LIFE EXPERIENCE

YOUR FATHER IS SUCH A BABE,” said my friend Edie. Of everything in the living room—two giant TV sets, at least four videocassette recorders, camera and tripod, a rack of blinking stereo components, paintings signed by famous artists, leather couch and chairs from Italy, heated slate floor, and that amazing view—she’d zeroed in on a shelf with a couple of framed photographs. It was her first time at my house, and I told her she was going to hate it. But she said it was kind of cool. She liked the flat roof and openness. It reminded her of houses she’d seen in magazines. I was glad she’d invited herself over.

She had appeared one day in homeroom, not long after you’d collected your first Daytime Emmy for playing Jaymie Jo Rheinhart. You’d gotten so big so fast. One day you were the new girl in Foxboro and the next you’d hogged the cover of every soap magazine in America. I was happy I’d been there from the beginning and had started clipping articles. Some I hung on my bulletin board or taped to the walls, others I carried in my sketchbook, practicing what Mickey’d taught me about art. In colored pencils I kept you with me always, taking any free moment to draft the outline of your face, a new outfit, or that boyfriend of yours who presented new color possibilities. It was important work, you told a reporter from Soap Opera Digest, and I pledged to support you even though the producers had received a bunch of angry letters, and my grandmother called from Arizona to tell me you didn’t look like the kind of girl who would date a schvartza, and something about the way she said the word made me shiver and like her a little bit less. People were always chipping away at themselves, little by little making it more difficult to love them. You understood this. In the same Digest interview you said it was hard to trust people since you’d become famous. You could relate to your character coming into a whole new life. You’d had to leave your entire family on the other side of the country, having landed a role on one of the only soaps that didn’t shoot in New York, and making friends was never easy for you. “I understand what it’s like to feel all alone in the world,” you said. “I’m kind of an outsider.”

I clipped that quote and taped it into the sketchbook Blair had given me. You and me, we were both outsiders, both alone in the world. We could tell each other things. There was (and still is) a way we communicated that went beyond time and space.

And you were opening up to me. I knew you liked McDonald’s hamburgers, preferred Pepsi to Coke, though your favorite drink was Orange Crush. You went to church on Sundays whenever you were home in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, with your family. You had your hair trimmed and highlighted once a month, your legs and bikini line waxed every three weeks, which was sort of upsetting. You couldn’t have been that hairy, you were a natural blonde, and I wondered whether you’d think I was too hairy, but I was terrified of hot wax and razors and usually made a mess of stuff that came easy to other girls. I’m telling you, my genes and chromosomes had crossed wires somewhere along the way. One night I dreamed I was in the desert apartment with my grandmother. She pulled me out on the terrace and beneath the rhinestone stars asked if I knew anything about hermaphrodites.

“They have both sex organs, like the earthworm,” I said, psyched to display my knowledge. Earlier that week in biology we’d pinned rubbery earthworms to blocks and sliced them down the center.

“Good, then you’ll understand,” Grandma said, and gave me the face she’d used when she thought I was making fun of old Mickey.

“Understand?”

Her face stretched from grave to ghastly. “That’s what happened to you!”

I bolted up in bed. My sheets were soaked and I could barely breathe. I pulled my hands behind my hot, sweaty neck. It wasn’t true, I told myself, it was only a dream, only a dream … I was overwhelmed by the thumping of my heart, my soothing words, but when I turned my head toward the glass I swear it was you speaking, not me.

You were the first person since Blair who really knew my mind. But you were having a tough time in Hollywood and just like Blair you needed someone to look out for you: I was up for the job. The first step was getting to know each other privately, until I could leave home and become famous. We needed to be on equal footing in the outside world.

My immediate world was high school, with the same kids from junior high. Edie was the new girl. Just like you. But in a way, she was your exact opposite. You were so light and clean-looking, eyes as clear as the Pacific; Edie had the darkest black hair I’d ever seen, wore ripped T-shirts and fishnets. Up close her skin was like milky cellophane and her eyes, once you got past the raccoon makeup, flashed a purplish blue—a young punked-out Liz Taylor. You visited animal shelters and said people’s hearts should be filled with love not hate. Edie was a flesh-and-bone hypodermic of hatred and contempt. In the lunchroom, I’d overheard people say she was a witch, a devil worshipper, a cokehead, a pot dealer; she’d had an abortion (which was why she had to leave Ohio where she’d been living with her father), French-kissed her older brother, sucked off the bass player in a heavy metal band from the south shore; guys kept roaches from the joints she’d smoked in their wallets. I often caught myself staring at her, wondering if she knew what people said, what it felt like to be so talked about.

Then one strangely warm winter afternoon during lunch, I sat in the dried-up grass near the steps by the gym (smokers’ corner) trying not to listen to a group of girls nearby. They talked about the dumbest things. A shadow loomed in. I looked up expecting a cloud but instead saw Edie standing over me. “You shouldn’t smoke cigarettes,” she said, but before I could think of a response she sat down next to me and continued talking. “They’re totally useless, you know? They don’t even get you high.”

“It’s not about that.”

She took out a lighter and plastic stick with a metal tip that looked like a tiny baseball bat. “Oh yeah? Then what’s it about?” She put the bat in her mouth, flicked the lighter in front of the metal, and inhaled. Her chest puffed up with smoke, the smell unmistakable. Jack’s.

“I don’t know, smoking keeps me mellow,” I said. “Gives me something to do.”

She burst out laughing. Tiny gray clouds staggered from her mouth. “Okay, that’s good, that’s honest, that’s cool, I believe you. There is absolutely nothing to do around here. See, I have this theory that’s kind of based on science …” She stopped for a second to grab another hit from the bat. Then she handed it to me. “Go ahead. I packed that baby good this morning. It’s Peruvian Gold. It’ll blast your boobs off.” She laughed and I lit up, though I’d never got stoned in school before (never got stoned outside of my own house). And we were right on the front lawn. “Look at them,” Edie pointed to the girls in smokers’ corner. “Have you ever seen people who look so much like each other? And talk so much like each other? They probably do it the same way, too.”

I laughed. “Yeah, it’s kind of scary.”

“Did you ever have this? You’re sitting in class and all of a sudden everybody’s voices become echoes?”

“Like an echo chamber,” I said, leaning back on my hands to count the clouds rolling in.

“An echo chamber?”

“It’s like a mirrored room, only the walls are cushions instead of glass. You make a noise and it bounces back in a million different ways. They use them for sound effects on TV.”

“That’s exactly my point! Everything in this school, in this town, on this whole planet, you know … so much of it’s meaningless sound.” Edie took a sudden pivot and grabbed my arm. “Did you ever listen to the Butthole Surfers?” No, I hadn’t ever. Her eyes exploded. “Oh my god, they’re the best. The only good music these days is coming from the other coast. I’ll play you the Buttholes sometime. You’re gonna love them … I have to tell you, those are really cool pants”—they were camouflage—“I’ve got a halter top the same. And those sneakers, okay, where’d you get them?”

“In the city.”

“I knew it! You don’t look like everyone else around here.”

“Neither do you.”

She let go of me and slipped the bat into the chest pocket of her jean jacket. Then she glanced left and right as if somebody was watching us. “Okay, are you ready for this?”

“Your theory?”

“Theory?”

“Before. You said something about science.”

“Science?”

“Yeah, science.”

Edie’s eyes crossed and she knocked her palm against her forehead. “Oh my god, I forgot!” She giggled and I giggled and before I knew it we were both rolling in the prickly grass, laughing our heads off. We breathed heavily, sighed, then Edie sat up and said she had to see a guy called the Ayatollah over by the junior high. “Got a business meeting.” She tapped the pocket above her chest where the bat was and winked. “But first I have to know, have you always been here?”

“Since I was about twelve.”

“That’s exactly when I came down!”

“But you just got here from Ohio.”

