Treasure Island!!!

sharpness. What if the Patty situation didn’t pan out? Crashing with Rena would be a retreat to primordial self without the boon of my mother’s well-stocked pantry, but it would do to keep my options open. “Sorry, Rena, don’t mean to be blunt. I’m just in such a rush.”
    “Why?”
    “Meeting someone.”
    “Lars?”
    “No,” I said with a snorting laugh. “Lars means nothing to me now. He’s like a bad dream. A distant vapor. I can’t even remember the color of his eyes.”
    “Green,” she said.
    “He’s like a bank of fog that hung over everything and then the moon came up and burned him into nothing. What did I ever see in him?”
    “I don’t know,” she said with just the slightest tremor in her voice. “Green . . . with little gold tiger flecks.”
    “Wait, first my crappy job, now my crappy boyfriend? Rena, you wouldn’t dare!”
    “I didn’t do anything,” she pleaded. “But he was lonely, and I’ve been missing you. We didn’t do
anything
, I swear. I wanted to sound you out first.”
    “Sound this, you treacherous dog,” I said and hung up.
    Lying on my crumb-laden bed, I thumbed through
Treasure Island
in search of solace, but the words blurred together, and I threw my book to the floor. Over the last few nights I had been pretending not to hear Adrianna making sad noises in her bedroom. She had been having long talks with Mr. Tatum and taking steamy baths at night, during which I was pretty sure I could detect, under the sounds of splashing, her sobbing. The girlish misery in this house was rising like a sea tide. Squelch it, I thought. I deliberately made myself think of Lars as a compendium of flaws and inadequacies. I remembered his lack of ambition and his habit of smudging his glasses. I remembered his boyishly servile way with my parents (until my mother had finally put a stop to it, he’d called them “ma’am” and “sir”) and his piercing, bed-shaking sneezes. I remembered his clothing—all of it, bad; in fact, the best you could say is some was neutral in color—and his penchant for supernatural sci-fi movies. By boarding the brig of his unappealing qualities, I managed to calm myself. Then I picked up my book, thrust it under my pillow, and slept.
    When I awoke at dawn, I had an angry red crease on my right cheek where the spine had pressed. No cucumber slices, I vowed, no lotion. The book had cut me like a saber.
     
    BOLDNESS
    RESOLUTION
    INDEPENDENCE
     
    I didn’t care that I couldn’t remember the fourth one. Let the rude mark lie. On my way to breakfast, I did a capital imitation of a seaward whistle.

CHAPTER 17
     
    P atty’s girlfriend Sabrina sat cross-legged on the floor, in a dark grey smock and cargo pants, smoking. I liked her
instantly
, even though her tattoo alarmed me: a mermaid stabbing herself with Neptune’s fork. Patty had gone out for more cigarettes.
    “Steven King,” she said, when I asked her what she liked to read. “
Road and Track
, the magazine.”
    There was a long pause in which she drank her beer, and I drank my water, both of us gazing at Richard, whose cage I had placed on the floor.
    “Nice bird,” she said at last.
    “Thank you. He’s supposed to be a helpmate, but he’s more of a talisman for my journey towards bolder selfhood. I got him after I read
Treasure Island
.”
    “Okay,” Sabrina said.
    Richard rocked from side to side, pupils slightly dilated. He bobbed on his perch in the dance style of Shirley Temple.
    “Is he going to talk?” Sabrina asked.
    “No, that dance always wears him out. He’ll take a nap soon.”
    He would. I’d given him a piece of Xanax. Although etiquette required me to disclose to Patty and Sabrina that I had a pet, I hadn’t wanted to showcase his irritating qualities.
    I explained to Sabrina that I knew Patty from fifth grade, and she explained to me that she had grown up in Michigan but at fourteen had run away from home. She had lived on the streets, then in the back of somebody’s truck; she had moved here and taken a job fixing motorcycles, which she quit abruptly it seems, or maybe it was just her manner of telling it; then she went back to a different school; dropped out; rode around the country a bit; worked in a fish cannery in Alaska, and before she met Patty I don’t know where she lived, though she spoke repeatedly of a drug-dealing person who went by the name of Midas, both because he was regarded as a king of sorts among his peers and because he liked