All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Ruth Madievsky
- Language: English
- Genre: Sibling Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you
met on the bus. You never knew if it would end with you, euphoric, tanning
topless on a fishing boat headed for Ensenada, or coming to in a gas station
bathroom, the insides of your eyes feeling as though they’d been scraped
out with spoons. Often, it was both.
The first time Debbie took me to Salvation, she dressed me in a
highlighter-pink bandage dress with cutouts up the sides. She wouldn’t let
me wear a bra.
“Nipple outline is part of the look,” she insisted.
We were at her apartment, a dingy West Hollywood complex with
permanent pigeon-shit stains on its maroon awnings. She lived there with
her on-again-off-again “musician” boyfriend, Dominic, who was really just
an addict with a guitar. He wrote songs with names like “Heroin Heroine”
and “Salty Surprise.” If he’d ever made money off his music, it left his hand
before it reached his wallet.
I watched Debbie do my makeup in her filmy bathroom mirror. She held
a smoky eye palette in her palm like a clamshell, lips parted as she painted
my face. Debbie had big blue eyes and a pout that made men do stupid
things. People said we looked alike, but no one ever mistook one of us for
the other. Debbie wore her body like she owned it; for me, it was the other
way around. She was only five foot two, but that made her more powerful;
you could fall asleep spooning her and wake up with a screwdriver pressed
to your throat. She was so alive it was scary. I could hear her heart beating
from another room. Sometimes, she bruised herself sleeping—her blood
was that close to the surface.
She powdered the corners of my eyes, and I could count every flag of
dead skin on her lips. Her breath smelled of barbecue chips. She’d sucked
the blackheads from her nose with a pore strip earlier, but she intentionally
left a cluster above her right nostril.
“Making one imperfection visible makes another invisible,” she
explained.
So this was why she’d half-heartedly tweezed my eyebrows: to distract
from the way my ears poked out of my hair, how my bottom lip was thicker
than my top. I craned my neck to watch myself transform in the mirror.
“Stop moving,” Debbie said, forcing my head back. “Keep your eyes on
me.”
She didn’t want me to learn how to do my own makeup. It would upset
our dynamic of her as artist and me as canvas.
I was eighteen and had just graduated high school. My plan was to do
two years at Valley College and transfer to UCLA. I couldn’t decide
whether to study English or biology, so I was considering registering for
classes in both. Debbie had planned the night out as a graduation present.
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