The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  • • •

  At thirteen Lee stuffed a vintage Misfits T-shirt into her backpack because she had seen a girl in the store admiring it. When she wore it to school, a boy mumbled “Cool shirt” as he passed, which left a ringing in her ears. The next day she dropped the folded shirt on the cafeteria table in front of the boy. The gesture had taken every ounce of nerve she could muster, and she felt dizzy with it as she walked away. He never said another word to her, but the day after, another boy gave her ten bucks to get one for him, and a business was born.

  Soon she was regularly taking orders from her classmates, anything from jeans to jewelry to CDs. She’d hit the boutiques and department stores on Walnut Street in downtown Philly, shop small and steal big, then sell the stuff for a third the price. The money—loose change and wadded bills—she pushed into a hole in her father’s old guitar case. Lee’s tastes were simple—jeans and hoodies and Chuck Taylors—and so she had little to spend the money on. It wasn’t about the money. Stealing scratched a locationless, tingling itch in her.

  At fourteen she stole a stack of blank birth certificates from the hospital where her mother worked, along with a stamp of the hospital’s seal. She laid the sheets out on her roof, exposing them to several days of sunlight, and aged them with coffee grounds until they looked like they’d been sitting in a drawer for twenty years. Then she sold them to her classmates for a hundred dollars apiece so that they could use them to obtain fake IDs at the DMV. This earned her the attention of Edie Oswald. Pale and athletic, tall without being gawky, Edie had a face that looked as though it had been carved from marble by some Renaissance genius. She carried herself with the ease and insouciance bestowed by a life of privilege and was the only girl in school who could dress like a 1960s socialite one day, an early-’80s punk the next, and get away with it.

  “Can I bum one?” Edie asked.

  Lee was standing against the wall outside the gym where no one ever came, the remains of a sandwich on the ground by her feet. She fished a cigarette from her pack and handed it to Edie, then helped light it with her own.

  “I’ve been looking all over school for you. For a while I thought you might be one of those gone kids.”

  Over the past few months seven teenagers from the Philadelphia area—two from their school—had simply disappeared without a trace. One of them showed up again a few weeks later, a fifteen-year-old boy from a foster home in the suburbs, but he was still gone. His eyes were engorged and depthless, and it was as though his consciousness had been scooped out—he’d lost the ability to communicate and responded only to simple commands. Lee hadn’t known any of them, but she knew Edie did; one of them had run with her crowd.

  “So this is your spot, huh?” Edie looked around the patch of dirty grass and wrappers and cigarette butts as though it were Lee’s living room.

  The buzz of Edie’s recognition left Lee mute. To be seen by Edie Oswald was to suddenly exist.

  Edie pointed to a bit of graffiti, a cartoon stick figure with a cock rammed through its mouth and out the back of its head. “That one of yours?”

  Lee took this opportunity to stare into Edie’s unblinking green eyes. Edie had a jagged black bob and a mouth that was always turned up at one corner as though perennially on the verge of amusement. Lee understood she was supposed to say something clever back, but the moment for that had passed, and now there was just awkwardness.

  They stared out across the football field. Lee watched a kid arc out for a long pass and stretch his arms, only to have the ball drop through his hands. Edie wasn’t the kind of girl who needed to go trawling for friends, so Lee knew the score: within a minute or so Edie would ask her for something. She began counting in her head: one, two, three, four, five . . .

  “I hear you can get things,” Edie said.

  Five. The girl was to the point, Lee had to give her that. She looked down at her cigarette.

  “So how’s it work?” Edie flicked her cigarette away. “You take orders or what?”

  Edie asked for a green cashmere sweater with abalone buttons from Bloomingdale’s. She even had a picture, and Lee couldn’t help but be a little thrilled when Edie texted it to her—they now had each other’s numbers on their phones. Edie probably had hundreds of numbers on hers, but not Lee. Lee now had twelve.

  What Lee didn’t expect was that a few days later, after she had delivered the sweater, Edie would invite her over to her house after school. They ended up drinking from Edie’s parents’ liquor cabinet and gossiping about the kids in school Lee only ever watched from afar. Edie asked Lee things no one had ever thought to ask her—about what she wanted to do after high school, where in the world she most wanted to visit, what kind of man her father was—and Lee realized she didn’t know how to answer these simple questions. She had never talked to anyone about her father and did not know how to start. She asked Edie about hers, and Edie lit up when she spoke of him: what an important man he was and all the places he took her. She talked about where she wanted to go to college, and when she asked Lee about it, it was as though Edie were asking what pro basketball team Lee wanted to play for. Lee was silent. Edie drunkenly put one finger to the mole above Lee’s lip and seemed about to say something, then just giggled.

  This is what it must be like, Lee thought as she walked home, drunk on Edie’s attention even more than the booze, to have a friend.

  • • •

  They began hanging out more and more after that, and Edie was careful to ask Lee for things only occasionally, insisting on paying her even when Lee would refuse her money. Lee took notice of Edie’s taste, and she couldn’t help stealing for her the more-than-occasional gift. Her feelings for Edie were as formless as a weather pattern. All Lee knew was that she tingled under Edie’s attention and sometimes placed herself in Edie’s path after school in the hope that Edie would collect her. With this friendship came an acceptance into Edie’s crowd, and before long Lee found herself invited to parties and out to clubs.

