Gone Girl: A Novel Read Online Free

arched an eyebrow at me. “I’m intrigued.”
    Without asking, she poured me a draft of PBR into a mug of questionable cleanliness. When she caught me staring at the smudged rim, she brought the glass up to her mouth and licked the smudge away, leaving a smear of saliva. She set the mug squarely in front of me. “Better, my prince?”
    Go firmly believes that I got the best of everything from our parents, that I was the boy they planned on, the single child they could afford, and that she sneaked into this world by clamping onto my ankle, an unwanted stranger. (For my dad, a particularly unwanted stranger.) She believes she was left to fend for herself throughout childhood, a pitiful creature of random hand-me-downs and forgotten permission slips, tightened budgets and general regret. This vision could be somewhat true; I can barely stand to admit it.
    “Yes, my squalid little serf,” I said, and fluttered my hands in royal dispensation.
    I huddled over my beer. I needed to sit and drink a beer or three. My nerves were still singing from the morning.
    “What’s up with you?” she asked. “You look all twitchy.” She flicked some suds at me, more water than soap. The air-conditioning kicked on, ruffling the tops of our heads. We spent more time in The Bar than we needed to. It had become the childhood clubhouse we never had. We’d busted open the storage boxes in our mother’s basement one drunken night last year, back when she was alive but right near the end, when we were in need of comfort, and we revisited the toys and games with much oohing and ahhing between sips of canned beer. Christmas in August. After Mom died, Go moved into our oldhouse, and we slowly relocated our toys, piecemeal, to The Bar: a Strawberry Shortcake doll, now scentless, pops up on a stool one day (my gift to Go). A tiny Hot Wheels El Camino, one wheel missing, appears on a shelf in the corner (Go’s to me).
    We were thinking of introducing a board game night, even though most of our customers were too old to be nostalgic for our Hungry Hungry Hippos, our Game of Life with its tiny plastic cars to be filled with tiny plastic pinhead spouses and tiny plastic pinhead babies. I couldn’t remember how you won. (Deep Hasbro thought for the day.)
    Go refilled my beer, refilled her beer. Her left eyelid drooped slightly. It was exactly noon, 12:00, and I wondered how long she’d been drinking. She’s had a bumpy decade. My speculative sister, she of the rocket-science brain and the rodeo spirit, dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan in the late ’90s. She was one of the original dot-com phenoms—made crazy money for two years, then took the Internet bubble bath in 2000. Go remained unflappable. She was closer to twenty than thirty; she was fine. For act two, she got her degree and joined the gray-suited world of investment banking. She was midlevel, nothing flashy, nothing blameful, but she lost her job—fast—with the 2008 financial meltdown. I didn’t even know she’d left New York until she phoned me from Mom’s house:
I give up
. I begged her, cajoled her to return, hearing nothing but peeved silence on the other end. After I hung up, I made an anxious pilgrimage to her apartment in the Bowery and saw Gary, her beloved ficus tree, yellow-dead on the fire escape, and knew she’d never come back.
    The Bar seemed to cheer her up. She handled the books, she poured the beers. She stole from the tip jar semi-regularly, but then she did more work than me. We never talked about our old lives. We were Dunnes, and we were done, and strangely content about it.
    “So, what?” Go said, her usual way of beginning a conversation.
    “Eh.”
    “Eh, what? Eh, bad? You look bad.”
    I shrugged a yes; she scanned my face.
    “Amy?” she asked. It was an easy question. I shrugged again—a confirmation this time, a
whatcha gonna do?
shrug.
    Go gave me her amused face, both elbows on the bar, hands cradling chin, hunkering down for an