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

Epiplectic Bicycle, The Glorious Nosebleed. There was a zither and a tabla. A hand-carved bellows beside the fireplace. Dark blue candles, in pewter candlesticks, that were lit every night at dinner. Also a candle snuffer.

Suffusing everything was the faded smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace, and the stronger smell of eucalyptus branches in earthenware jugs. On top of that, when he came in wet from outside, the musty smell of Hamish.

Hamish was Imogen’s cairn terrier, and she also had a brother named Nicholas. He was older than Imogen by four years. He was large and shaggy and beautiful, not an athlete but the co-captain of the debate team at his school. For Mari, who didn’t have siblings, his presence was slightly stupefying. If they encountered each other in the kitchen, he would greet her with an electric smile and a booming “Hey you!” but then have nothing more to say. They would go about their business in cordial silence. Wanting to feel like Johnny Marr, she once asked Nicholas if he would show her how to play a chord on his guitar, and after a strenuous minute of wrestling her hand into position, he finally said, “Huh. You’ve kind of got stubby fingers, don’t you.”

When Bree first became friends with them, she was unrestrained on the subject of Nicholas. She embarrassed both Imogen and Mari by acting ridiculous as soon as he left the room: shaking her head in disbelief, fanning her face with her hand. Eventually she caught on and cut it out, or at least she stopped doing it in front of them. But that didn’t mean her worshipful feelings had changed. At school, during midday lulls, Melanie liked to liven things up by going around the lunch table and making each girl disclose the identity of her crush, and the moment it was her turn Bree would pause, look down at her tray, try not to smile. “No one” would be her faltering response, a performance that was tedious for Mari to watch. She could only imagine how bad it had to be for Imogen.

Yet Imogen continued to invite them both—not actually invite, because inviting was a nicety no longer needed, but simply to accept that on any given weekend Bree and Mari would be coming over. By the eighth grade, they had reached an unspoken agreement that among the three houses, Imogen’s was the one they preferred—the closest to school, the most comfortable, the coziest, her parents visibly amused by their enthusiasms. As if in anticipation, the pantry at Imogen’s house was kept magically full. Every Friday afternoon they would find it restocked with the snacks they liked most: cheese-flavored popcorn, kettle-cooked potato chips, the dark chocolate biscuits with the picture of the French schoolboy pressed into them. No oranges or bananas looking tired in a fruit bowl on the counter, but a basket of washed strawberries chilling in the refrigerator, or freshly cut cubes of pineapple, waiting to be eaten—which they wouldn’t hesitate to help themselves to, feeling healthy in advance of phoning in their order at Dino’s.

Imogen’s father didn’t complain about driving them to the video rental place, where the decision-making process was long and difficult, Mari going off on her own to comb through the old titles, in search of A Taste of Honey or Billy Liar or anything else about growing up working-class in the north of England, and Imogen and Bree tracking her down in the back of the store to say that the only black-and-white movie they would consent to was Psycho. Mari was in the thick of developing her sensibility, an essentially solitary endeavor, yet she liked doing so within earshot of familiar voices in the comedy section a few aisles away. Without a word she’d wander off, following the pulse of nameless feelings and associations, knowing that at some point her friends would have to come find her. When they did, they were bearing copies of The Blues Brothers and Better Off Dead, but in the end they settled on Psycho, not unhappily for Mari: Anthony Perkins had certain qualities—delicate features, button-down shirt, near-black hair, pained smile and perpetual unease—that marked him as probably belonging to the shadowbox she spent every spare moment assembling.

She was not alone in pursuing large, private, ongoing projects. It had become impossible to deny the fact that Bree’s appearance was changing. The glasses were gone: her parents had finally relented and deemed her ready for soft contacts. Her hair, which she’d been growing out, turned red overnight—or Titian, as she described it jokingly, like Nancy Drew’s. She corrected anyone who said she’d dyed it, pointing out that “henna is all-natural and actually good for you.” Though she remained as short as Mari, she had grown confoundingly slim, and was now behaving like a thin person—wearing tops with spaghetti straps, slicing off the legs of her old jeans—and while Mari tried not to take it personally, she did experience an occasional pang of abandonment. Cow no longer applied in the affectionate plural.

Not all Bree’s self-improvements were successful. One morning she arrived at school looking different in a way that Mari couldn’t pinpoint.

“It’s my eyebrows,” Bree said. “You hold a pencil along the side of your nose and where the pencil meets your eyebrow, that’s where you start plucking.”

She took a yellow pencil from inside her desk and pressed it up to her cheek to demonstrate. Now Mari saw what was strange about Bree’s face. She asked, “Are you supposed to pluck from that side of the pencil or this side?” and touched the raw gap between Bree’s brows to show where she meant.

“Ohhhhhhhh.” Bree exhaled, letting the pencil fall. “I wondered why mine didn’t look like the picture. You’re saying they’re too far apart.” She smiled bravely at Mari. “But that’s what makeup is for, right? I can always fill them in.”

The rigors of change did not discourage her. It required trial and error, dedication, regular servicing. She had taken to shaving not only