Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Ella Berman
- Language: English
- Genre: Suspense & Thriller
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 3 MB
- Price: Free
2018
I KNOW IT’S HER FROM the moment I hear the knock at my door. After
ten years, with no warning, somehow, I still know.
—
Over the years, I’ve begun to think of Joni only in photographs—reassuringly
flat shots of her golden arm slung over my shoulders, eyes knowing, grin
wolfish, face tanned and inscrutable, maybe careless in the wrong light. Now
that she is inches away, I remember the full animality of our friendship. The
clamminess of her skin as we slept side by side, matching leg hairs dusting
our thighs; the keloid scar just above her left temple; the viscous blood that
would trickle from her nose often and without any warning, although usually
when she was being her worst self, as if her body wanted so badly to remind
us that she was human.
Joni’s short hair is wet, slicked back, and her lips are swollen in the
flickering porch light. I remember that she used to chew her bottom lip when
she was feeling vulnerable, and I never mentioned it because it felt like a
waste of this rare insight I’d been given. Now I can see that her mouth looks
painful, red raw where she’s torn at it.
Joni doesn’t attempt to hide her shock at my own appearance in return,
and I stand rigidly as she takes me in—hair hanging limply to my waist,
faded T-shirt thrown over flannel pajama shorts, pale skin that has seen less
sun in five years than it used to in one summer. From afar, I’ve kept abreast
of Joni’s transformation from scrappy, magnetic teenager to overgroomed
media rent-a-personality, but this is the first time she’s seen me outside of my
teenage state, probably seared as indelibly into her mind as it is my own (hip
popped, pink tongue sticking out of lips coated in MAC’s Rapturous).
“Jesus, Bess,” she says finally. “You’re a little fucking young to retire to
the desert, aren’t you?”
As Joni’s openers go, it could have been a lot worse, but I still feel my
perspective shift. I wonder if she can already sense the stifling flatness of life
next to the Salton Sea—a wasteland or a kingdom, depending on how you
ended up here.
“I need your help,” Joni says next.
I think of the ghost between us. The three of us sticky with sweat,
sunburned bodies loose from cheap beer as we danced to our favorite song
underneath a palm leaf canopy, or lying on our stomachs on a hotel bed, dirty
soles of our feet in the air, as Joni and I competed over who could shock
Evangeline into laughing first. Then, inevitably—the unnatural angle of Ev’s
neck under the skinniest moon I’ve ever seen. Ten summers that have felt
like ten seconds and ten lifetimes all at once.
When Joni takes a step toward me, I move away and she pretends not to
notice, just like how I pretend not to notice that her hand is shaking as she
plays with the button of her white linen shirt. I think about the last time we
were together and the cruel things we both said, knowing they could never be
undone.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB