We Are Pirates: A Novel by Daniel Handler Page A

she said, and kept rubbing her shoe.
    “What are you doing?”
    “My new shoes. Toxes, but I don’t want them looking so new.”
    “Toxes?” Gwen’s mother wouldn’t buy her Tox.
    “Yeah, I know, they look stupid, right? So new like this. You wear Tox?”
    “My mom won’t buy them.”
    “Well,” Amber said, “your mother’s a bitch.”
    Amber laughed then, loud and hoarse, and Gwen joined in. The laughter could have meant anything on that day, that the bitch was a joke or was absolutely true. “Verily,” Gwen said, and they laughed again.
    “Here, do the other one.”
    Gwen knelt down beside her and took the shoe off Amber’s foot, bruised with broken black polish. “You gotta redo your nails.”
    “You think it looks stupid?”
    “It looks like you did it a long time ago.”
    “Well, I did,” Amber said, squinting at Gwen like she was reconsidering. Gwen smiled, quickly, and started wearing down the shoe. “Relax,” Amber said. “What’s your name—Gwen? Are people usually mean to you? You act like people are mean to you.”
    “I guess,” Gwen said, rubbing rubbing rubbing. “I don’t know.” It was a few seconds before it became enormous, the thing Amber had said, a firework that sparked in the dark for a bit before flowering out across her whole body. It was true. Gwen had not thought of it like that.
    “At school?” Amber asked.
    “Everyplace,” Gwen said shakily.
    Amber smiled. “How was it in there?”
    “Dr. Donner? Okay.” Gwen took a breath. “Better than yours.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I guess it’s not your day,” Gwen said, something her father said sometimes.
    “It’s not my life,” Amber said, dropping her music on the ground for drama. “ And I want to do something else, you know? Different?”
    “Yeah,” Gwen said, gripping the shoe harder. “I know, I know, exactly.”
    “Exactly verily ,” Amber said, and put on her shoe. She stood up, and Gwen looked right between her feet, one bare and one shod. “Give me that, it’s good enough,” Amber said. “You want to go to the bakery? It’s stupid, but I need a snack.”
    “Okay.”
    “I like to eat sugar right after going in there,” she said with a sharky grin at Dr. Donner’s door. Gwen nodded. They walked toward a short, depressed neighborhood with a few stores and shops, all crowded in by wires for the streetcar, which at the time this story takes place overhung the streets like a sketch for a claustrophobic dome. Gwen took one last look at the direction she had promised her mother she would walk, and at Dr. Donner’s cross office.
    “Are you in trouble for that?”
    “In there?” Amber sighed. “Probably. Thanks for nothing, Dr. Donner. I’ll hear about it at home.”
    “I just got done being grounded.”
    “For what?”
    “I took things at a store,” Gwen said.
    “Like, stealing?”
    “They could have pressed charges.”
    “Did they tell you that stupid thing? They don’t charge girls our age.”
    “Well, there’s punishment. I have to volunteer at this place for old people.”
    “Today? Can I go with you?”
    “What? There?”
    “Is that stupid?”
    “No, I don’t know. It’s old people.”
    “Do you like it?”
    Gwen stared out at traffic for a second. “Yes,” she said. “One guy, anyway.”
    “So I’ll go with you. Better than no place. What do you do, swim?”
    “How did you know?”
    Amber pointed at a badge Gwen had forgotten she’d pinned to her bag. It said MARIONETTES and had the silhouette of a slender, graceful woman. “Are you good at it? I can’t swim at all.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I bet you are.” Amber ran her nails through her hair, fingers crossed like she was actually betting on something. None of the cars stopped, each of them with someplace to go, but Gwen couldn’t walk, only look right at her. “I bet you’re good,” Amber said.
    Gwen could not believe how easy this was.
    Le Bakery, French for “the Bakery,” was a place Gwen had never