“That’s where I landed, poor me … talk about the soundless masses. I’m really from the planet Andromeda,” she said, and I giggled, but she didn’t join me. “Don’t tell me you’re a nonbeliever! I’m so disappointed.” She raised her hands to the sky and shouted, “Darvon, must I take them all under my wing!”

For one second all the girls in smokers’ corner turned toward us. I could hear my heartbeat, feel my brow heat up though the sky had chilled over. I liked talking to Edie but she was really weird. Hovering over me, her purple eyes shooting through their heavy black frames and violet lips glowing, she looked like some kind of hybrid, a girl-monster. All the rumors I’d heard about her flashed like billboards across my cerebral cortex. Maybe she was from another planet. Maybe she was just trouble. There was a recklessness to her, like she could do something really bad. One of the smoking girls said, “What a slut!” and they laughed as their soundtrack quickened over the wind.

“USE-LESS!” Edie shouted at them, then turned to me. “Open yourself up a little,” she said. “Things are never just what they seem.” She walked away, jet-black hair swinging against her faded jean jacket. I watched her disappear into the naked brown trees.

A couple months later she was in my house. “What’s his name?” she asked, fingering that picture of my father in his bathing suit. It was covered with one-dollar bills.

“Jack.”

“Jack,” she nodded. “I like it.”

As if he might have had to change it if she didn’t. She was that sure of her opinions. She put down the photograph and said we should listen to some music. Behind my eyes came a dull throbbing. I wasn’t supposed to touch Jack’s stereo. And all my music was upstairs, including some CDs. I loved the little plastic jackets, those sparkling discs with their rainbow beams, the crisp scratchless sound. It was like stealing a piece of the future. Jack had CDs but kept all of his albums, too. Edie was skipping through them, saying what a massive collection, too bad there was so much hippie music, my parents must have been hippies. “Not really,” I said. “They were too busy.”

Edie nodded. “Mine too. You were born in ’69, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Me too. And I even have an older brother. My parents spent the sixties changing diapers.”

“Mine were in school. College was, like, such a big deal for them. Now it’s, like, who cares?”

Edie laughed. “I know, totally. Training camp for zombies.”

“You look at most famous people today, and they never went to college.”

“That’s my point exactly. Nobody around here’s going to teach you anything important. It’s all about life experience. Can we smoke in here?”

“Sure,” I smiled. “But hold on a sec, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Edie said fine, she’d pick out a record. I went upstairs to Jack’s drawer, detached a bright green bud from his stash, and was crossing the balcony from my parents’ wing to mine when I heard a crash of drums and guitar and looking down saw Edie standing in front of Jack’s stereo banging her head from left to right and back again. If Jack found out he’d be royally pissed, but what could I do? I stood for a couple of minutes watching Edie bounce up and down, pumping her fists in front of her, and I thought, I could never walk into someone’s house, put on the stereo, and dance alone. Who did she think she was? I crushed the bud in my hand. At that very moment, Edie looked up and saw me standing on the balcony. “Hey!” she shouted. “What are you doing up there?”

I said, just wait, she’d know soon enough, and she shrugged, then swung her arms up over her head and continued dancing. I stopped off in my room to turn on the VCR. (A few months later I would know how to set the timer.) It was almost three and I didn’t want to miss World. My favorite thing about videotape: you could be in two places at once. I hit Play and Record just as the theme song was coming on and then hopped downstairs. Edie was still swinging her body in front of the stereo when I returned with the crushed-up bud. She stopped and took it in her hand. “Holy shit!” she shouted, breathing heavily. “Where’d you get this? Have you been seeing the Ayatollah? No, this doesn’t even look like his shit, doesn’t look like anybody’s I’ve ever seen. I know practically everyone, and why’s it so crumbly? … You gotta learn how to take better care of your pot. Something like this should really go in the refrigerator.”

“Yeah, right next to the milk and OJ. Maybe in the butter dish.”

“All right, smarty pants, but you can be more clever about it. I keep mine in one of those ham tins underneath my bed. At the very least you should isolate a cool, dark place. Trust me, I know about these things.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“So, come on, what gives? Where’d you get it?” She looked at me hard. In the background a woman wailed about a river. Edie bounced over to the stereo and turned it down. “Ike and Tina, baby! One of the least corny albums I could find. Now, come on, tell me everything. I haven’t seen dope this green since Andy—that’s my brother, he’s at UCSD but he’s not, like, a jughead. He plays football and grows pot in his backyard and has a band … they’re called Black Box and they’re excellent and they once played in the same club as the Buttholes. You’d really like him, Lil …”

Two things: (1) Nobody but my grandfather ever called me Lil. I hated it. But in Edie’s mouth the name seemed reborn. Cool even. (2) Her brother sounded like a jerk, but who wasn’t?

I nodded and said nothing. She kept on nudging about where I got the pot, and finally I said, “Jack.”

“Your father gets you pot?”

“No, no, it’s not like that. He doesn’t know about it, or if he does, we’ve got, like, what they said in social studies: a de facto understanding.”

“You liar! Your parents are such hippies! I’m okay with it, don’t worry. I mean, I know the deal. Anyway, all those bands at Woodstock are all playing in football stadiums now. They’re corporations. Oh yeah, I know all about hippies giving it up for the big bucks, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I’m telling you, they’re not hippies. They never went to Woodstock or anything. Jack’s in advertising. They have to do a lot of schmoozing and partying.”

“Yeah, sure, Lil, whatever you say.”

“I’m serious.”

Edie shook her head back and forth, smiling. “So, come on, what are you waiting for? Flare up Jack’s dope.”

We smoked, and Edie talked about how great it was and asked if I could get more and I told her only if we kept within the rules: one medium-sized bud per month. Any more and Jack might have to say something, although he’d probably go after the cleaning lady first. They’d blamed the last one for money I lifted from Nancy’s wallet. It was right after Blair left, and I was still saving up to go and find her. Jack said if Linnelle was taking the money she must really need it. Maybe they weren’t paying her enough. They gave her a raise. And congratulated themselves on their problem-solving skills. A few years later, Linnelle was gone and a woman named Sema took her place. No one ever said why.

“Hello!” Edie snapped her fingers in front of me. “This is a no-zoning area. I had enough of that back in Ohio. Nobody says anything out there, but it’s different from Andromeda. We read each other’s brain waves.”

“That sounds awful. I wouldn’t want everyone knowing what I think.”

“It’s not like that. You have your private mind that people can’t access, unless you want them to. The thing is, you’re in control. You can make the information public, or transmit to one or two other people. Your choice.”

It sounded familiar. The way you and I communicated. Edie said all the electrical wires and satellites and TV antennas on earth made it harder to read people here. Too many signals jumbled together. Still, she was more psychic than most people. “I bet I can read you,” she said, slipping forward on the couch and beaming her purple eyes into mine. “Let’s start with something easy. What kind of guys are you into?”

“Um—”

“Don’t answer! The point is, I have to guess.” She put two fingers on the side of each one of my eyes and hummed. Up close she smelled like pot and candied lip gloss. “Okay, I’m getting a signal … Wow, you’re an open book.” I squirmed a bit. What if it was everyone? Not just you and Blair. What if my brain was wired all wrong and anyone could see it? I felt myself heating up. “Here we go,” Edie said, her fingers massaging my temples, our knees touching. It felt good. “Okay, you like the depressed intellectual type, a lot of dark clothes and facial hair, right? Come on, am I right?” I smiled. She was so not from another planet. I could read people better than that, even through TV screens. “Hah!” Edie shouted. “I knew it. That’s totally not what I’m into. I like ’em big and sexy, with tight, round football-player butts and really big dicks. Not too thick though. Nice and long and thin.”

