The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

The girl continues to sit at the counter facing the street, fiddling with her phone. She smiles to herself, unaware that anyone is watching. I glance up at the windows above the pizzeria, but the velvet curtains have been drawn closed again. Thinking about the first girl makes the pizza weigh heavy in my stomach. The pizza of dismay.

“No, I guess I didn’t,” I say.

“You’ve got to make her sign one of Krauss’s releases, you know, to cover my ass. This is so going on my Vimeo channel when it’s done.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Then we’re in the back of the cab and Tyler is giving the driver the address of the film lab. I turn and look one last time through the rear windshield. It glitters with droplets of hot summer rain.

The chair where the tattooed girl was sitting is empty, and there’s nothing but some greasy napkins and plates to show she was ever there.

Upstairs, behind the neon of the psychic medium sign, the velvet curtain twitches. I press my cheek to the taxi window, squinting up at the fa?ade of the building.

A vertiginous rush knocks me sideways. I’m almost certain I glimpse the pale outline of the girl’s face with hipster hair curled over her ears. The face is looking down at our taxi in the street, and she’s smiling. That perfect mouth with its perfect mole. The eerie feeling spreads across the back of my neck again, and I close my eyes against it. It’s almost sickening. The taxi jolts as it pulls away from the curb, jostling me against Tyler and shaking loose the weird sensation.

But when I open my eyes again, the girl is gone.





CHAPTER 3


I’m so tired I haven’t even bothered to take my sneakers off. I root my face in my pillow, feeling myself just beginning to float off the surface of my bunk when there’s a soft click, and a triangle of light cuts into the room.

“Jesus. What happened to you?” a male voice says. It’s deep and gravelly, unmatched to the young, slender guy it actually belongs to.

I moan, draping my arm over my eyes to block out the light.

“What time is it?” I ask, my voice thick with sleep. I belch, and the stale taste of pepperoni and garlic pizza fills my mouth.

“Beats me.”

Springs creak as Eastlin flops onto his bed. Soft sounds of sneakers being unlaced. A click as he turns on the desk light. The lamplight hammers into my brain. Tyler took me out after we hit the editing room, to say thank you, I guess. God. It’s not like we don’t know how to drink in Wisconsin. But I can’t drink like Tyler. And he magically seems to know all the places downtown that don’t card.

“Man, come on,” I whine.

“What? It’s only two.” Eastlin is laughing at me.

I peek under my arm at my roommate and see him leaning over a mirror on his NYU-issue desk, wiping his face with a moist ball of cotton.

“Two? God.”

“Yeah. It’s early!” Eastlin grins and chucks the dirty cotton ball at me. It hits my forehead with a wet splap. “I wouldn’t even be home, except for the DJ sucked, and this guy wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“What guy?” I ask.

“Some twink. He was thirsty.” Eastlin shakes his head with pity.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Old, too.”

One of Eastlin’s dirty socks comes sailing toward my face after the cotton ball, but I bat it away in time.

“Sounds rough.” I try to commiserate. My gay friends back home don’t go clubbing. Or if they do, they don’t tell me about it. Which makes me pretty sure they don’t. My high school friends are more the beer and batting cages type.

He laughs, leaning an elbow into his pillow while pulling out his phone. “And was your night as good as it looks?” he asks without looking up. He stretches a bare foot out, spreading the toes until they crack.

I groan, staring up at the ceiling. Acoustical tiles. There have been moments, this summer, when my solitude has been so deep that I’ve caught myself counting the divots in them.

“Tonight was the palm reader, right?” he prods me.