Elsewhere

by Gabrielle Zevin

She imagines her messy closet back home with its twelve pairs of blue jeans. It had taken a long time to find all those jeans. She had had to try on many pairs. The thought of them makes Liz want to cry. She wonders what will happen to her jeans now. She puts her head in her hands and touches the stitches over her ear. Even getting dressed is difficult here, Liz thinks.

Seeing it all written down, she isn’t sure what to make of it. Do I throw it out, or do I try to get everything back? Can you possibly do a combination of both?

‘To laughter and forgetting!’

‘You can’t mean a keeper of books?’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean. You have to be good with punctuation, which I am, and a good listener, which I also am, and like to stay up late at night when people do most of their reading, which I also like.’