She dragged out her words so I could see those dicks. I had a few visuals stocked from my parents’ porno tapes. Dicks resting in hairy palms, bouncing between scrawny white legs, making tents of their tight white underwear. I liked watching them grow under the cotton and sometimes in class imagined all the penises simmering beneath those wooden desks, aching to bust through their dungaree shields like the fire-breathing dragons on black concert T-shirts. I liked this immediacy, their need to be tended and tamed. Guys were always raising their hands to be excused and running off to the bathroom. All kinds of jerk-off sessions must have gone on in there. I said this to Edie, who moved in closer and pulled us down to the floor. “Holy fuck! It’s so hot!” I smiled and told her it was heated. She stretched out on the fiery slate and said, “Nice. Really fucking nice.” I wanted to lie down next to her but stayed cross-legged. I was sort of dizzy. “Okay, Lil, you’re really gonna like this,” she said in a deep, low voice. “Damon—he’s one of my boyfriends. I’ve got another one: Bobby. But he’s a little scary. He drives a beat-up old Chevy and has the coolest little flask that fits in his bomber jacket. We haven’t done it yet or anything. I just got in his car and we kissed a little. I have no idea where he lives even. Everything about him’s a total mystery. But, anyway, Damon …” she smiled, and between her lips that name became full of secret messages and meanings. “He starts off so small I can put the whole thing in my mouth and in, like, just a few seconds he gets so big I swear I’m gonna choke. I’m telling you, it’s the coolest thing.”

“That’s wild,” I said, and tried to ignore the pins and needles in my legs. I couldn’t stretch them forward without hitting Edie, and my back was wedged against the couch. My jeans felt like plaster casts and my butt was burning off.

“Wild? That’s nothing. Sometimes when we’re on the bus together I put my head in his lap, and oh my god, he gets so hard! Once—” She put her hand on my thigh without looking up. It threw a weird tingling into the mix. She continued talking, lying there like the slate floor was her own private beach. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, you’re so easy to talk to, Lil. Anyway, a couple of months ago we were on the bus and it was so hot and stuffy and Damon took off his jacket and put it over us and he got hard in like a second and you know …” She fluttered her eyes, and my cheeks flushed. I could feel how hot it was on that damn bus. Could see his head thrown back, her arms moving under the coat. It was like I’d walked into one of my parents’ videotapes. I could barely breathe but managed to say, “Go on.” Edie took her hand off my leg and sat up. She glanced over my shoulder, where the Long Island Sound was rumbling away outside the windows. Waves crashing like the roar of a bus in motion. Edie in the backseat, hand pumping a long, thin dick. She turned back to me, eyes like glimmering headlights. “I made him come, Lil. Right there on the fucking M34 or whatever. It was such a rush, even better than getting stoned. I keep playing it over and over in my head.”

She looked off into the water again. For the first time in days the sun peeked through the clouds, throwing a steamy pinkish glaze over the tiny beach. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Edie said. “Let’s go see Damon!”

“Now?”

“Yeah, he works at the mall. We can take the bus from town.”

“It takes like an hour to get into town,” I protested. The thought of walking all that way felt like trudging through the desert on a hot summer day. The only place I wanted to go was into the kitchen for a grilled cheese sandwich, then up to my bedroom to watch World. I was sort of hoping I could get Edie to watch with me.

“Wow,” she said, “you’ve really got a lot to learn. You’re gonna be so happy you met me. It’s ten minutes in a cab.”

“We’re going to take a cab to the bus?”

She stared at me like that was the stupidest question she’d heard in days, like there was nothing I could do to protest without sounding even stupider. Edie and I were going to the mall to meet Damon. You and the rest of the world would have to wait.

LAST WEEK THE SHIT HIT THE FAN. This according to my lawyer, Jonathan Brickman. He asks if I know what happens when the shit hits the fan: Everyone gets splattered.

Brickman gives me the quick coverage: Gustave Monde collapsed the company he and Jack had launched fifteen years ago and joined a Hollywood stable with big-time movie and music video connections. It was written up in the trades, Brickman says. Huge news. Not that anyone was surprised. Jack hadn’t been bringing in much work these past few months, and Gustave needed work, didn’t he? A writer can write in solitude. A painter can paint. But a director, very much like a monarch, is nothing without his subjects. Since I’d been inside, the question wasn’t whether Gustave would leave, but where he might end up. “Nonetheless, it’s a slap in the face,” Brickman says, shaking his head ominously, and I feel like I’ve eaten a cup of laundry powder. When I’d seen Jack over the weekend, I bugged him again about getting a new lawyer. He was sullen and withdrawn. Could barely bring himself to argue. He curled his fingers into fists, took deep breaths, clicked his lips together, kept checking his watch. Whenever I said something, he answered, “That’s nice.” It was like talking to a piece of cardboard.

“He wanted to tell you,” Brickman says, “he just didn’t know how.”

“That’s lame.” I remember the call I’d made from the Shelter Island police station: “Jack, I’m going to need a lawyer …” It’s not like I knew what to do. And this is what my father came up with.

“It’s a tough blow, Lily,” says the lawyer Jack hired. “He’s not himself. Which is all the more reason we have to stay on track here. The more holes we can plug in their case, the easier it’ll be for everyone.”

“I want to change my plea,” I say.

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me plead guilty, bargain for a lesser charge, get out of here at least.”

“Were you listening to anything I just said? Your father is suffering. Suffering worse than you can imagine. Didn’t you hear me when I said the shit hit the fan?” He slams his fist down on the metal table, his thick ring reverberating like a gunshot. I am stunned to attention. He sits down across from me. I can smell his cologne or aftershave. It reeks of sailboats and split-level houses, designer suits and weekends in Paris. Everything about him says “I’m loaded.” He moves his high-priced face in close, almost whispering. “Do you know where that saying comes from, Lily? The shit hit the fan. Let me tell you where it comes from. It’s an old vaudeville joke. A guy’s having stomach pains and knows he’s about to have diarrhea. He walks into a crowded bar so pained by this point it’s amazing he’s made it so far, and yet somehow he manages to ask where the toilet is. The bartender points up a flight of stairs. At the top there are two doors. The guy’s about to lose it, mind you, when he opens the first one and sees a hole in the floor. ‘Primitive,’ he might have thought if he’d had any time to think, but you know how these things go, right? So he squats down over the hole and lets it loose, every last drop, then sighs a happy little sigh and walks downstairs to find everyone in the bar’s disappeared, and the place is covered with smelly, brown soot. ‘Where’d everyone go?’ he asks, innocently. The bartender looks at him and says, ‘Where were you when the shit hit the fan?!’” Smiling ear to ear, his face is the perfect outline for a Colombian necktie. Then his brow clouds over: “Do you see what I’m saying, Lily? You’ve got to look underneath your own shithole here. It’s not just Gus I’m talking about. Things have gotten worse than you can imagine. Much, much worse …” He tells me again how Jack is suffering. Between my legal fees and Nancy’s rehab, he’s going broke. He’s sold a couple of cars, taken out a second mortgage on the house, put the summer place on the market, and his career’s stalled out on both coasts. He’s a salesman, remember, and his number one product has just jumped ship: Imagine if Colgate lost its patent for toothpaste. Everything is more … tenebrous, I think Brickman says, more tenebrous than ever with the media trailing him, and now the crash. His investments are worth less than they were a week ago. “See, Lily, he’s got to believe this’ll end. He’s got to trust that I’m going to get you out of here. It’s the only thing giving him any hope.”

What he really means is Jack needs to believe I’m innocent. That he had no part in birthing a monster. It’s the only way he can get on with his life, save face. And in walks the attorney singing sweet alibis.

For the next couple of days I am haunted by Brickman’s words. I look up tenebrous in the dictionary and it says dark and gloomy, like Jack’s face whenever he comes to see me. I imagine him day after day sitting in his office with the door closed and blinds down; lights dimmed to nothing, he wades through it. Shit. Splashed across his windows the way I used to finger-paint it, piled steaming high on his desk, caked into the grooves of his oak floor, nothing escapes. Even his neat black furniture used to be a pat on the back, now it’s cold, sinister, angry as the telephone blasting his heart to the moon when it rings. On the other end it’s nothing but shit.

