When the Famous American Artists Correspondence School called to speak to Mr. Biondi, Mom put Dad on the phone. After hanging up, he walked into the kitchen with the proud news that his youngest child had shown glimmerings of artistic genius — so much so, that they’d assumed I was a boy. A representative of the school was coming over to our house that very evening to discuss my future.
Mom snorted. “Coming over to hard-sell us, more like it. How did they hear about Debbie’s doodles?”
“I sent away for a free talent test,” I mumbled through a mouthful of toast.
“Congratulations,” said Dad. “They said you have a unique creative spark.”
He was so happy, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had thrown away the test. I hoped that bit of information wouldn’t come out while we were in the living room, awkwardly sitting through the Famous American Artists Correspondence School sales pitch.
* * *
The representative of the school looked nothing like an artist: he was a small man in a dandruff-dusted sports jacket, with nervous hands and a twitchy lip. He carried a vinyl briefcase bearing that self-portrait of Norman Rockwell I’d seen in the ad and the words: We’re looking for people who like to draw.
Despite his twitchiness and the pungent odour of Old Spice and rye, the salesman said many things that my parents — particularly my father — were happy to hear. I had clearly demonstrated a high degree of artistic ability. There was absolutely no question of that; the school’s adjudication process was strict and stringent and scientifically proven. This seemed odd, given that I didn’t send in the test.
My mind drifted. I woke up again when he said that many alumni of the Famous American Artists School were themselves now famous: he rattled off the names of several well-known cartoonists whose strips appeared in the colour comics of the Shipman’s Corners Examiner, including the one with the sexy hillbillies, Mom’s favourite.
“She comes by her talent honestly,” confided Dad. “I’ve always had a bit of an artistic streak myself.”
I looked at Dad in surprise. “Since when?”
Dad lifted his chin. “I loved to draw when I was young. I wasn’t bad. If I’d had some encouragement, who knows where I’d be now?”
The salesman swivelled his head toward Dad, lip twitching: it was the expression of a small cat preparing to corner a large slow-moving mouse.
“We have someone local available to act as Debbie’s instructor right now, to provide marking, feedback, personalized lessons, even meet with her as often as once a week, and this individual is less than five miles from your beautiful home, can’t beat that, but I can’t guarantee that this opportunity will last: might be gone by tomorrow or even later tonight. You see, the good ones — and trust me, this instructor is a good one — get snapped up fast.”
Giving a soft burp, he removed a fountain pen from his pocket and laid it on top of a form he’d quietly unfolded on the coffee table. Then he hung his hands between his knees and waited, eyes on Dad.
Mom scrutinized the small print. “Three hundred dollars seems steep.”
The salesman sat back on the couch, folded his hands over his tiny paunch and gave a quiet sigh. “Spread over twenty-six weeks, that’s only about ten dollars a week, breaking it down for you. Less than the price of a cup of coffee a day.”
“I can break it down just fine for myself, thanks. That’s over eleven dollars a week, which is about a dollar forty for a coffee,” said Mom. “You can get a decent cup for a quarter in this town.”
“Think of it as an investment in your daughter’s future,” suggested the salesman, changing tactics.
“The guy who sold us a set of encyclopedias told us the same thing,” said Mom in a voice that sounded as if she suspected some type of international conspiracy of door-to-door salesmen.
The salesman looked over at Dad, who was reading one of the brochures.
“This sounds on the up-and-up. It would be good for Debbie to have a hobby,” Dad said. Mom, the salesman and I watched him sign on the dotted line. And just like that, I became a student of the Famous American Artists Correspondence School.
After exchanging boring bits of adult blah blah blah about tax deductions and void cheques, the salesman shook my hand, presented me with my complimentary Famous American Artist student portfolio and assured me that my instructor would be in touch with me within five business days. My course would be carried out by correspondence, with my finished assignments and the instructor’s critiques passed back and forth by mail. Depending on what we could work out, we might meet even more often than once a week.
“It all depends on your level of ability, honey,” the salesman told me, giving Dad a broad wink to show that he was in on the open secret of just how staggeringly talented I was.
