Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

Whenever they sang “Jerusalem” in morning meeting, she and Imogen and Bree would entertain themselves by surreptitiously acting out the words; they would mime the seizing of the bow, and the spear, and the countenance divine shining forth upon the hills, and they would attack the low note in “arrows of de-sire” with fake solemnity, but even as they joked around, Mari found the song unspeakably beautiful. That ardent phrase—“Bring me my chariot of fire!”—stirred her.

When it touched her face, the cake batter was not cold, as she thought it might be; it felt only thick and wet. Her eyes were closed at this point. And her mouth too, of course. Nothing—not Duncan Hines, or egg-borne bacteria, or anything not her own—would cross the threshold. Her lips were squeezed so tightly shut that they tingled. No one was getting in or out: she kept herself intact, impervious to the panting weight of Imogen and Bree on top of her. With satisfaction, she felt their bodies slacken, the energy dissolving—they were thwarted, and there was nothing to do now but smear batter on Mari’s face. Even with her eyes shut, she could tell when it was Imogen doing it and when it was Bree. Like in Chariots of Fire, where the two men ran extremely fast but for different reasons: the Scottish one because he believed so much in God, the Jewish one because he wanted to fit in and show that he was better than all the anti-Semites he met in college. The perfunctory swipes across her cheek—that was Imogen, having already lost interest in the whole thing—but in the precisely centered dabs on her forehead, her nose, her mouth, her chin, she felt the warmth of Bree’s attention, her thoroughness and care.

After they hoisted themselves off her, Mari made her way unsteadily toward the hall bathroom, eyes slitted and face sticky, and it was here that she caught a whiff of the cake baking in the oven. She had never smelled anything like it before. Initially it reminded her of the cloying scent of Play-Doh, which she had always hated, and in fact hated so much that when small she’d refused to touch the stuff, but as she inhaled again she found something spreading underneath the sweetness, a smell similar to that of butter and eggs and vanilla and flour but not quite the real thing, a smell that was artificial but also intoxicating and somehow more intoxicating for being fake. She didn’t have to taste it to know ahead of time how much she was going to like this cake. How moist it would be, and warm, how its faint chemical aftertaste would make her go back for more. Wiping off her face above the sink, she decided to tell her mother that from now on the only kind of cake she wanted for her birthday was yellow cake from a box.

In the middle of seventh grade, Mari heard the Smiths for the first time, on a late-night radio show that played the day’s most requested songs. She had to spend extra money when buying their record because it was imported from the U.K.; it had a Dutch-blue cover with a black-and-white photograph on it of a handsome man in profile, in a tank top—a man who turned out not to be one of the Smiths, despite a superficial resemblance to their bass player. Printed tinily on the inside record sleeve was every word to every song, which was how she learned that the correct words were I am the son and the heir and not I am the sun and the air, as she’d originally thought. At first she felt unsophisticated for having heard it this way, but then it occurred to her that maybe the ambiguity was deliberate, a mark of genius.

Once she bought the record, the Smiths became the most important part of Mari’s life. She made friends with a girl in her class named Melanie because Melanie was the only other person she knew who’d heard of them. For Mari’s birthday, Melanie wrote a pretend letter in which Johnny Marr, the guitarist, declared his love for her, and though Mari put the letter in her treasure box, she didn’t plan on rereading it. Speaking as herself, Melanie pointed out that the similarity between Mari’s first name and Johnny’s last name couldn’t be entirely coincidence.

Imogen and Bree didn’t have strong feelings either way about the Smiths—Imogen liked soft rock with soaring choruses, and Bree listened to the kind of dance music played on Kiss 108—but still they were Mari’s best friends. She went back and forth between trying to convert Imogen and Bree to her excellent tastes and wanting to keep the Smiths as something sacredly her own. But how could you help but share that which took up so much space in your mind? She talked about them daily, and though her friends wouldn’t necessarily know a Smiths song if it hit them over the head, they could recite the names and instruments of the band members, and could recognize them in photos; they now knew that Manchester was a city not only in New Hampshire but also in Northern England, that there was nothing Morrissey relished more than going to a stationery shop and sniffing envelopes. They trailed behind Mari and took turns carrying her book bag as she drifted down the dim aisles, inhaling, grazing the reams of paper with her fingertips, attempting through her senses to transport her soul elsewhere.

When that didn’t work, they went across the street to get pizza. Each of them could order automatically for the others: Bree always got sausage and mushroom with a medium-size Sprite. Imogen liked Hawaiian, her favorite meat product being Canadian bacon, but Dino’s didn’t offer that by the slice; you had to order a whole pizza. For just a slice, she’d take pepperoni, as long as there wasn’t too much oil pooling in the pepperoni cups. Mari had stopped eating animals