My father used to love his job. He saw it as a public service. Once he told me, “Some people build buildings, some sew shirts, some make milk cartons, others run the farms that make the milk … The point is, everybody’s selling something. Gus and me, we’re selling lifestyles. We give people stories, these tight little nuggets of life, and they go, ‘Hey, I want that, that’ll make me happy.’ Maybe they never even thought of it before, it doesn’t matter. We tell them what they want, how to make their dreams.”

This was a man who’d built his own. After his father’d died young—some kind of liver trouble—it was just Jack and his mother. Their house was modest, they never owned a car or even a radio. Jack was enlisted by the woman as a young boy to deliver tiny decorative pillows to their neighbors. Each pillow had a saying sewn on top, something his mother had dug up from the Bible and stitched with her Singer: “Love thy neighbor as thyself “; “If thou have ears, listen”; “Whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Jack loved going out on pillow runs. He was invited into people’s homes, given food, Coca-Cola, was introduced to television. He watched shows with cowboys, listened to crooners, saw people become millionaires, but it was the sponsors he loved most. How they set out a world of endless possibility. Creation. You didn’t have to be who your family was.

And so in those grainy black-and-white images my father saw what his mother had failed to show him: He saw his future.

I call Gustave Monde collect at his home in L.A., and he picks up. It’s very early in the morning out there. “Well, hello, Lily! Hello!” he says. “What a surprise! … Very well, it’s good to hear you. We’ve been thinking, eh … Pamela did write a letter, I think.”

“I got it. And I wrote her back. Listen—”

“But tell me, what is it like there? Are you doing okay with yourself? Sometimes I read things that are not so fantastic. But the media is terrible. They make it like everything is a film. A bad film.”

“It is like a bad film,” I say, thinking, Actually, it’s more like TV and I’m trapped inside. Nobody ever turns off the set and says it’s time to go to bed.

“And how is the food?”

“Not too bad, really, but I want to talk to you about Jack.”

Through the phone I hear him take a deep breath. “I am very sad about this,” he says. “Very, very sad.”

“Can’t you help him out?”

“It’s terrible. The whole situation just stinks.”

“There’s got to be something you can do.”

“I’m sorry, Lily, but really there is nothing … nothing.”

Dramatic, his words resonate like the bang from Brickman’s ring. What a fucking liar. “Oh, come on,” I say, “you’re Mr. Hollywood. I saw your name in Variety. Don’t tell me this.”

“We are out now on the coast all the time—there is nothing left in New York. Nothing. Jack, he knows this too but he’s stuck. He can’t leave in the middle of … in the middle of everything.This is not his fault, I know, but neither is it mine. You don’t know the pressure there is with these things. Please understand, I’m not saying you are … you did … it’s just that there’s too much publicity, and I am working harder than ever—in fact, I must now go and prepare for work. I can’t hold on the telephone. But please, you’ll call again?”

“I don’t believe this. Jesus, you’re supposed to be, like, my godfather!” I say, blood crawling up my neck.

“No, not officially. There was never a ceremony.”

“But he didn’t do anything,” I plead, about to crack.

“I wish I could help, you don’t know how much, but—”

“Bullshit!” I bang my fist against the side of the phone. Needles fly up my elbow, everything throbbing. I hit again … and again, biting my tongue to keep from screaming.

“I feel terrible about—”

“No you don’t. You’re a fucking asshole!”

“It’s not my—”

“ASSHOLE! ASSHOLE!” I slam down the phone with my good hand. What an asshole! Sinking against the wall, wishing it would grow a pair of arms and take me in, everything throbs. A guard comes and lifts me up. My pinkie hangs low, like it’s stupidly splintered from the rest of the group. The guard touches it lightly with her fingertips and I flinch, “Ahhhh!” Feels like she’s trying to break it off. I squeeze my elbows into my sides, clench my teeth together, as she whisks me off to the infirmary, where like something out of a dream the white coats wrap me up and pop me with codeine before sending me back to my cell. Mimi slips by, dragging her mop and aluminum pail behind her. They let her in even though they’re not supposed to.

As the guard unlocks, she stares at the white bandage on my hand. “Oh, chica,” she says, and leans her mop against the wall. I could vomit from the bleach and ammonia clinging to the invisible ring she carries everywhere. Like an earthly saint with dishpan hands, stinking worse than the chemicals on her rubber gloves, she can still get me with the look. Makes me stir where I don’t necessarily want to, not with my hand injured and head clogged. She’s directly in front of me now, long brown hair swept behind her back and she’s so tall, almost six feet. From where I sit, I’m looking straight at her stomach. She sits down next to me, grazes her middle finger against my splint, looking at me with those deep brown eyes like Jack’s. So dark I’m afraid of falling inside and never coming out. Tenebrous eyes.

“Angel’s having the baby,” she says finally. My throat clamps shut. Nothing in, nothing out, not even the stinking air. Already lightheaded from the drugs, I fall back against the cement. Ow! It’Ow! It’s my head this time. Pounding so hard I feel like smashing it harder. I feel like screaming, “Gustave Monde is a fucking asshole!” but I can’t even raise my head. Mimi crosses herself and takes my good hand, kneeling me down with her in front of the bed. “My little muñeca,” she says, “let’s say something together. Let’s pray for Angel.”

And because part of my blood belongs to the grandmother I saw only three times alive and once in her coffin, the one who claimed a personal relationship with Jesus, maybe he’ll listen to me, if it isn’t all a bunch of crap like Jack always said. Imitating Mimi, I press my hands together, careful not to disturb the white coils around my pinkie. Mimi’s Spanish tickles the insides of my eardrums, though it’s hard to figure out exactly what she’s saying besides Jesus and Angel. Hey-zeus and Ahn-hel. I want to say something for Angel’s sake, but I’m not sure how it works. I envision Angel’s face, beads of sweat falling as she pushes cannonlike. An eerie feeling sweeps up through my knees, then come the pins and needles. “Please let Angel be okay,” I murmur.

Mimi takes the back of my bandaged hand and kisses it lightly. Still speaking her language, she tells me not to worry, tells me she’ll take care of me, tells me she loves me, and when I ask what she means she calls me a happy girl, locacita. “Don’t all mothers love their daughters?” she says. Then we commit incest.

EDIE SAID BOBBY DAVIS HAD A VELVET PENIS. And that wasn’t his best quality. She liked his ringlets of white-blond hair, the way his faded Levi’s hugged his tight ass, how he stuffed the lining of his bomber jacket with bags of sticky green pot and drove a monster Chevy with souped-up wheels, so different from the sleek foreign cars that filled the parking lot at school. But Bobby didn’t go to school. He mixed cement for his uncle’s construction company in Queens. I think that was where he lived. He just came around to buy pot from the Ayatollah and flirt with Edie. They’d hooked up over the summer just before she’d gone off on a teen tour and met a bunch of guys whose names sounded like those foreign cars. Edie’d rated them all on a scale of one to ten for looks, personality, bod. Sergio was her favorite, she’d said. An eight-ten-seven: European guys were skinny and they hardly ever showered. “Here’s the main difference between European and American guys,” Edie’d told me. “European guys smell funkier and their hair gets really greasy, but you’ll never find shit stains in their underwear. They scrub their assholes three times a day. Put that in your book.”

I’d been jotting down “life experience” phrases in my sketchbook. Edie said they’d come in handy when I stopped scribbling pictures of soap stars and got out into the real world. She had some kind of beef against you from the beginning, only I never realized how bad it was until it was way too late.