When a postcard finally arrived on behalf of the Famous American Artists School with my instructor’s name, address and phone number, I stood at the mailbox for five long minutes, staring at it. It read:
Mrs. Beatrice Kendal
105A Zurich Street
* * *
The first time I went out to Z Street for an art lesson, Dad drove me, even though I assured him I was more than capable of getting there myself.
“You’ve got to watch yourself in that neighbourhood,” was his only explanation for the lift.
When we got to Kendal’s house and Bea Kendal opened the door in her tie-dyed pantsuit and chic scarf, I could see Dad was taken aback — even more so when he came in and saw her paintings.
“I’ve always suspected Debbie had artistic ability,” she said.
“She comes by it honestly,” Dad said. “I’ve always had a leaning that way myself.”
This seemed to impress Mrs. Kendal, who folded her arms and listened to a long description by Dad of the lost days of his youth, sketching dogs and farmhouses. Pretty soon Dad and Mrs. Kendal had completely forgotten me; when she offered him something cold to drink, he accepted, following her into the kitchen to continue the conversation. I had the uncomfortable feeling that they had, in the words of the older generation, hit it off.
Mrs. Kendal was an excellent instructor, far better than the business studies teacher who also taught grade nine visual art, my only arts elective at St. Dismas Collegiate — all he did was show us murky tinted slides of Renaissance sculpture and occasionally let us blow up a piece of pottery in the kiln. Despite the biography that was eventually cooked up for me by my publisher, which included an MFA from New York’s prestigious Parsons School, my only art instruction came from Mrs. Kendal, who met with me every week to practise perspective, life drawing and colour theory. It turned out to be the best three hundred dollars my parents could have invested in me; years later, it would provide what would turn out to be my only marketable skill. Not to mention that, over those weeks of driving me back and forth, a friendship developed between Mrs. Kendal and Dad, making it easier for him to take a fatherly interest in John Kendal.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
* * *
Fast forward to the first week of high school — not much of a change, even with those lost eighteen months, since my classes were full of kids I’d known since kindergarten. The biggest adjustment was seeing Duff roam the hallways in a short-sleeved shirt and clip-on tie, chased by kids in welding glasses, waving their chemistry homework and shouting, “Sir! Sir!” wanting him to look at their equations or answer a question about the periodic table. Enrollment in his classes skyrocketed when he announced that he would teach how to build a TV that could receive broadcasts from another dimension — a popular project in a town that could barely pick up stations from Buffalo.
Linda had weepily returned to university in Toronto with promises to come home every weekend. Duff had been spending a lot of time at our house ever since her departure, eating most of his meals with us, as if he were already some type of de facto son-in-law.
I eased into the routine of six hours of rotating classes every day, Kendal and I brushing fingertips or even stealing a kiss as we passed one another at the bell or meeting up after school at our lockers. We’d settled into the role of high school sweethearts; the younger, more progressive teachers looked at us with satisfaction. To underline the point, Kendal was elected student council president and captain of the basketball team, while I took up Linda’s old position on the volleyball team and became the first girl to sit as student council treasurer. The first months of high school were a golden time for Kendal and me. It felt as if we had turned a corner into a bright, brave, colour-blind utopia.
On October fourth, I turned fifteen. Kendal took me to a movie. Shaft. He knew the guy selling tickets, so we were able to get in despite the movie’s Restricted rating. As the trailer said: If you wanna see Shaft, ask yo momma!
We drove downtown in Duff’s Cutlass, the battered chassis and U.S. plates giving the two of us an aura of grit and glamour. “Mixed-race couple sees Shaft at the Shipman’s Corners Downtown Cinema — right on!” We were practically as urban as Buffalo now.
The plot was about how the “mob” wanted to “take back Harlem.”
“I’m looking for a nigga named John Shaft,” said a stereotypically Italian mobster.
“You just found him — wop,” answered Shaft.
Kendal gave a snort of laughter.
I loved watching movies set in New York City. Dangerous. Dirty. Crowded. Unpredictable. One of two places I wanted to travel to with Kendal, the other being the Sea of Tranquility.