  For the first time she went to a school dance. She gave Edie the combination to her locker, because it was near the gym and accessible, and Edie stashed a few booze-filled bottles of Coke there earlier in the day. Drunk and emboldened, Lee even danced, awkwardly bouncing around with the kids in Edie’s crowd—her crowd now, too, Lee reminded herself—listening in as they gossiped and gave each other shit about who was fucking whom behind whose back and who’d pissed on whose toothbrush. But for Lee the highlight of the dance took place in the bathroom with Edie, as they sat up high by the windows and shared a joint. When she was with Edie, it was as if Lee were the only person on Earth; Edie focused in so totally, with such sincere interest, that Lee felt herself seen in a way she never had before.

  “What do you think of Danny Poole?” Edie asked her.

  She hadn’t much noticed this boy from Edie’s crowd, except that sometimes Lee would feel herself being stared at, though he always looked away when she turned. Lee tried to see him through Edie’s virescent eyes.

  “He likes you,” Edie said.

  “He told you that?”

  “I can tell. You want to go out with me and Deke sometime? The four of us could have some fun.”

  Deke was Edie’s boyfriend. He dressed like a headbanger and played guitar in a metal band but drove his parents’ Infiniti and wore four-hundred-dollar boots. Lee felt as though she’d been chosen. “Sure,” she said. Why not.

  “Cool. I’ll set it up.” Then Edie reached into her purse and took out a folded Kleenex. She unwrapped it, revealing two powder-filled gel caps. Edie held them out until Lee took one. She waited for Edie to go first, then swallowed the one in her hand.

  “What did we just take?”

  “Molly-olly-oxen-free!” Edie trilled.

  Lee had never taken Ecstasy before. “What’s it feel like?”

  “You’re about to find out.” Edie hopped down from the windo
w, and Lee followed her back into the dance.

  Lee didn’t remember much about that first time; it just got swallowed up with all the other times. She did remember dancing in a way that felt as fluid as a river. She remembered a sensation of pure joy, and she remembered the people all having auras, trembling outlines that she kept trying to touch. Mostly she remembered going home with Edie that night, sharing Edie’s bed and the feel of Edie’s skin against hers, Edie’s fingers tickling up and down her back, Edie’s eyes on her own.

  “Why’d you choose me?” Lee asked her, the drug making all questions suddenly possible. “You can have . . . you can hang out with anyone in school you want. Your friends, they wouldn’t have anything to do with me if you hadn’t taken me in.”

  Edie’s eyes were softening with sleep, but when she opened them wide again, Lee thought she could see herself reflected in the pupils. “You want to know what’s special about you.”

  It made her feel stupid to hear it phrased that way, but yes, Lee supposed that is what she wanted to know.

  Edie was silent for a moment. “When I was nine, I found a little baby bird. It couldn’t have been more than a week old, but it had all its feathers and it was walking around in drunken little circles on the sidewalk. So I bundled it up in my jacket and took it home, made a nest in a cardboard box, and fed it seeds and ladybugs and Cheerios. It was the first thing I woke up to every morning, and every day after school I rushed home to take care of it.”

  “You think I need rescuing?” Lee asked.

  Edie looked at her with a mix of affection and pity. “The first time I saw you, I wanted to bundle you up and take you home with me. You’re so pretty, a beautiful little bird, but you look so lost, Lee—anyone with a heart would want to do the same.”

  Lee thought about how to take this. She wanted to be seen, especially by Edie, as strong and capable of handling herself, but the drug was making her so velvety inside, it was hard not to smile. “What happened to the bird?” she asked.

  But Edie was already asleep.

  • • •

  Lee was used to being invisible, she had been her whole life, so it wasn’t easy to know what to do with the spotlight, even if she was only taking up the diffuse edge of the light shined on Edie. The drugs helped. White powders and blue pills and yellow pills, little red plasticky stars, mossy purplish weed laced with crystals, things snorted and smoked and ingested. Stimulants and sedatives and entactogens and dissociatives and psychotropics and hallucinogens. Things that made her at once open up into the world and sink so deeply inside herself that she grew scared she’d never find her way out. Meth made her jerk and flop on the inside like a windup mechanical toy. Ecstasy made her oozy with love. Ketamine made her float. Oxy wrapped her in a warm, steamy blanket. Soon enough she was trading stolen goods for drugs, and soon after that for drugs in bulk, which she sold to the kids in her crowd.

  Danny Poole turned out to be a nice boy, shy but thoughtful. He played drums in Deke’s band. Lee could tell that he mistook her disconnection for shyness like his own and saw an affinity where there wasn’t one. But she liked having him around all the same, and for several months they went to movies together and got drunk together and had clumsy, gawky sex that turned sweet with time.

  Lee honestly didn’t know what to feel when he broke up with her, in a long handwritten letter, which he made sure to point out was blurry with his tears. The letter detailed how much he cared about her, how he even thought he might love her (at least that is what Lee thought she could read within the big blue smudge), but that they were just too similar—“too shy together and too silent together”—and that he felt as alone with her as he did by himself.

