Summer’s at an end now. At night a hurricane hits and the wind is so strong it ripples the skylight glass. We watch from our beds, not able to hear each other talk because the sound is so loud. We play hurricane roulette and try to see who can run to the bathroom and back before the next flash of lightning. I run and I trip and fall and lose and the whole house and all of us in it are lit up white by the lightning and I see my sisters laughing at me with their heads thrown back in their beds, their mouths wide open, the ridged roofs white like ribs, like carcasses standing in sand bleached by sun.

Our mother’s neck is falling. She firms it with slaps. One after another right under her chin.

“Merde, in France, well you know, in France, never, never this,” she says.

She is chapped at the ear tips. Hung skin on her lips, raspy at the elbows, and low in the mouth when she yells “Count me in” across the house. We are up all night with Atlantic Avenue and Park Place and the lost silver car and terrier dog replaced with bottle caps and garbage twist ties fashioned into lumps that won’t blow off the board. Cheating is rampant. Hands passing hidden orange 500s under the tabletop and stolen hotels plunked on property never fully paid for. The game is not the game, but the cheating of it all. We play until night bleeds out dawn, until our mother’s eyeliner has crusted and balled in her tear ducts she’s so tired. “Good morning,” we say and go to sleep. Our brother is sponging his robe, wiping out spots from sipping hot chocolate whose froth slid and soaked the dragon’s scaly tail. “Water stains too,” we tell him from under our covers deep in our beds.

“Really?” he says. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he wants to know. He comes at us with water, throwing it on us from a bowl left in the sink. The bowl once had something in it like milk, held curdled bits in its curved sides that now lace through our hair like unmelting snow from some Hollywood holiday set.

In the morning kids in front of school are burning required reading in a bonfire right in the middle of the street. I see Catcher in the Rye go up in flames. I would go grab it, but they’re all the cool kids who smoke and cut Hygiene and still get good grades, so I don’t go near them. They are smarter than I am and have vision and reasons for doing things I may never understand. If Vietnam were now they’d protest it and I’d probably think the fucking Communists should be shot down. I’d find reasons to agree with our government because it would be easier. I don’t want to be hit with a club and tear-gassed and trucked off to jail.

After school I go over to Rena’s and Hells Angels are riding their motorcycles through her loft. Bonnie’s boyfriend cuts hair in a salon and after work he brings his friends over to Rena’s and they do drugs at the long kitchen counter sitting on stools and then move back to their bikes, gunning their engines, turning fast turns on one back wheel that burns rubber and smokes up the air.

Rena’s got a beagle named Muy Hombre and he walks himself around the neighborhood and when he comes back he scratches at the downstairs door so that we let him in. Often he comes back with dirty fur as if he’d been crawling through tunnels but Rena says it’s from the bums on his route who all know his name and call to him and pet him with their filthy hands.

Rena’s building is three lofts all connected by trap doors. She lives in the bottom, her grandfather lives in the middle, and her aunt on the top. We go through the trap doors and visit them and leave the Hells Angels behind. We open the trap door and go up the ladder and we hear Mozart on her grandfather’s stereo and he’s painting with oils on a canvas. Rena says not to talk to him while he’s painting so we just pet his Persian named Monet and then head up to her aunt’s. She’s got crystals in her windows and a pet skunk named Toro who lives under the couch. Toro’s scent glands were cut out, but not all the way, and so the place still smells like skunk, but we hardly see Toro and only hear him at night with the lights off when he runs back and forth in the loft for what Rena’s aunt calls his midnight stroll.

We sleep at Rena’s aunt’s loft because Bonnie and her boyfriend and the rest of the Hells Angels are still zooming around Rena’s loft on their bikes. In the night I wake up to Toro nestling and rooting in my hair and I pick him up and throw him across the room but he just comes back and at school all the next day I stink like skunk and I just want to go home and wash.

It’s blood day and during Wood I see out the room’s windows and into the windows of the nurse’s office where the tough lesbian gym teacher, Miss Tord, who we call Miss Turd, is about to give blood. When the nurse sticks in the needle, Miss Turd faints and I yell and point to show all the other kids, and the sawing and hammering stops and we’re all laughing and watching the nurse slapping Miss Turd’s face. Mr. Lenin, who’s got a forest of black hair up his nostrils, comes over to tell us to get back to our projects, but when he sees Miss Turd facedown on the nurse’s desk, he says, “Oh, eet’s Miss Turd,” and watches too while he picks at his nose.

I’m making a box, but Mr. Lenin has to do everything for me because I don’t like holding the wood and pushing it through so close to the blade of the circular saw. Mr. Lenin tells me I have to sand and glue, but I don’t do that well either and when you pull out the drawer to the box the sides are slanted like a parallelogram and not a rectangle.

“You must do it again,” Mr. Lenin says, but I say I won’t and he says I’ll fail and I say I don’t care and I don’t know what good is a box if I have nothing to put in it and he tells me I can put a paper and a pens in it and I tell him I don’t need a place for a paper and a pens and Mr. Lenin walks away from me and I think it’s because of the stink of Toro in my hair.

“Merde,” my mother says when she gets back from work that night, “lucky none of you were on that boat,” she says, speaking of a ferry where a man plunged a samurai sword into passengers’ bellies. She always thinks we are where a disaster is, even plane crashes when none of us have ever flown. On our street a bus once caught the legs of an old woman and rolled over her skull. My mother was convinced it was one of us and up above from our window my sisters and I could see our mother pushing her way through the crowd, hitting at onlookers’ shoulders to make room for her so she could get down low and see.

There’s no money for the rent so we sell the piano for less than half its worth. Later that night we miss the cats walking across the keys, waking us up to sometimes a lighthearted tink-tinking and other times a low and sinister roll from the darker range.

“Not my parents’ piano!” my father yells the next day when he comes over to collect more of his things and then he yells “Jesus Christ” in front of the space where the piano used to be. Now there is floorboard that is shiny and looks new because it’s never been stepped on. I wonder if he can see himself yelling in the reflection of the shiny board, the way I can see him. His face is turning purple and the spots on his head are white compared to the rest. There’s a bulging vein in his neck that makes me stand back from him and go out the door for fear I’ll get sprayed when it bursts with a jet of his hundred-proof blood.

Jody lets her mice climb her head and shoulders and holds out her arms so the mice can climb out to the ends of her fingers. She closes her eyes and smiles.

“They tickle,” she says. “Want to try?”

“Fuck no, get those mice away,” I say.

She hums when she cleans their cage. She tosses the dirty wood shavings out the window.

“For the wild mice,” she says. She coughs while she cleans, sending up the shavings from their cage.

“You’ll infect them,” Louisa says. “They’ll die. You’ve given them mouse bronchitis, all right in humans but deadly in mice.”

The phone rings. It’s Ma Mère, very drunk. She’s talking French to us, but our mother is not around to pass the phone to.

“We don’t understand French,” we say and we hang up the phone. She calls back again, this time we yell it, “We don’t understand French!” and then we slam the phone down. When the phone rings a third time we don’t bother even saying hello, we just start yelling, “We don’t understand French.”