On the show, you and Max were engaged to be married, and the whole town of Foxboro was jazzed up about interracial marriage. This was big stuff. And in your personal life, you were collecting money at shopping malls to help feed the hungry kids they showed on TV. Lots of people were doing it. Just before Thanksgiving you took a trip to Africa with a couple of rock stars to help deliver the food, and at the Emmy’s (your second win) you had tears in your eyes. “We’re gonna keep going until every child on earth has enough food to eat and a warm bed to sleep in,” you said, in your sparkling black dress and high heels. I’d videotaped the whole thing and had been pausing the tape to draw you from stills, even though Edie said you were a hypocrite. Most celebrities were. It was no sweat raising money for starving kids in Africa without thinking twice about starving kids right here at home. But our kids weren’t running around naked with pregnant-woman stomachs and white paste around their lips. I thought you were noble and asked Nancy to write you a check. A few weeks later, you sent a thank-you note that hung next to a few Emmy sketches on my wall.

Edie said my room was starting to look like an Egyptian tomb, every bit of space covered in words and pictures, whole stories written on the walls. She said it was weird, but that was before she started watching World, too. We spent a lot of time in my room looking at TV and getting high and talking about guys. At the moment we were working on what Edie called my virginity problem. She had me make rating lists of guys in my sketchbook and lectured me on finding opportunity like it was the most important thing in the world. Not that I didn’t want to lose it, I just didn’t want anyone touching me. In pornos it looked so grubby, and I really didn’t see the point. At camp a girl had said orthodox Jews did it through sheets. That sounded okay but I never mentioned it to Edie. She was on a mission.

Then one cold Saturday night Bobby Davis called and invited her to a party in one of the big mansions by the Sound. He said he would bring a friend for me. Edie was psyched. She was sleeping over, and I didn’t have a curfew. But we had a few days’ worth of World to watch.

“I’ve got the tapes all ready,” I sighed.

“So fucking what,” she said, “they’re not going anywhere.”

“But we had a plan.”

“Jesus Christ, Lil, you can always watch TV. This is reality. This is a gift. An opportunity. God, can’t you see …” she huffed and threw her head back. “You know, anybody else would have given up on you by now.”

My throat tightened. I looked up at the glossy black window, which at night reflected my walls. You floated kaleidoscopically, from all angles, begging me not to go. Edie caught me staring. “Are you even listening to me?” she said. “You know, most people wouldn’t give a damn about your life experience. And tell me, if it wasn’t for me, who else would devote even five minutes to your virginity? Tell me, who?”

“I don’t know.”

Drooping shoulders, a high-pitched whine, she imitated me: “I don’t know … When are you going to take some responsibility for your own experience? Do you want to stay a virgin forever or what?”

“It’s not that, it’s just …” I stopped myself. How was I supposed to tell her you were more important than anything I’d find outside? Even a de-virginizer. Someone I’d never even met. Our philosophies were totally opposed.

“What?” she pressed.

“Huh?”

“Come on, what’s your excuse this time?”

“I have an English paper due Monday.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Edie laughed.

“I haven’t even read the book.”

“Oh my god, Lil, you putz … why didn’t you say something? I can take care of that. Let me take care of that. We’re going to the party! Yeah!” She threw her arms in the air, then picked up the phone again and asked information for somebody named Jerome Finkelstein. “Toss me a pen,” she said. I did, and she jotted down a number on her palm, then dialed again. “What’s the book?” she said.

“Brave New World.”

“Science fiction. That’s cool, that’s my kind of thing, although it’s not really a classic, might be tough—hey, is Susan there?” she spoke into the phone. I walked closer to the closet where she was standing in front of the full-length mirror rubbing purple lipstick from the corners of her mouth as she waited, then perked up. “Hey, Susan, it’s Edie, how’s it going?” she said. “I’m cool. Totally cool … well, except for a little problem I heard you can help me out with …” Laughing, she explained the situation, systematically checking her makeup, running chipped fingernails through her hair, straightening her velvety green skirt over ripped fishnets. Was it a joke, her wearing velvet? Or a reminder? Every time she grazed herself she thought of him. A few minutes later, she hung up the phone. “You’ve got your paper. It’s on the book’s view of sex and reproduction. Sounds cool, right? I almost want to read it myself. She says it hasn’t been used since 1981 and it’s only forty bucks.”

“Forty dollars?”

“Well, what did you expect? This is contraband. This is underground economy. Susan Finkelstein is the Ayatollah of term papers. Now, let’s get you dressed.”

I had on a black turtleneck and khaki safari pants—I looked fine. Edie disagreed. Sizing me up, she said I should at least find a tighter shirt and put on a little mascara, but I refused. Adamantly. She accused me of fighting opportunity before it began, and I said just let me try it my way tonight, if it doesn’t work I’ll reconsider. “Okay … under one condition,” she smiled—I knew what she wanted: Jack’s pot.

I led her into my parents’ bedroom, and together we opened Jack’s sock drawer, took out his leather cigar box, and sat down on my parents’ bed. Inside the box was a bigger bag than ever and something else: a tiny orange vial filled with white powder. “Holy shit!” Edie said. “Your parents are so cool.” The last time we’d found a matchbook from a club called Symposium. Edie said it was a sex club. She’d read an article about it in the Village Voice. It said couples went together and traded partners. Some did it in groups. But most men didn’t go with other men, afraid it would make them gay. Women were different, more experimental. They could go back and forth more easily. Edie said that made sense. She said she was going to have sex with a girl someday, and my body temperature jolted. I grimaced and said … I can’t remember what I said, my blood was pumping like molten lava, and then she said something like everyone should have that experience at least once and I felt like she was stripping layers off my skin and she must have sensed something because she added this (and I remember it clearly): “Not that I’m advocating it tonight or anything.” And then I felt really bad for a while and it was that badness swelling back as we argued about Jack’s coke. I thought we should leave it alone. A couple of buds were one thing; cocaine was expensive. But Edie thought otherwise. “Go and get your book,” she said.

“No way!” I didn’t trust her alone with that stuff for a minute.

“Then listen to me and listen good: Jack wanted us to find this.”

I laughed. “Oh yeah?”

“It’s in his underwear drawer!”

“Socks.”

“Same difference. It’s like the first rule of being a parent. If you want to communicate with your child, you check out his underwear drawer because that’s where he’s leaving anything he wants you to find. Everyone knows that’s the first place people look.” My brain was spinning and we hadn’t even smoked. If everyone knew the sock/underwear drawer wasn’t a real hiding spot, then what could looking really tell you about your kid? And Jack … what did it matter? This was his house. Nobody was checking up on him. But Edie said things were different around here. “Your parents don’t act like parents and you’re no normal kid. No offense. I mean, who wants to be normal, but my point is, everything around here works in reverse. Trust me, Jack’s a smart guy. He knows you’ve been looking in that drawer and he still leaves all his shit in there. That’s practically an invitation.”

Mostly to shut her up, I said okay and cut a few thick lines on one of Jack’s marble book ends. We snorted them with a rolled-up twenty. Edie fell back on my parents’ steely gray sheets and said, “Fucking A!” Her tits, covered in fraying white words—Talking Heads—bobbed up and down. I chewed my lip, but couldn’t really feel it, couldn’t feel anything inside my mouth, and imagined my slack jaw unable to form words, sentences, and why the fuck were we going to a party with demented faces? That’s it, I thought, I’m staying home. I’d lose Edie downstairs, somewhere between the den and front door. It was a big house. As if she’d read my mind, she bounded up and ricocheted from room to room, practically dragging me by the collar. My nose twitched and I couldn’t swallow, but Edie said that would stop as soon as we had a few drinks and helped me put my arms through my coat, saying, “Oh, man, this is good shit, this is really good!” She paced. I followed, and when she turned we collided. “Jesus, Lil! Don’t walk so close.”

“Everything’s so tight in here.”

“Let’s wait out front.”

Outside, my breath fogged in the crisp black night, but I didn’t feel cold. I was riled inside. Felt like jumping out of my skin. I wanted to run down to the beach, run past the swimming pool that used to be Blair’s house, although everything about it was fading. I couldn’t remember where the front door was, how I’d reach under the mat for the key and let myself in. Everything was a big Blairy blur.

