Free The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki

see how well she could re-create it all. But her hand stopped on the cover. I have to learn to dance, she thought. And not just dancing acceptable in a high school gymnasium. I have to learn to dance well enough for Diaboliques.
    Celia went to her bureau, where her treasured stack of discs from Regine and Brenden sat next to her CD player. She chose one and put it on. In a moment Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Desire” began to play, and Celia looked at herself in the mirror.
    What do I do? She moved her feet back and forth and felt awkward. She waved her arms around but felt foolish. This is not going to be easy.
    Celia closed her eyes and tried to imagine a time when she would feel completely at home at Diaboliques. When she, too, would stand and speak with the Rosary as though posing for a portrait. She would hear a song she liked and step out onto the dance floor. Celia felt her hips moving smoothly from side to side, and her hand rose, sweeping back and forth in front of her.
    She opened her eyes and found herself in the mirror, looking like a flamingo caught in a bog. She laughed in horror and returned to her desk to open her sketchbook and draw.

4. SOME GIRLS WANDER BY MISTAKE
    T HAT WEEKEND CELIA FOUND a job at a small bookstore in a cluster of shops on a charming street about a mile from her house. She could walk there when the weather was nice. She wasn’t sure why the owner hired her, though. Celia had confessed she wasn’t very well read, but the woman had laughed and said she couldn’t imagine how Celia would be, at her age. “I have the opposite problem.” She smiled. “I’ve read everything, and now I’m down to the dregs.” She held up a book. “ The Correspondence of Edwin and Morcar, Earls of Mercia and Northumbria . It’s the driest thing I’ve ever read. What I wouldn’t give to be blown away by Faulkner for the first time, all over again.” Celia nodded, wishing she knew who Faulkner was.
    Regine had advised Celia to say she was available on Saturdays only after one o’clock so she wouldn’t have to get up too early after Diaboliques. When Celia’s mother learned Regine was the impetus behind her employment, Mrs. Balaustine admitted Regine permanently into her good graces and extended Celia’s Friday curfew to two a.m. “I’m probably crazy, but I’m glad you’re making friends,” her mother told her.
    “Me too,” Celia said. “I think I’d like to paint my bedroom.”
    “We just painted it last year!”
    “I know, but I didn’t pick the color! You did!”
    “I just thought you liked your old room, and it matches your comforter! I suppose it’s all not dark enough for you, now?” her mother teased. “All right, we’ll do it again. How about this weekend?”
    On a whim, Celia dug out their Polaroid camera and took a picture of her room before the transformation began. Changing her clothes, making friends at Suburban, and now redecorating her room, Celia had a profound sense of leaving a part of her life behind—not by chance, but deliberately. It was a new feeling, like shedding her skin, revealing a new self. She wasn’t entirely sure who her new self was yet. She wondered if that was something she would create, or discover, or maybe a little of both.
    Changing her room was a daunting prospect because Celia had a better sense of what she didn’t want it to be—pink, ruffled, childish—than what she did. But she felt strongly she must figure it out herself, rather than ask for suggestions from Regine or any of the others. She wanted her room to be a reflection of herself, not of how they saw her or how they might want her to be.
    Her closet was quite sparse already—Regine had seen to that. Celia filled a few boxes with the trinkets and toys that cluttered her shelves and banished them to the attic. Only her sketchbooks were allowed to stay, lined up on one shelf. She evicted the overstuffed chair in which she never sat and a rag rug whose best years had passed. Her