* * *
I had forced myself to stop worrying about the end of the world. Duff’s wallet full of twentieth-century ID convinced me that he was nothing more than a con artist and that all my memories of hopping through time had sprung from my overactive imagination. Duff had never mentioned alternate timelines or me being the Ion Tagger. The whole idea of hopping into a parallel world, taking everyone on Earth with me, had begun to sound like the plot of a comic book.
And yet, every time I walked into the TV room while Dad was watching the Buffalo evening news, an ominous dark tension seemed to be tightly wound around every word that came out of Walter Cronkite’s mouth.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks in Helsinki — known as SALT — were not going well. Richard Nixon was about to press the issue of nuclear arms limitation with a no-holds-barred show of force on Amchitka Island, exploding the Cannikin bomb, the largest underground nuclear test ever carried out in America. A ragtag group of seafaring hobos predicted tsunamis and earthquakes. They said the blast would cause untold devastation to what people were starting to refer to as “Earth’s ecology.”
“Amchitka Island is on Russia’s doorstep,” said Duff. “What, exactly, is the point of a five-megaton underground nuclear test anyway?”
“They’re trying to send the Ruskies a message,” said Dad approvingly.
Duff cleared his throat, something he always did when he was about to disagree with Dad. “Not sure the Soviets give a damn. They have a considerable stockpile of nuclear weapons themselves.”
My mother frowned and ladled out the lasagna. “Ma che,” she said, sighing. “Politics at the supper table.”
* * *
That year, October 31 fell on a Sunday, so the St. Dismas Halloween dance would be held on the thirtieth, a Saturday night. Everyone was excited by the news that Mr. Duffy was going to be “the man” for the Halloween dance, a cross between a bouncer and a chaperone. It was expected he would tolerate bad behaviour — drinking plonk in the bathrooms, pot smoking, fights.
Unexpectedly, Duff stood guard outside the gym door that evening dressed as a priest. With his hair cut short and a fake beard hiding his perpetually sunburned skin (I had decided he was suffering from eczema, not radiation burns), Duff was unrecognizable. Linda was at his side in a nun’s habit.
“Except for the wimple, it’s pretty comfortable,” she told me, tucking a few stray hairs under her veil.
I had come to the dance dressed as the Contessina — flesh-coloured tights, high boots, ballet leotard, a purple-tinted beehive wig. Sandy wore layers of ragged petticoats that Mrs. Holub must have brought from the old country, and the tight red bodice and red boots of her traditional Ukrainian dance costume: she was supposed to be a gypsy fortune teller. She’d unbraided her hair and left it an uncombed mess, as if she’d just got out of bed, looking even more spectacularly beautiful than usual.
“Is that a Snugglegirl costume, Deb?” Sandy asked, shaking out her petticoats.
I frowned at her. “I’m a crime fighter. The Contessina Doloria di Largo, Captain Kyle Crusher’s girlfriend from the Agents of V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E. comics. How does this look like a Snugglegirl?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You look really skinny dressed like that. Have you lost weight?”
“A little,” I said, trying not to nibble on my bile-chapped lips. I seemed to be thinking about food all the time these days.
Kendal came as Shaft, wearing a turtleneck, sunglasses and leather jacket, with a water pistol tucked in his belt. He’d grown mutton-chop sideburns and wore a fake moustache that made me wish he’d grow a real one.
“You should dress like that all the time,” I told him.
“Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt,” he said, quoting the movie’s trailer.
Judy and Jayne Donato dressed as the Pan Am stewardesses from Coffee, Tea or Me? and flirted with Bum Bum and Rocco, who had driven in from the farm. In old-fashioned three-piece suits, Borsalino hats and wingtip shoes, the guys were straight out of The Godfather. Bum Bum carried a violin case as a prop.
“Where’d you get the threads, man?” Kendal asked, adjusting Bum Bum’s pinstriped lapels.
“Rocco’s dad, Frank,” said Bum Bum. “He’s got a shitload of them stuck in mothballs. He’s given them up for leisure suits, so he said they were all ours.”