In the distance came the clink of a low-hanging carburetor, followed by a few shouts. Headlights rolled toward us. Edie grabbed my upper arms. “Okay, you ready?” she said, and I nodded. “Trust me, it’s gonna be okay. Just follow my lead, you can do that, you’re a fast learner. And remember, Lil, this could be your lucky night.” She let go of me and waved her arms in the air.Her down jacket rose up over her hips. “Whoooo! Bobby!” she shouted. “Over here!” An old Chevy with dark windows screeched in front of us. Bobby Davis and his velvet penis had arrived.

We—me, Edie, Bobby Davis, and his six-foot-two, two-hundredfifty-pound friend, Noz—pasted ourselves behind a group of girls who’d been dropped off in a Rolls Royce and slipped inside the huge Colonial house. Market value: a couple million, easily. Nancy would have wet her lips at the prospect of that commission. The foyer had marble floors, life-sized statues, and antique-looking paintings in thick gold frames. Opposite the double front doors was a wide staircase like something out of an old horror movie. A boy I recognized from chemistry class was leaning on the banister, talking to a few people gathered on the steps, the faint echo of a Phil Collins song spilling from a lighted room in the distance. As we passed, a couple of spokes in the banister cracked beneath him, and the boy slipped back. Bobby reached out and pulled him up. Red-faced, he brushed himself off and sneered at Bobby. “You’re welcome, Prince Charles,” Bobby said. The boy kicked another spoke until it broke through the middle like a chipped tooth.

“Asshole!” Noz said. “I hate these motherfuckers. What the fuck are we doing here?”

“It’s a party,” Bobby said, and steered us toward the brightly lit room. A giant chandelier hung sloppily from the ceiling and heavy curtains with velvety swirls covered part of the windows, exposing patches of the black night like illicit skin. It made me think of my mother, how she’d always leave the outdoor shower in the Hamptons before realizing her towel was too small. Edie pulled me further into the room, where some girls from school huddled in tiny cocktail dresses, a mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke rising above them, and it looked like something I’d seen on TV, one of those parties you were always showing up at, even though you preferred staying home. This was good practice for me. Phil Collins repeated the same line over and over again. You had to be really famous to get away with that kind of crap. One of the anorexia girls dropped a cigarette butt and crushed it underneath the heel of her shiny leather shoe. It smelled funky, like burning hair. Looking down, I noticed the carpet was covered with cigarette burns.

“We need those drinks,” Edie said, and pointed to a few people sipping green liquid out of long glass goblets and munching on what looked like pieces of sushi.

“And sushi,” I said, entranced, mouth watering. “I love sushi!”

Grabbing me by the elbow, Edie counseled: “Never eat at parties. It makes you look desperate.”

“What?”

“Trust me.”

We left the ballroom for a dark cavern with leather couches and walls smothered in books. A group of guys wearing dinner jackets and loaded with gold jewelry sat around a table playing poker like the old men at Palm Court. One of them smoked a cigar, a rich-boy gangster type. “Welcome, ladies,” another one said. I think he was in my math class. “Are you the hookers?”

“In your dreams,” Edie shot back, and we quickly left, continuing on into a huge open space off the kitchen where we found the food and drinks and Noz stuffing pieces of sushi down his thick throat like Godzilla swallowing an entire town.

I pointed at him. “He’s eating.”

“It’s different for guys.”

“Yo E-D rhymes with V-D!” Noz shouted across the table. “B-D’s been looking for you. Says we’re supposed to meet him upstairs in the executive suite, whatever the fuck that is. You want some raw fish?” He dangled a piece of tuna in front of her face and it looked like a tongue, his tongue, only thinner. Sniffing it, he said, “Smells like—”

“Hmmm, let me guess … pussy?” Edie grabbed the piece of fish and flung it in the air. It stuck to the ceiling, then plopped onto a girl’s bare shoulder. She flicked it like a fallen leaf, a bug, a minor nuisance that barely interfered with her monologue.

Noz smiled. “Hooo-sah!”

Edie reached into the punch bowl and filled a couple of goblets with green liquid. While her back was turned, I sneaked a piece of salmon from the table, dropped it in my mouth, and swallowed before she finished pouring and handed me a glass. “What is it?” I asked.

“Who cares?” She chugged hers, then waited for me to do the same. We refilled and drank a few more glasses with Noz, before following him through the kitchen, where a couple of people held pieces of sushi over the blue flames of a gas stove, toasting the rectangles of fish, rice and all, like marshmallows. The smell was worse than the burning rug, but they glowed beautifully. Little electric rainbows. I wanted to hold one in my hand, feel it ride down the back of my throat, hot. How was Edie not hungry? We hadn’t eaten in hours. A clock on the microwave said five, another one on the wall said nine, and I wondered if either hour was correct and which would get us out of there faster. But we descended further inside, climbing a steep staircase off the kitchen and making our way down a long, dark hallway, floorboards creaking beneath our feet, toward an echo of music and laughter, golden triangles of light. Edie called it the VIP room, and I imagined you and me being ushered into a Hollywood club together. People turned their heads, shouted your name, grabbed at our clothes. You took my hand. Stay with me, Lillian.

Hundreds of candles burned around gigantic pillows spread out on the thick carpet and soft velour couches, all bursting with faces that made me think of that people-are-strange song, but the B-52s blared from speakers on the ceiling, a fire simmered beneath a brick mantel covered with soot and candle wax, and in the middle of the room, a door with a full-length mirror nailed into it was propped up on two footstools covered in fur, deer probably, with hooves attached to the bottom. In the smoke and candles the door looked rubbery, bending like a worm above its furry feet, trying to slither back over to its hinges off the blue-tile bathroom where a group of girls danced in ballet costumes or I was really wasted and seeing things and felt a leaf? a bug? crawl up my arm and flicked it like the girl who’d flipped the tuna from her shoulder but instead of coming off it yanked me to the floor: Edie’s arm. You were lost in the fog. Edie and I sat down in front of the door. Bobby Davis loomed over it, his pink face blown up in the mirror, octopuslike, with huge dilated eyes and nostrils engorged. He was a rock lobster. A silver tube connected his nose to the mirror, the thickest lines of coke I’d ever seen laid out in front of him. Next to him was the Ayatollah. Edie’d finally introduced me to him a few weeks earlier when I put a cork on Jack’s stash. He sold us an eighth of reddish buds from Hawaii, almost as good as Jack’s.

The Ayatollah filled a glass pipe with a chip of something that looked like rock candy and handed it to Edie. Giggling, she put her lips to the glass. The Ayatollah flipped open a metal lighter and brought down the flame. Curls of smoke fluttered through the pipe, the smell chemical but sweet, sugar melting over a Bunsen burner. Watching her, the Ayatollah’s eyes sparkled. He was so gorgeous. Long black hair flowing down his back, smooth caramel skin, brown eyes, a straight elegant nose that made him seem ancient and foreign, which he was. What I liked best was if you looked too quickly you might have thought he was a girl.

He dropped another diamond chip into the pipe and held it out to me. Inflated in the mirror it looked like a neon test tube. This guy in his white tank top and drawstring pants was some kind of rad scientist. “Go ahead,” Edie said, dreamily. “It’s not like the shit you get on the street. This is sweet.”

Sweet as sugar, I thought, easy to smoke sugar. I reached for the pipe.

“The only difference is what you call it,” Bobby said.

“This is not true,” said the Ayatollah. He grabbed his lighter, but before bending to fire me up, he said everything he presented was uncut, pristine, and pure. He said his connection was only once-removed from Peru. He used his Bic like a pointer.

“Whatever,” Bobby said. “Expensive crack is still crack.”

“You are mistaken, my friend. This is not crack.”

“Crack is whack!” Edie said, and burst out laughing. She rolled her head against Bobby’s lap. I’d never seen her so silly.

