Free Girl Defective by Simmone Howell

he said.
    I walked out then. It was four-ish. The sun was climbing and the shoppers were rampant. I felt stupid and hungover. My throat all thick. I clomped along and didn’t stop until I was standing on the little gray bridge looking down at the Purple Onion in all its brush-fenced testicular glory.

SOFT-BOILED
    N ANCY WAS A LOUSY waitress. She couldn’t hide her boredom. She stood with her pen poised over her notebook and stared past the customers’ faces. Even with her mouth all twisted she looked beautiful: her hair piled on top of her head, a big silk rose pinned to one side; red lipstick. Nancy’s apron was longer than her shorts. Her skin looked like something you could sleep on. I hung around the spider grass feeling inferior for a while and then moseyed down to the sandbags that skirted the dome. Nancy grinned when she saw me. She urged me over and hollered to no one, “Taking a break!” And then we were arranging ourselves on the milk crates outside, our faces turned to the sea.
    â€œDollbaby, I’m dying! Do you know how hard it is to be polite to those fuckers? I feel like I’m in one of those boxes they used to lock hysterical women in back before they invented Valium.”
    â€œYou don’t look hysterical.” I stopped short. Nancy was wearing a silver scarf, same as the girls from Otis’s gig. She had it tied like a neckerchief. I couldn’t stop staring at it.
    â€œWhat?” she asked.
    â€œNothing,” I said. Then: “Where did you go? You just left me there. Anything could have happened.”
    Nancy was unmoved. “And did it?”
    â€œDid what?”
    â€œDid anything happen?”
    I told her how I’d seen Luke Casey pasting up the picture of Mia, and how I’d gone home in a cop car and Dad was pissed off but yet to hand down his punishment. Nancy nodded, a small smile playing on her lips.
    â€œDollbaby, I don’t know. You say you want to go to the zoo, and then you get upset when the monkeys throw shit on you.” She used her cigarette like a pointer. “You had an adventure.”
    â€œI did, didn’t I?” I said in surprise.
    â€œI knew you’d be okay.” Nancy cracked her neck. She looked proud and tough. In the pulp fiction novel of our life Nancy was a doll, a dame, a dizzy broad. But I was soft-boiled. I watched everything from a distance with my knuckles wedged between my teeth.
    â€œWhat else?” she asked.
    I told her about Luke Casey in the shop, on my stool, looking hot, but wholly uneducated in the area of popular music.
    â€œHe might be sucking up to Dad,” I added.
    â€œLet me tell you how to handle Luke Casey,” Nancy said. She had a copy of Neon open and was systematicallyburning holes through random hipsters on the “Seen/Scene” page with her cigarette.
    â€œTell your dad he’s frotting you.”
    â€œWhat’s frotting?”
    â€œRubbing up against you.”
    â€œThere’s a word for that?”
    â€œIt’s French. The French have a word for everything.” Nancy tossed her hair and rearranged her scarf, and that was when I saw the clutch of plum-dark love-bites. She saw me looking.
    â€œDid you have an adventure?” I asked.
    Nancy’s lips were pressed tight. Then she turned to me and her eyes were shining. “Okay,” she gushed. “I’m in love. I’m, like, annihilated. He’s not like anyone I’ve met before. You saw him, right?”
    â€œI saw him.”
    â€œSo after the Paradise he takes me to this penthouse, and it has three-hundred-sixty-degree views and everything in there is, like, new. I was scared to sit down.”
    I couldn’t imagine Nancy being scared of anything.
    â€œHe had his friend with him. The fat guitarist. Rocky. He had a girl too.”
    â€œSounds cozy. What did you do?”
    Nancy sighed. “Everything.”
    I forced a smile and waited for the