One of Shipman’s Corners’ many garage bands had been brought in to provide live music: with their combination of electric guitars, drums, mandolins and balalaikas, they were a Ukrainian-Italian fusion folk music group that had added some Led Zeppelin, Elton John and David Bowie to their repertoire. They had just kicked off the evening with “The Immigrant Song” — perfect for St. Dismas — when Linda fluttered up onto the stage in her nun’s habit, shouting “Cut the music” and making a slashing motion across her throat. The lead guitarist handed her the microphone.
“I want you all to remain calm and stay where you are,” said Linda. “We just received news from the States — Mr. Duffy will be making an announcement.”
Duff’s voice boomed out over the PA system, struggling to be calm, but slightly shaky — a nice touch. “Your attention please! The school board has just received an alert from the Emergency Broadcast System, which I have been instructed to read to you, as follows: a thermonuclear test was carried out on Amchitka Island earlier today at 12:01 a.m., Pacific Time. Dead radioactive birds have washed up on the coast of Siberia. The Soviet Union considers this an act of aggression. They have declared war on members of the North American Treaty Organization, including Canusa. NBC New York reports that NORAD is confirming that Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles have left their silos. In a short time, we will be under nuclear attack.”
We looked at one another, a bunch of terrified teenagers dressed as superheroes and characters from gangster movies. This was the moment we had spent our entire childhoods preparing for. The drills, the duck-and-covers, the Emergency Broadcast System tests — it all came down to this. World War Three. And as our parents had always pointed out, Shipman’s Corners would be the first to go.
Sandy put her hands over her face, silently weeping. I put my arm around her. Her body was trembling as if she were standing in a gale.
Duff’s voice continued over the PA. “Please listen carefully to this emergency bus schedule: Welland Avenue to Niagara Street, bus 1A. Scott Street to Lakeshore Road, 1B. If you live outside those areas, catch bus 2C, that’s 2C, and it will drop off any of you who live on the concession roads or on the other side of the Welland Canal. Please remain calm and line up quietly to dismiss. Buses will be in the parking lot momentarily. May God be with you all, and your families.”
The rush for the doors knocked over some of the smaller kids who hadn’t yet had their growth spurt. I felt a hand grab mine. Kendal’s.
“It’s bullshit!” he yelled over the screams. “It’s got to be a prank.”
“I know!” I shouted back. “If it was a real attack, we’d be hearing the —”
That’s when the air-raid siren blasted down at us from the roof of the school, an up-down, up-down wailing like Planet Earth’s collective death scream.
In the stampede out of the gym, I saw Linda’s fluttering nun’s habit disappear through the doors of the girls’ change room. Strange, that she was running in the opposite direction from everyone else.
I started to consider who I wanted to die with, my family or Kendal. Duff had said that ICBMs could reach us in under fifteen minutes, barely enough time to go home and kiss Nonna Peppy and my parents goodbye. I had little faith in the anti-radiation suits in the basement, and even if we did survive, what would be the point of living in a world devoid of other people? Kendal’s hand tightened around mine, settling the matter: if it was the end of the world, we were going out together. Caught in the current of the crowd, the two of us were pushed through the fire doors, with Sandy, Bum Bum, Rocco and the Donato twins close behind. The buses hadn’t arrived and I doubted they ever would; the announcement was probably just a way to normalize the situation by making it seem like the authorities were in control. Judging by the crowd of milling, weeping teenagers outside the school, fighting over a single pay phone, that strategy wasn’t working.
Kendal looked over our heads in all directions. “Where the hell is Duff? He should be out here, keeping people from freaking out.”
“There’s room for all of us in my car,” shouted Rocco. “But where the fuck should we go?”
“Our new house has a fallout shelter,” said Judy-Garland. “Mom keeps her canned tomatoes inside it.”
Sandy hugged herself, shivering with fear. “I want to go home and be with my parents.”
“I’ve got Duff’s keys. I’ll take you in his car while Rocco takes the rest of them to the Donatos,” said Kendal, turning to look at me. “Debbie, go with Rocco. I’ll check on my mom and your folks and be there as fast as I can.”
I tried to protest but he kissed me, said “I love you,” pushed me into Bum Bum’s arms and got into the Cutlass, a few more kids from Sandy’s block hopping into the back seat. Kendal peeled out of the parking lot just as Rocco popped the trunk of his car to carry more passengers.