The girl in the tutu—which I now realized wasn’t a tutu but a short frilly skirt—leaped out of the pale blue light and spinning toward the stereo announced that she would never smoke crack, or do any drug besides pot. “I want normal kids,” she said, and in the mirror I saw the blown-up pipe glowing in my hand, radioactive, toxic, terrifying. I didn’t want kids, I hated kids, but the thought that I was doing something to mess up my chances of having them felt dangerous … and not in a bad way. A frustrated Ayatollah repeated that this was not crack, he would never sell crack … I didn’t care what it was, I wanted it more than anything. The music scratched off and the room vibrated with Edie’s mantra … crack is whack! … crack is whack! It made the Ayatollah laugh.

Suddenly (I can’t help it, I need this word) all six-foot-two, two-hundred-fifty pounds of Noz slammed down next to me and tried to wrestle the pipe from my hand. “Wait your turn,” I said.

“You’re my date, right?”

“I guess.”

“So I go first.” He pushed his mouth inside my arm toward the pipe and looked up at the Ayatollah. “Light, faggot.”

“What did you call me?”

Noz stared at him. “Faggot, you know, like a bunch of sticks. I need fire.”

In the corner, the girl in the mock tutu pressed buttons on the CD player and the soundtrack from The Rocky Horror Picture Show began. Slow-mo wheels in gear. A lot of weird staring. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Ayatollah. He looked scared, even prettier than before. Level, my face fell upon Noz’s tattoo, a fleet of Budweiser horses carting a keg around his upper arm. To the right the girl by the stereo whooped and pirouetted in front of the CD player. Noz shoved his slimy head further inside my arms. Sweat covered the back of his neck, making spikes of the bottom of his hair. He smelled like fish and BO and was shoving his hip against me. I tried to dislodge him with my foot. The music jumped abruptly, and the tutu girl threw her arms in the air, shouting: “Let’s do the Time Warp! Let’s do the Time Warp!” More girls rushed from the bathroom and formed a line, screaming the words to the song in high-pitched voices.

“You shit,” Noz said to me. “You’re making me hard!” His dick grew through his jeans just like I’d imagined it—fire-breathing dragon on a concert T-shirt, mini-Godzilla drenched in scaly pond scum. No velvet in sight.

Bobby put his hand on Noz’s shoulder. “Chill out a second, man.”

“Get off me!” Noz looked up at him, sweating. His salty wetness seeped through my sleeves and I wondered if this would go into my book as a prelude to opportunity. Around me voices pealed:

… It’s just a jump to the left … and then a step to the ri-i-i-ight …

“What’s his problem?” Edie kicked Noz’s thigh.

“It’s his mother’s birthday,” Bobby said, and held out the silver tube to him. “Here, man. Do another line.”

“He doesn’t like birthdays?”

“He doesn’t like his mother.”

Bobby dislodged Noz’s arms from mine and my heart beat faster than those girls doing the Time Warp. Noz leaned over the table—bigger, fatter, and even more disgusting, but I couldn’t stop thinking about his dick against my thigh, what I’d done to him. Didn’t think I could do that to anyone. This was going okay. As long as he didn’t start thinking he was my boyfriend or anything. You were my first priority. The Ayatollah flicked his Bic, rolled his eyebrows. Sugar time. I put the pipe to my lips. He leaned over from where he’d been huddled with Edie and lit me up. Smoke caked my throat, not sugary at all, it tasted like baby powder. Cold bubbles rushed my head and I felt like a commercial … plop plop, fizz fizz … Daddy’s little girl. My legs started to tremble, my jaw tightening, as all the forces in the room converged in the Time Warp. I wanted to dance but my legs were gelatinized, swishing like the rubbery door. How could I trust them? I drummed my hands against my thighs and swayed. Edie picked up a roach clip from the mirror and made it talk. “I want to bite you, baby,” it said.

Finished with his lines, Noz wedged in next to me and leaned his arm on my shoulder … plop plop, fizz fizz …

My toes tingled and my head bounced to the song on repeat cycle, I think. I could have sworn we’d come to the end and all the girls had collapsed on the floor like they do in the movie then bounced up again. We were all stuck in the Time Warp. I gnawed the inside of my cheek, darted my eyes back and forth. There was movement next to me, a few words brewing between the Ayatollah and Noz, Edie chewing the roach clip into Bobby’s face, and I imagined her munching on velvet which couldn’t have been as cottony as my mouth felt just then. The girls were still doing the Time Warp, a line of slimebag Rockettes making lasers out of their arms and legs. The Ayatollah lit a joint and handed it to Edie, who smiled and took a deep drag.

“If she was my girl, I’d watch out,” Noz said to Bobby. “I heard she’s a nigger lover. Hoo-sah!”

“Don’t fucking hoo-sah! me,” Bobby said. “You fucking moron.”

“I’m serious, man. You don’t know how they are with chicks.”

Edie stared at the roach clip. “Hello, Mr. Alligator, I’d rather talk to you than anybody else here. You’re not prejudiced, you’re just a reptile. Green. And we all know it’s not easy being green …”

“Alls I’m saying is the nigga’s got eyes on her.” Noz glared at the Ayatollah.

“Who are you calling nigger?” the Ayatollah said. Edie undid the first few buttons of her shirt and peeled back her bra.

“What are you doing?” I stammered. She ignored me.

“Nigger, A-rab, same difference,” Noz, my date, was saying. “You’re all nothing but a bunch’a criminals and terrorists. Every time I turn around one of you’s hijacking a plane or pushing some old guy off a boat.”

“Listen, man,” Bobby moved behind him. “He’s not a terrorist, that’s why he’s living here. And in case you forgot, it’s his shit you’ve been scarfing all night, so chill the fuck out.”

“You just don’t get it, man. Guys like him, they’re ruining our fucking country!” Noz said, his eyes gnarled and bloodshot, sweat collecting in his sideburns. “My father fought like a crazy son of a bitch for this country, he died in the fucking war, and for what? So he can come in from Saudi Arabia and take all our jobs away?”

“I’m from Iran, asshole.” The Ayatollah moved closer to Noz. Bobby stepped between them, lightly pressing his palm on the Ayatollah’s chest.

Beneath them on the floor, Edie circled her left hand around her tit, revealing a hard pink nipple. Little bumps crawled around it, like tiny growths on a twig. The dancers contorted their bodies … Then it’s a pelvic thrust—ooh-ah—that really drives you insa-a-a-aane … Everything was happening at once, a split screen, surroundsound. The Ayatollah and Noz stood eye to eye, or more correctly the Ayatollah’s eyes to Noz’s chin, Bobby still wedged between them. Had to admire the Ayatollah, trying to ward off Godzilla. Edie opened the roach clip with her right hand. It said, “You look good enough to eat,” then bit her nipple. “Whoa!” she bounded up between the three guys. “Look at my tit! Look at my tit!”

Bobby and the Ayatollah looked. “Holy shit, Edie!” Bobby said.

“Whoa! Edie number one! Edie fucking rocks!” She screamed and threw her hands in the air, bouncing back into the Time Warp girls.

“Fuck that! I’m saying something important here,” Noz said.

“Nothing you say is important, you are too stupid for anything important,” the Ayatollah said, and Noz’s face froze.

Noz slung back his hand and punched, time slowing to nanoseconds, as the Ayatollah ducked and Noz’s hand slammed into the wall behind him, cracking through layers of plaster. “AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” he screamed, louder than Edie number one, louder than the girls doing the Time Warp again and again and again.

“Now, look what you’ve done,” the Ayatollah said. “You’ve put a hole in the wall. I’m sure Felicia will send you the bill.”

“Are you kidding me?” Bobby said. “This whole house is falling apart.”

“That’s what these houses are like, high-class slums,” Edie said. “Everything’s cracked and peeling. Nothing ever works. Did you see my tit?”

“Yes, it’s quite impressive,” said the Ayatollah.

“ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!” shouted Noz, his fist crammed into his balls, and I wondered if he was still hard.

