band called Joy Division and telling Kelly, “You have to listen to this song, it is so us ,” that the boy introduced himself.
    â€œI’m Vee,” he said, deep blue eyes fixed on Kelly’s face from the passenger-side mirror.
    â€œHi. I’m Kelly.”
    The song, Bellamy said, was called “She’s Lost Control.” For a while, Kelly and Vee listened to it in silence, both thinking about Bellamy saying us, both wondering which of them she’d meant to include.

CHAPTER 6
    â€œWords can be bent to your will in a way that visual art cannot,” says Bellamy Marshall, a smile curling her bright red lips. “In a way, all memoirists are fiction writers. But in visual art—in my art—all you have is the truth.”
    For the artist—who happens to be both the daughter of movie legend Sterling Marshall and a former classmate of convicted murderer Kelly Lund—the truth of her heady growing-up years in the early ’80s is alternately ugly and beautiful. Her art installations encompass both qualities—most notably Mona Lisa , which features a seven-foot-tall version of the iconic 1981 photograph taken of Lund outside the Los Angeles courthouse. Chilling in its own right, the photo takes on new meaning at this size, adorned with globs of gold and silver glitter and pink feathers—and accompanied, like all of Marshall’s creations, by an arresting “soundtrack.” In this case it’s Lund herself, recorded during a prison phone conversation with Marshall several years ago and played in a continuous loop thatgrows more terrifying with each repetition. “I miss you,” intones Lund’s flat, childlike voice. “Why won’t you visit?”
    â€œ Mona Lisa was utterly