The Donatos had moved into a sprawling split-level with a weeping willow on the front lawn. A jungle gym stood in the backyard, like the last cage in a zoo from which the animals had all escaped. Their subdivision was a tangle of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, turning back on themselves like snakes eating their own tails. Piles of dirt and yawning pits, waiting to be filled by brand-new bungalows, made the neighbourhood look like a war zone.
As we ran up the front walk, Claudia Donato opened the door, a martini glass almost toppling out of one manicured hand, her hair backcombed into a brilliant dark dome, crowned by a rhinestone tiara. The sounds of party music and laughter spilled out of the house.
“You all look adorable!” she slurred, kissing me on both cheeks as she slopped her drink on the wall-to-wall. “You’re so sweet — I could just gobble you right up. Come in!”
Inside the foyer, I noticed a goldfish bowl full of key chains — Mickey Mouse, Playboy bunny ears, War Amps of Canada, rabbits’ feet, peace signs.
“Mom, didn’t anyone tell you . . .” Judy-Garland started to say.
Claudia waved off the warning. “Honey, it’s the usual malfunction. We turned on the TV and all we saw was Hollywood Squares. Daddy even called ShipCo Security. They said it was a Halloween prank; someone’s jiggered the siren so they can’t turn it off. Relax and have a drink, kids.”
We trailed Claudia through a living room packed with middle-aged princesses, ballet dancers and movie stars. A few men were wrinkled hippies in bell-bottoms and silly wigs, or cowboys in Stetsons, their beer bellies flopping over the belts of toy holsters. Dusty Springfield’s deep voice oozed suggestively out of the hi-fi.
Looking like they belonged in a gangster movie, Rocco and Bum Bum stood in the living room in their 1950s suits, sipping beer. The siren continued to rise and fall, rise and fall. Al Donato dealt with it by turning up the hi-fi. I drifted into the kitchen, where the twins had started arranging platters of Ritz crackers topped with slimy canned oysters. The stench of hot Gruyère cheese floated out of a ceramic pot.
“Don’t scald the fondue, honey,” Claudia told Judy-Garland as she leaned down to sniff the pungent goo.
Claudia handed me a tray. “Manhattans, martinis and White Russians. Would you mind taking this around, love? There’s a girl.”
I weaved my way through the crowd, past Elizabeth Taylors and Bette Davises and Rosemary’s Baby–era Mia Farrows sipping martinis and laughing loudly at the men’s dirty jokes. Princess Graces plucked White Russians off the tray with dainty pink-lacquered nails and Claudia Cardinales spoke in breathy, fake French accents. Sailors and cowboys ogled the ballerinas and go-go dancers while sucking beer straight from the bottle.
On the other side of the room, smoking a pipe and nursing a Manhattan, stood the Shark, a Playboy medallion nestled in the thicket of chest hair bristling out of the top of his shiny black bathrobe. Next to him, an emaciated, balloon-breasted blonde, predictably costumed as a sexy Bunny, teetered on spike heels with one knobby knee cocked like a pony striking a pose. It took me a few seconds to recognize her. The blonde was Angie Petrone, or an inflated, sculpted and ruthlessly exfoliated version of her former self; she looked like a cross between an android from a pornographic sci-fi novel and some type of mad scientist’s comic book chemistry experiment gone wrong. Her curly black hair had been bleached and straightened, her dark eyes turned acid green, her eyelashes curled and lengthened so that they brushed her forehead. Her waist was cinched tightly in a metal corset, from which hung a thin silver chain. The Shark had one end looped tightly around his wrist.
When the Shark noticed me, he whispered a word in Angie’s ear, then clipped her corset chain to a little hook on the wall, as if leashing up a very expensive dog. The type of animal valuable enough to steal, but too stupid to ever find its way home, like an Afghan hound. Angie looked at the Shark dully and sipped a cocktail the colour of congealed blood. She never shifted from that stilted cock-kneed pose.
Holding his highball glass over the heads of the crowd, the Shark pushed his way to me, his eyes eating me up, just like that day in the Falls.
