Free The Mark by Jen Nadol Page A

choice,” I said to the empty apartment.

chapter 9
    I spent about an hour putting away my clothes and checking out the rest of the apartment. The only other rooms were the bathroom, which Drea had forgotten to show me, and her room, which I’m sure she hadn’t forgotten but I wanted to see anyway.
    I stood by the sofa looking out the big windows to the busy street below, feeling more energized than I had in weeks. If Drea wasn’t exaggerating—and my brief experience told me she wasn’t—I would have this place to myself a lot of the time. It would be like having my own apartment, a cool one at that, in a new town, with fresh, unknown faces. Not bad. Maybe Nan had had the right idea after all.
    I decided to head out, attaching the keys Drea left me to my ring that still carried the ones for our Ashville apartment, my bike lock, and some other randoms.
    The streets of downtown Bering were clean and lined with mature trees and iron lampposts. It was small, comfortable, and naggingly familiar, but in a good way. I felt at home. It was more than Bering being like Ashville, I thought. This is where I was from. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I was born among these people, maybe in the same hospital as some, our mothers sharing a room or a doctor.
    I wandered for a while, then, thinking I’d take Petra’s advice and pick up a City Paper, circled back to the bookstore below Drea’s apartment. I sat on an iron bench outside and flipped open the newsprint magazine. Right away I saw what Petra meant—there was a section dubiously titled “The Weekly Wassup,” with lists of street fairs, outdoor concerts, poetry readings, a lot of them taking place right downtown or on the campus of Lennox University.
    I’d circled a few that might be worth checking out, when three girls and a boy came out of the bookstore, smiling and laughing. They wore short-sleeved shirts and tank tops a little too early and reminded me of my classmates, even myself before Nan died, enjoying the final days of school. They sauntered down the street and, having already gone through most of the City Paper , I tucked it into my book bag and followed them.
    “… not as good as The Dead Zone, ” the boy was saying as I fell into step a few paces behind.
    “Or Salem’s Lot . Or Carrie, ” a girl with short dark hair, nearly a crew cut, added.
    “I never liked Carrie, ” a different girl, pretty with red hair, said.
    “Maybe not the same caliber,” Crew Cut agreed. “But what about The Stand ?”
    Yes, I thought. I wished I could join in. I’d add Cujo to the list. Maybe not the same caliber either, but I could never get the final scenes—the desperate mother, her dying child, the foaming dog—out of my mind.
    “Anyway,” the boy said, leading us around the corner, “it wasn’t bad. Just not my fave.”
    “Well, I’ll take it when you’re done,” the redhead said.
    I followed them as they filed into a storefront coffee shop, its velvet drapes held back by thick brown ribbon. The rough wooden floor was covered with threadbare rugs in faded jewel tones. The smell inside, rich and spiced, was immediately calming, and without thinking, I breathed deeply, nearly closing my eyes.
    “I love that coffee smell too.” I caught just a glimpse of the man on his way out—dark-rimmed glasses, floppy hair, older than me: twenty maybe. Cute. In a buttoned-down shirt kind of way.
    I smiled back and made my way to the counter.
    Fifteen minutes later, I was snuggled in a well-used chair near the window, steaming coffee by my side. I felt good, I realized, better than I had in weeks. “If you don’t like the view, change the scenery,” Nan used to say. It wasn’t that I thought I could escape the mark. I knew it would be back; it was only a matter of time. But if I saw it here, it would be on a stranger rather than someone I knew and cared about.
    It wasn’t that I missed Nan any less either, but the pain of her being gone wouldn’t