Free The Gallery of Lost Species by Nina Berkhout

boots and marched down the hall as though he was on a mission. I imagined him raging through the buildings with a machine gun.
    â€œWhy are you hanging out with that creep?” I asked her.
    â€œHe’s misunderstood. He’s a poet,” she told me.
    She had begun skipping classes and was coming home smelling like pot and beer. I knew the smell from Daphne’s older brothers, who were stoners. Now, with her pageanting career behind her, she had a lot of spare time on her hands.
    Then she shaved her head. When she strolled through the kitchen’s saloon doors, my gasp prompted Con to look up from the lotto tickets she was scratching. I waited for our mother to hit the roof. But when she saw my sister, all she did was stare her down, light a cigarette, and blow the smoke in Viv’s face.
    Each time Viv altered her once-prized physique, Constance had the same reaction. At night, though, Con would lock herself in the bathroom and run water for a bath, only the water ran long enough to fill twenty tubs.
    Their duel was wordless. Con took away her allowance. Viv somehow still had money and got along fine. Con removed her bedroom phone. Viv used the booth down the street and then she bought a cellphone. Con threatened to take her to a centre for disobedient teens. Viv barricaded herself in her room and smashed the mirrors with the base of her floor lamp. Con unhinged her door and replaced it with a transparent curtain. This went on for months.
    My father wasn’t disturbed by Viv’s new style. Provided that she was painting—and she was, obsessively—he thought she was merely asserting herself and figuring out her identity. He said it was normal, which made me fear I’d have to go through it too.
    â€œ Well. This is different!” he’d say when she came home with black nail polish or an outfit adorned with holes and safety pins.
    Soon Viv had piercings all the way up her ears, a diamond in her nostril, and a hoop in her eyebrow. Then she got a tattoo of a paintbrush on her shoulder blade. I wanted to take her picture and send it to Liam to horrify him. The problem was that Viv was still beautiful, just fiercer.
    She traced thick sooty liner around her eyes and bought her clothes and lace-up boots from the army surplus store. Her teachers couldn’t express disdain because she was still maintaining As.
    Nick Angel was bad news. In the school parking lot, kids approached him and an exchange took place. He got away with it because there were no security cameras back there. His father was often travelling, so he had the house to himself and he brought Viv there after class.
    â€œCiao!” My sister waved to me, clutching Nick’s meaty arm.
    â€œBye sweetheart, be good,” Nick Angel called, grinning.
    Constance was home less and less herself. I turned into a latchkey kid. None of us knew where she went in the afternoons and Henry’s shift had changed from four until midnight.
    Alone in the house, I’d go into Viv’s room to inspect her graphite drawings. There were sketches all over and I was always curious to see what she was working on. To my dismay, her most recent stack were all naked pictures of Nick Angel.
    I fetched a hat box from under her bed. It contained awful love notes signed NA. I read a few and got bored. I looked forward to telling Liam about this new relationship in my next letter.
    Under the notes I found a dainty glass pipe, pale blue and shaped like a bird with a golden brown streak on its spine. It was as fine as any paperweight and I debated taking it so I could begin a new collection.
    I put my lips around the pipe’s stem and inhaled. The glass had a burnt, earthy taste to it. Next to it was a piece of foil, which I unwrapped. A small brown chunk fell onto the carpet. It had a strong and unpleasant smell.
    Then I found two tiny zip-lock bags of white powder. The powder looked like the artificial sweetener Con used in her coffee. I