Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(27)

Anyway, my first stop was Sam Goody’s. I’d been buying records there for years, so I recognized a lot of the sales staff. Most of them listened to different kinds of music than me—they were more of an arena rock crowd, Journey, Kansas, Starship—but they were usually nice.

I had seen the guy behind the counter a bunch of times. He was tall and thin, with pale skin and hair so blond it was almost white. He looked like a Q-tip.

“Hi,” I said.

“Can I help you?”

“I was wondering if you’re hiring?”

“Oh, sweetie,” the Q-tip said, almost laughing. “This place isn’t for you.”

“Huh?”

Then, I swear to God, the guy looked me up and down from my head to my toes, taking in the whole package. I felt naked.

And do you know what he said?

“Facts of Life doesn’t really fit in around here.”

I could’ve killed Agnes.

“Try the bookstore,” the Q-tip told me.

So I did.





HARBINGER JONES


Cheyenne’s announcement at rehearsal that she had a job caught us off guard. I was too stunned to speak, and Johnny just looked dejected. Wait, strike that. He looked rejected. Like Chey getting a job without his knowledge was a personal affront. Only Richie spoke.

“Fucking A, short stuff. What’re you gonna be doing?”

She explained that she was going to be working at the bookstore in Cross County Shopping Center.

I knew that store well.

When I was younger and going through the long and tortured recovery from the lightning strike, books became some of my best friends.

I remember this one day, I was sitting in the science-fiction section reading a Robert Heinlein book, when all of a sudden there was a big commotion coming from the other side of the stacks. I must’ve been twelve and had convinced my mom it was okay to leave me there while she went shopping at Gimbels.

The bookstore was usually a quiet place, library quiet, so the noise was startling. My first reaction was to shrink and hide, to make myself disappear. The more raucous something was, the more I wanted to avoid being seen. Commotions almost never ended well for me.

But this was a happy noise; I ignored my inner voice and peered around the corner.

A man in priest’s clothes stood in the center of a small entourage as the store manager—a guy named Guy—was setting up a table for a book signing. I’d only ever seen a signing here once before, and almost no one came. Already, seven or eight people were on line for this priest.

Only, he wasn’t a priest. He was some kind of radio disc jockey who had written an autobiography and was dressing as a priest as a kind of gimmick. I must’ve stepped all the way out of the science-fiction section without realizing it, because the disc jockey looked straight at me and we locked eyes. For a minute I didn’t know which way this was going to go.

“I’d hate to see the other guy,” he said. Then his gang—and to me, they’d gone from being an entourage to a gang—turned and looked at me. Their audible gasps were drowned out by their laughter at their boss’s incredible wit. I turned on my heel and went back to the books, none of which seemed to want to judge me. I’d been through enough episodes like that in my life to let it wash over me. I picked up the Heinlein book—I think it was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress—and started reading again.

A few minutes later, as more and more fans arrived for the signing and the noise from the other side of the bookcases grew, a woman, one of the DJ’s gang, poked her head around the corner and found me.

“Hey, kid,” she said. I looked up, waiting for the punch line. “He didn’t mean anything by it. That kind of humor is just part of his act.”

That kind of humor? I wanted to ask her why people thought it was funny to cut someone else down. Why they thought it was okay to put someone in a situation where they had to defend themselves when there was no possible way of actually doing so. Why cruelty was so fucking hilarious.

But I didn’t. I wasn’t wired to ask those questions. Besides, I knew the answers. People act like that to make themselves feel superior. People suck.

“So,” the woman continued, “he wants you to have this.” It was a signed copy of the disc jockey’s book. She smiled as she handed it to me. I took it, and she walked away without another word. Part of me wanted to forgive the guy and to embrace and cherish that book. That’s what I always did. I made excuses for people, found reasons for their behavior. But this was different; it was a kind of turning point for me. It’s the moment where I think I finally got smart enough to be jaded.

I’ll bet any amount of money that the priest-disc-jockey douche bag had no idea that woman had given me the signed book. She was doing damage control. I moved a few books on the shelf in front of me and shoved the signed copy all the way to the back. It’s probably still sitting there today.





CHEYENNE BELLE


I wasn’t the biggest reader in the world, but I did like books. I went through a phase when I was fourteen when I read everything I could by V. C. Andrews. It was horror-romance stuff. You can eat it like candy.

Since then the only things I’d read were the books assigned in my high school English classes and maybe one or two more books during the summer.