  Lee couldn’t bring herself to feel much of anything, though she missed those nights they would sit together in his room, wordlessly playing some drinking game until they were buzzed enough to fumble toward each other.

  Life went on, and Lee remained the go-to girl for drugs and stolen merchandise. All the money she made she stuffed into the hole in the guitar case, until it became too full to squeeze in another wad. And so, for the first time in nearly four years, she opened it. The money fell out onto her bed in a big green pile of bills: crumpled bills, folded bills, rolled bills, wadded bills, a geological strata of bills—the smaller denominations, from when she’d just started out, at the bottom; the larger ones layering the top. The pile had an earthy, fungal smell. To get the money back into the case, she sorted the bills and flattened them and bundled them, counting as she did, feeling her hands grow a filmy layer of dry mold. By the end she had just over twenty thousand dollars, an amount of money Lee could hardly fathom. She began to feel like getting out was really possible; that she might actually make something of her life. College, maybe, something she and her mother had never even discussed.

  • • •

  Lee was apprehended for shoplifting at sixteen, pinched in a Nordstrom by an undercover security guard she’d marked but had taken for oblivious. He led her by the arm through the store, the evidence—one crumpled teal cashmere cardigan—draped casually over his shoulder. She felt the eyes of the shoppers on her in a way they never had been before, and burned with shame.

  The store security called her mother and involved the police as well, and though they did not press charges, the police made her aware that the incident would remain on her record and that a second arrest would entail real consequences. Lee promised that she had never stolen before and would never do it again. Her mother didn’t speak to her at all except to ask her, in the parking lot on the way to the car, what the hell she wanted with a sweater like that? Did Lee think they were country club people?

  The second time she was caught came only a month later, and the police threatened to throw the book at her, chuck her into a juvenile detention center and see how she fared with a little structure in her life. Her mother had begged them to give Lee another chance, had described the disappearance of Lee’s father and how tough the years had been on both of them.

  Lee’s mother wasn’t happy to have to do the whole song and dance for the officers of the Philadelphia Police Department, and on the way home she made it clear just how long was the limb she had gone out on for her. Lee soon stopped listening, wondering if her mom had meant any of what she’d said about Lee’s father.

  • • •

  Lee was curfewed for the rest of the semester, and she kept her hands clean. She stopped stealing, stopped doing drugs, stopped partying. She worried that Edie might no longer want to be her friend, but this wasn’t the thing that cracked their friendship.

  They were sharing a table at a café downtown, talking vaguely about college, when a tall young man wearing some sort of vintage military uniform, a few dull medals peppering his chest, sat with them and asked for a cigarette. He had short black hair, severe avian features, and intense, sunken eyes. He put the cigarette behind one ear and chatted easily with them, talking music mostly. He performed a little puppet dance on the table using two spoons and a napkin, his eyes on Lee the whole time. “You know, you remind me of someone,” he told her.

  Lee pulled a cigarette out for herself before realizing she couldn’t smoke here. “Oh, yeah? Who?”

  “Someone very special. What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Her name’s Lee. Lee Cuddy.”

  Lee gave Edie a dirty look, but Edie just grinned back.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lee.” One of his spidery hands flipped open an old canvas shoulder bag and pulled out a stack of fliers. He handed them one each. “Why don’t you two come to a little party we’re throwing this Friday.” He pulled a small black notebook from the bag and wrote something in it. “Go to this Web address on here and type in the code on the bottom. It will give you a time and a place to meet one of my associates. She’ll take you there.” When he turned to leave, Lee could see a large star shaved
into the back of his head. She watched him hop onto an antique bicycle and ride off.

  “Do you know what this is?” Edie said, gaping down at the flier in disbelief.

  The flier was on thick card stock, about the size of a postcard, and it had an old black-and-white photo that looked like an aerial shot of some just-excavated ancient city. TO RAISE DUST was typed in, by manual typewriter, at the top, and SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME was printed at the bottom. Below that it read ADMIT ONE. There was a date, September 3—this coming Friday—but no street address. Only a Web address, followed by a different six-digit code on each flier.

  “Isn’t that your birthday?” Edie said.

  It was. Lee was turning seventeen.

  “Well, happy fucking birthday. This is an invitation to an S.A. party.” Edie looked around the café and slid her flier quickly into her bag, as though someone might try to take it away from her.

  “What’s an essay party?”

  “Dude. These things are legendary. They’re thrown in an old missile silo somewhere outside the city. I’ve been trying to get into one for months, but they’re totally underground. You can’t just buy a ticket; you have to wait for one to come to you.”

  Lee handed Edie her flier. “Give it to someone else. You know I can’t go.”

  “What are you talking about? That guy was totally into you.”

  “I’m grounded.”

  “So sneak out. Your mom doesn’t even have to know you’re gone.”

  It was true; she could probably get away with it. But Lee liked that she was no longer doing drugs or staying out nights drinking. She was thinking more clearly, and her grades were moving back up.