SUN VALLEY/NORTH HOLLYWOOD
The girl was a bandit now, and she knew a bandit’s pleasure. She could tell her dad felt it too. He drove fast. He took lefts and rights that seemed random, but Polly knew it was all planned out. Polly powered down her window and stuck her head into the wind like a dog. She tasted the night. Her body was a single thing, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair dancing on her skull.
They passed an SUV with a woman behind the wheel and kids in the back, their noses pressed against the glass so Polly could see the boogers. The bear mooned them. Polly laughed. Her dad laughed. The light changed. He gunned it. Polly shrieked wild noises of joy. She tumbled back in her seat.
“Come on back,” he said. “Come on back to earth.”
She came back slow. She wondered what Madison Cartwright was doing just then. How small she seemed now, how pinched and ratlike her face was, that same face that had seemed impossibly pretty to Polly before.
“I never thought it would be so fun,” she said.
“It isn’t always,” he said. “Now put on your seat belt. Last thing we need right now is to get pulled over just for having a kid with no seat belt.”
“I’m hungry,” she said as she buckled up. “Can we have pancakes?”
The bear rubbed his stomach like yum.
“The bear votes yes,” she said.
“Funny how he likes all the stuff you like.”
“He likes you,” Polly said. The bear leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “See?”
Polly pulled open the paper bag. Plastic bricks of white powder. She held it gingerly away from her, like it might explode.
“This is meth?”
“It’s bad news,” he said.
The bear walked down her lap to peer into the bag. He stuck his head into the bag. He came out shaking like he was electrified.
“Oh no,” Polly said, laughing so she worried she would pee. She threw the bear up in the air like jumping. He bounced off the green monster’s ceiling and crashed to the floor. Her dad laughed and laughed.
“Drugs are bad,” she told the bear. She rubbed stomach muscles sore from laughing.
“For real, what will we do with it?” she asked.
“Dump it,” he said. “All we want is for them not to have it. We don’t need it.”
“Do you think it will work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will they quit?”
She wasn’t sure what the answer would be, or what she hoped it would be. She wanted to be safe, to sleep through the night without waking up at the slightest noise. But when it was done, she didn’t know what their lives would be. He had told her one night about a place called Perdido. A town in Mexico where everybody was somebody who’d run away from the world. A beach town that wasn’t on any map. An outlaw resort, a place for them. Because she was an outlaw now. Would she be the only girl?
“No,” he said. “They won’t quit just yet. We’re going to have to hurt them a lot worse than that.”
She didn’t know if she was happy or sad. But she knew she had to feel that feeling again, that bandit joy.
The white powder was bagged up in little plastic bags, the kind kids at school used for carrot sticks. When they got back to the apartment, after diner pancakes, Polly opened the first package, dumped it in the toilet. She thought the toilet would maybe bubble like witch’s brew, but the powder mostly just disappeared. She grabbed a second bag.
“Dump it slow,” Nate said from the door. “It eats pipes. We don’t want to have to call a plumber.”
“It eats pipes?”
“Told you it was bad news. I’m going out,” he said.
“Where?”
“Just out,” he said. “Want me to bring you something back?”
“Candy,” she said.
“You already had pancakes,” he said.
“So?”
“You’re in training,” he said back.
“Just a little piece,” she said. “One piece of candy.”
“All right then.”
She flushed the toilet, grabbed the second bag, and dumped it in.
“Put a towel over your face or something,” he said as he left. She pulled her T-shirt over her mouth. She kept dumping. When she was done she moved over to the sink, her shirt still over her face so she looked like a bandit.
She was a bandit.
She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she’d picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he’d opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn’t a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first.
She touched the glass. She was glad that her dad had hurt the man who had looked at her like that, and she felt bad for feeling good. It seemed when she was a kid she only ever felt one thing at once. She could be happy or sad but she’d only be that one thing. Now she never felt only one thing. It was like walking wearing two different-sized shoes. Nothing was ever level or smooth.
“Maybe I should dye my hair back normal,” she told the bear. The bear shook his head no. He reached forward and stroked her hair. He gave her a thumbless thumbs-up.
“I like it too,” she said. “Fuck that guy.”