“I know you from somewhere,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it. He’d torn away my virginity and left me with a summer’s worth of ridiculous fantasies and he didn’t even remember who I was?
“I met you at Table Rock House with the Holubs,” I said, setting down my tray.
I could see recognition in his eyes. “Oh, yeah! You’re so skinny, I didn’t recognize you, is all. Those nice big boobs of yours are practically gone. Still cute as hell, though. And we can give you back the boobs easy enough. Let me pour you a drink.”
He took me by the elbow and guided me to a shimmering castle of liquor bottles on the bar where a tipsy tramp leaned on a dimly lit lampstand, against a background of flecked gold wallpaper with a pattern of naked women in silhouette. The Shark’s face and mine were reflected in a mirror that said CINZANO.
“Whaddya want? Tequila Sunrise? Rye and ginger? Sex on the Beach? Plonk?”
My eyes caught on a candy-coloured bottle that looked like the brandy cherries we drank in shot glasses at Christmas.
“That.”
He picked up the bottle. “Dubonnet. French! You got taste. Rocks?”
“Uh — sure.”
He grabbed a handful of ice cubes out of a bucket, dropped them into a highball glass and filled it to the brim with the thick red aperitif. Then he reached into the pocket of his robe and fished out a tiny white pill, holding it up between thumb and forefinger before plopping it into my drink.
“What’s that?”
“Spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.” He clicked my glass with his and said, “Here’s to chemistry, little girl.”
I tasted it. Sweet and sour at the same time, like my grandfather’s wine cut with 7-Up. Blechh. I swallowed my first sip, then let the next one dribble back into the glass.
Across the room, Judy-Garland and Jayne-Mansfield were go-go dancing on the living room rug, surrounded by a gyrating posse of TV cowboys. The starlets and ballerinas looked on with crossed arms, their Virginia Slims smouldering angrily between sharpened fingernails. Meanwhile, Claudia pushed backwards through the swinging Dutch door, a roiling fondue pot balanced between pink piglet-shaped oven mitts. I had a vision of her tripping and spewing hot cheese all over the guests, but she staggered safely to the buffet table.
“I didn’t know old people had Halloween parties,” I tried to say, but it came out I dunguhswun’s dress luk Haween, as if someone else’s tongue had been stuffed between my teeth.
“You never heard of a key party?” The Shark slid his satiny arm around my waist, his fingers strumming my breast like a Spanish guitar.
I shook my head. That one little sip of candy-coloured booze was making me feel warm and loose and jangly, as if my shoulders and legs had been detached from my body. The Shark took the pipe out of his mouth and grinned at me.
“All the guys throw their keys in a bowl. At the end of the night, the chicks reach in and pick out a set. Whatever guy’s keys they get, they gotta go home with him. No one knows who slept with who.” He leaned in close to whisper in my ear, “You look so sexy dressed like that, you could be a Snugglegirl, know that? I can arrange an audition for you. ShipCo’d hire you in a flash. You’ll love it. Parties, clothes, cruises. All the drugs and booze you want. And I get to show you the ropes so you know what the guys want. You’ll love that, too.”
Through the murk of my aperitif-and-unknown-drug-addled brain, light dawned. The Shark wasn’t in love with me. He was a ShipCo recruiter.
“I’m not innerrested in being a Snug’girl. My boyfriend John Kendal will be here soon,” I said, trying to be careful to pronounce every syllable.
The Shark burst out laughing. “You’re dating a Kendal? That kid who looks like Meadowlark Lemon, used to date Angel? Oh lawdy, lawdy! If I knowed you liked that type, I’d’ve got myself a tan.”
I threw the rest of my Dubonnet into his face. The red drink dripped from his nose as his leer turned into a snarl.
“You little fucking bitch, I’m gonna kill you.” He tried to grab my arm, but I moved out of reach too fast.
“Go to hell,” I said and pushed my way through the crowd.
Behind me, one of the Liz Taylors brayed a laugh. “A party isn’t a party ’til Larry gets a drink thrown at him.”
