Free Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

and work the cash register at a store where we used to steal candy. I didn’t have disdain then, and so when I told her about the contest, I lied to impress her. I said I’d slapped Gregory Carson’s face, and that John had followed me out, begging me to enter the contest. We were sitting on a concrete stoop outside an apartment complex, drinking beers and watching cars drive in and out of a strip mall across the way. She smiled without looking at me, and I knew she could tell I’d lied, and that she forgave me. Music and laughter tumbled from the apartment in a snarl. Headlights flew past Lucia’s face and she gazed into nothing with a contentment that I didn’t understand. I saw it and I fertilized it. For a second, I pictured her eating dirt. Then I went home and half-listened to my father talk about what had gone wrong with the marriage and what might be done to “bring it back together.”
    I took the GED in an old elementary school classroom in Hoboken. The desks were gray linoleum; the chairs were wood. The facilitator was a big, proud man with a bulbous, veiny nose, and he held his cheap jacket open to show his stomach. The other test takers were mosdy middle-aged people with bodies curled like snails crossing a road. The only other young person was a girl wearing a skirt that showed the tops of her panty hose. She glanced at me with sullen camaraderie. Then we hunched over our tests. The facilitator watched us cross the road.
    When my test scores came back, my father called my mother to tell her how well I’d done. She made her boyfriend drive her over and wait outside in the car while she kissed me. My dad yelled about “that bastard sitting out there where everybody could see,” and Sara ran upstairs and slammed the door. My mother went out and told him to drive around the block. We all sat down and planned a budget for classes. I ordered course descriptions. I made ready to register. Then the letter from the agency crashed into the side of the house.
    It has stopped raining. My sneakers are soaked, so I go ahead and walk through the puddles. Silver and black, full | of sky and the solemn upside-down world. The bus shelter glides under my feet like a huge transparent fish. On the side of it is a model in a black sleeveless dress. An ad for perfume: watch OUT, monsieur. She has a neat, exquisite face, deep, dim eyes, and a sensitive, swollen mouth. Her slight body is potent and live, like an eel. I like her. I am on her side to destroy monsieur. She makes me remember Alana, another small eel girl.
    I walk through black shadows, across the inverted sky. I met Alana at a benefit show put on to support and celebrate the renovation of an ancient Parisian department store, the first of its kind in that country. I walked into the tiny dressing room and saw her standing naked in heels, picking through gorgeous gowns and yelling how her agent had made her get an enema that afternoon so she wouldn’t look bloated. “Now Matmoi-selle, ve vill unlock ze bowel!” She was cracking everybody up, talking about the crazy German who’d hosed her out. “Everybody” consisted of the seven models, four makeup artists, and fifteen hairdressers packed into a hot, narrow room that was all mirrors and countertop. Getting their faces made up, talking about enemas and shit: passing out in a nightclub and waking
    up in ruined panties; diarrhea attack during shoot; farting in boyfriend’s face. The girls giggled hysterically; the hairdressers were getting in on it. They’d probably been up all night and didn’t feel like doing this obscure show. I hesitated at the door' Alana saw me and pounced. “You look like you need an enema ” she snapped. I blushed. The other girls tittered and quieted. Alana flounced into her chair and grabbed a handful of dark red cherries from a plastic bowl next to a mountain of hot hairpieces. Slouching and chewing, she looked absendy at her reflection: precise round forehead, nose, and chin. Hot