Excerpt from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

you are tracing it with your two fingers, up and down, slowly. are you doing it?

my roommate is in the kitchen

you're doing it

This Jack she knew. He'd said things to her, maybe not quite so dirty. People were less dirty in the nineties, or it felt that way. They weren't typing it yet. But Deb remembered talking on the phone. She'd had a roommate then, Izzy, another dancer in the corps, who was always around, walking through her room to the kitchen, peeing with the bathroom door open to still see the television in their dark one-bedroom converted to two.

now put your fingers inside. get them wet. are you wet?

Deb wondered if he bit her too. This faceless girl, touching herself, who was she?

i'm so hard for you. i've got it in my hand so you can see.

 And where was he, writing these words? Here, while she was in class and the kids were at school? i'm sliding in you. i slide right in you because you are so wet. He wanted to know about other men, how the girl touched them, let them touch her. did you like his cock in your mouth? did you suck his balls? These were the kind of questions he'd asked Deb when they were new to each other, when the memories of other men were still fresh in her mind. She'd tell him about a boyfriend who liked her to drag her teeth up his shaft or dance a finger around his asshole, and the next time they were together, he'd ask for teeth, for assholes. She thought it was cute, that he got jealous, and curious, that jealousy made him want it. "Don't you want to hear my stories?" he'd ask. "Don't you like hearing about things I've done?" No.

I'll be a little late tomorrow, picking up Kay's cake. Let yourself in, take off all your clothes, get down on the floor, and wait for me to make you cum. Deb saw smooth legs opening somewhere in Jack's studio, on the drafting table maybe, and she saw the white skirt.



To call her mother, she went out through the yellow lobby, past Angel, who hopped off his stool, and into the early-summer air that cradled her.

"Hello?" Ruth always picked up. "Hold on a minute; let me turn off the set."

Deb held, wandered the block. Dark around the First Baptist Church, where a woman she worked with at the college had gotten married. The outside was beautiful with its rose windows, stained glass rainbowed like oil in a puddle, but the little room where they'd had the ceremony had plaster walls and low ceilings. For two twenties Simon had helped videotape the wedding.

"Okay, hi, dear." To Deb's quiet she said, "What is it," her voice weighted with every possible wrong.

"They know. The kids. About Jack."

"You told?"

"What? No, of course not."

"Then what, Deborah? Slow."

Deb told her, slow, passing under the warm neon of the twenty-four-hour burger place where they used to give the kids balloons. Deliverymen sat waiting at the green tables and chairs on the sidewalk.

"And you called David?"

Deb walked faster down Broadway, with a snap that suggested purpose. She crossed against the light. David Currie was the divorce lawyer she'd gone to in January, really a friend from high school who had grown up into a lawyer. "I just wanted so goddamn much to be done with it." Her throat had closed up. Past the Korean grocery, where the grapefruits and green peppers outside seemed to glow. The streetlights were orange and red and swam in her eyes.

"I know." Ruth sighed into the phone. "Oh, don't I know," as if she was thinking of her own past.

"I just can't believe it. I just can't fucking believe he did this." That wasn't true, so why did she keep saying it?

"He's a son of a bitch, Debby. We knew this."

"I don't even want to fucking talk to him."

Excerpted from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont. Copyright © 2015 by Julia Pierpont. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.