The Shark started to follow me down the hallway, but Rocco blocked his way. Bum Bum tried to catch me in a hug but I brushed past him in embarrassment. I searched for a bathroom where I could lock myself in, but the powder room off the front hall was occupied. I ran upstairs where I suspected I’d find a big master bathroom. Bingo: hot pink walls and a giant shower stall, the vanity covered in Claudia’s makeup and shampoos and perfumes. I locked the door and lifted the fuzzy pink toilet seat, lowered my tights and plopped down to pee. Suddenly dizzy, I bent over, closed my eyes and rested my head between my knees. I wasn’t sure whether the wooziness was because of the booze or the Shark’s little white pill.
I still had my head between my knees when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes without lifting my head — had the Shark found me?
No. Worse than the Shark. Much worse: legs in white support hose ending in a pair of white crepe-soled Oxfords.
A familiar voice said, “I’ve had just about enough out of you, missy. Time to start coughing up what you know about a certain anarchist.”
I lifted my head. Nurse Dotty was holding up a hypodermic needle in one latex-gloved hand and gripping my arm with the other. I tried to get up off the toilet seat but I seemed frozen in place.
As she reached down to angle the needle into my bicep, she said, “Larry’s an asshole. He should’ve known better than to try to recruit a Normal like you. ShipCo prefers scraping the bottoms of barrels for their Snugglegirls. But his seduction pill was a useful coincidence. As you can no doubt already feel, it causes temporary paralysis. Very effective when you prefer your victim helpless.”
I watched, horrified, as the tip of the needle pricked my skin. But something didn’t make sense — I felt pain. If I were actually paralyzed, I wouldn’t be feeling anything at all.
Taking a deep breath to summon all my strength, I slammed one knee straight up into the nurse’s chest — a move I’d seen the Contessina do many times in Agents of V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E. while tied into a chair, to some beefy Russian henchman with an eye patch. Bringing down Florence Nightingale’s evil twin sister was a piece of cake by comparison.
With a grunt of surprise — I could almost see the “OOF!” floating in a speech bubble over her head — the nurse collapsed like a broken bag of white PEI potatoes, the glass needle shattering into itsy bitsy shards on the marble floor. Whatever hellish serum she was trying to pump into me formed a nasty little puddle. As if some drunk party guest had mistaken a floor tile for the toilet.
I yanked up my tights and snapped up the crotch of my leotard while the nurse moaned and writhed among the splinters of glass. Blood trails were forming on her white support hose.
“I’d pre-treat those bloodstains, if I were you, Nurse,” I said. “Didn’t anyone tell you not to wear white after Labour Day?”
“You little bitch!” seethed the white witch, trying to stand. Putting my foot into what I judged to be the centre of her I Can’t Believe It’s a Girdle foundation garment, I thrust her back into the shower stall and turned the tap marked COLD on full blast. It was hard to distinguish her screams from the wailing of the air-raid siren. This was starting to feel like fun.
The doorknob of the bathroom rattled, followed by a sharp knock.
“Go away, it’s occupied,” I called out.
“Debbie?” It was Bum Bum’s voice.
I opened the door and fell into him. Bum Bum wrapped his arms around me and kissed my forehead.
“Not sure Kendal would be happy to see us like this,” said Bum Bum.
“Or Rocco,” I said.
The rumble of Bum Bum’s laugh reached my ear through his chest.
He led me down the hallway past a paunchy cowboy backing up a giggling starlet against the flocked gold wallpaper. As we descended the circular staircase to where Rocco waited for us, Bum Bum explained that Kendal had called with news that the air raid was a prank, but Duff and Linda had disappeared, along with Dad’s truck. Now Mrs. Kendal was driving Dad all over Shipman’s Corners looking for them.
Before we left, I glimpsed the Shark with one arm around Angie and the other around Judy-Garland, his voice booming over the party noises. “You look like you really could be a Pan Am stewardess, darlin’. Ever hear of the Mile High Club? I’m a member.”
Bum Bum and Rocco shot their cuffs and adjusted their ties as I pulled on my crime-fighter boots.
“What now?” I asked, zipping up.
“We meet Kendal and track down that asshole, Duff,” answered Rocco. “Looks like it’s gonna be a long night, Contessina.”