“Okay, shit-brain,” Bobby took him by his good arm, “let’s get you to the hospital.”

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. They could have not admitted Noz right away; they could have not wrapped his swollen, black-and-blue hand in plaster strips as we sat in the white light of the emergency room tapping our feet against the floor, grinding our teeth, taking turns pacing to the water fount ain; they could have not written down his name and address and promised to bill his mother; they could have not handed him an envelope full of codeine pills, which we shared in the parking lot before Bobby decided we’d better get Noz home. He’d already passed out next to me in the backseat. Minutes later, we were cruising through the knotted trees and dark clouds, the stars and slight hook of moon having gone into hiding while we were at the hospital, driving toward Queens. The world seemed more desolate than ever. Tiny black streets with row houses and sagging traffic lights. Big empty boulevards lit up by gas stations. Only our presence gave the streets any purpose, and it depressed me being in a place where a few fucked-up teenagers in an old Chevy were the extent of any “scene” once the movie theatres and shopping malls and diners had shut down for the night. You were probably just heading out with your famous friends. Famous people always hung around other famous people. It didn’t matter whether they really knew you or not.

Bobby crossed over the train tracks to a few blocks of small one-level houses, many of them flashing with Christmas lights. A few had 3-D manger scenes, Jesus all grown-up and glowing, even Santa himself tore across a couple of tiny lawns, reindeer ahead of him like the horses galloping around Noz’s biceps. I’d forgotten that part of Christmas. The lights and stuff. Practically everyone in my town was Jewish, and the most anyone did for the season was plug in a boring electric menorah. These homes with their flickering rainbow lights were so beautiful. So alive. We pulled up in front of a house covered with cracked brown shingles. In the window, a Christmas tree smeared in multicolored bulbs with a shiny gold star on top was shoved in front of a curtain. Bobby turned off the car and jumped out to get Noz, who didn’t want to move and begged Bobby to let him sleep in the car. He was practically screaming when the front door opened and a ghostly figure in a long nightgown and green army cap with flaps covering her ears appeared behind the outer door. She propped it open and wagged a fist in the air. “Nelson Kenridge, you get in here!” she shouted, and I felt like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing.

“Aw, why’d you have to bring me here?” Noz asked. Bobby shrugged and hiked him up against his shoulder.

“Nelson Kenridge, I’m gonna whoop your ass ’round your head!” his mother shouted, and it was hard not to laugh, she looked so silly.

Noz pleaded with Bobby, “Can’t I go to your house, man?”

“Sorry, man, you know the deal.”

Bobby carried him to the front door where the mother he didn’t like waited in her soldier hat to whoop his ass. She tugged him inside by his bad arm. He shouted, “Get the fuck off me, you crazy bitch!” as the door closed behind them. Bobby turned on the ignition, and we drove off in silence. I kept seeing Noz’s mother shaking her fist in the air.

In the blink of a heavily drugged eye we were out of Queens and rolling through winding roads and temples and houses so huge compared to Noz’s it was sickening. I almost wished we’d taken him with us, but what would we have done with him? My opportunity was gone. Bobby stopped in front of my house and he and Edie smiled at each other like I was supposed to leave, but when I opened the door they followed me out. “He’s only gonna stay a few minutes, okay?” Edie asked, as if I had a choice. I nodded and told her they could hang out in Jack’s office next to the TV room. Edie grabbed my cheeks in between her hands and pecked me on the lips. “You’re the best, Lil.”

I smiled, and my cheeks felt hot though it was so damn cold outside. I led us inside, showed them Jack’s office, and ducked into the TV room. There, I shacked up on the couch watching a Ben Casey rerun and every so often staring at my uncracked copy of Brave New World. The next day I would have my essay on sex and reproduction in that new world, which I imagined wasn’t much different from this old world, where Edie removed her green velvet skirt and combat boots for a guy with untied sneakers on the floor of my father’s office. A part of me hated that she could give it up so easily. But I had to admit I was curious about her, what she smelled like, if she kissed with her tongue, the kind of sounds she made. I muted the TV to see if I could hear her.

… please!

She moaned so loud I could have been in the room with them. I rose from the couch and inched closer, noticing she’d left the door open, and it was like something placed in an underwear drawer: She wanted me in the room with them, the way you drew me into your world at night. Edie was on top of him, her head illuminated slightly by a streetlight not far from the window. Hair smothered her face as she bounced up and down, the roach clip still clawing her nipple, Bobby’s velvet penis inside her. “I’m the best,” she heaved. “I’m number one.”

“Yeah … you’re number one,” he said, and reached up for her head. He pulled her down and they kissed in the dim shadows. I leaned against the wall, watching their tongues touch, the insides of my legs sweating in my khakis.

Edie broke from Bobby’s lips, threw her fists in the air, and shouted: “Whoa! I’m the best fucker in the whole wide world!” She glanced forward and I thought she saw me. My heart jumped.

“Yeah, you’re the best,” Bobby said, and she smiled down at him.

“The best what?”

“The best fucker …”

“In …”

“The whole wide world,” they said together, slowly. Then Edie threw her head back, and their bouncing resumed.

Quietly, I returned to the couch and tried squeezing my legs together but couldn’t catch the seam between my legs, that place where all the stitching met in a bump. Edie’d called it the jean clitoris. I felt inside my pants, but only for a few seconds before it didn’t seem right … them in there, me out here. And I was usually in my room … with you. This was sort of perverted. I pounded my fist against my crotch until it stung. Edie shrieked and my thighs caved inward. I couldn’t resist.

As my normal breathing resurfaced, I pumped up the volume on Ben Casey and kicked back, elbows folded behind my head. Tiny snowflakes danced outside the window, the sky so black and heavy you couldn’t see the water. I watched the white pellets for a while before Edie and Bobby stepped out of Jack’s office and walked to the front door. The care Edie took not to make any noise as she tiptoed back through the living room touched me, only I didn’t want to hear one word about Bobby Davis or velvet. I turned my knees into the couch and pretended I was sleeping.

Edie shook my arm and whispered my name a couple of times. I didn’t budge. She shut off the TV, pulled the afghan from the back of the couch, and blanketed my body before spooning in behind me with her arm around my waist. She smelled sort of musty, like she’d been in a sauna, but her body felt warm against my back. I’d never slept that tangled up in anyone before, not even Blair who couldn’t fall asleep unless she was flat on her stomach, so I was surprised when I drifted off and woke up hours later with four inches of snow in the backyard and Edie’s arms around me.

I AM SUPPOSED TO GROW TOMATOES. Big red bulbs that make the community famous. Instead I spend my mornings pulling uniforms, underwear, socks and sheets and linens and towels from the dryer and shaking them out the way I’ve been taught. One clean crack before sliding them under the massive iron cylinder. You almost can’t believe a machine like this exists outside of someone’s imagination. So big it could steamroll, say, Stella, who’s never without one eye on me as she moves the wrung-out laundry from washer to dryer, and leave her flat as a character in a Saturday morning cartoon; so hot the stuff falling off the other end needs a few minutes to cool before folding. A steak shoved under the barrel would brown, one side at a time, although it’d be paper thin and carry the taste of metal and fabric softener.

Chandon catches the linens on the other side and puts them in a pile. She is a folder, too. When the load is through I come around and help her. She doesn’t look up. “My window was all fogged this morning,” she says.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving.”

“Maybe we should cook up a turkey.”

“We can brown it on the iron.”

“It’ll stick like crazy to that thing,” Chandon laughs.

“Spray some Pam, add vegetables. So they’ll be a little flat.”

She smiles and grabs a starchy white sheet by the corners.

I take the other side and together we fold it over once, pulling tightly to smooth the creases. We fold again, moving a couple steps toward each other, the sheet drooping between us like the diagram of fallopian tubes I remember from health class. Angel’s baby never screamed when they sliced him out of her stomach. She said she couldn’t push anymore so they had to do a cesarean. Then they stapled her skin back together like a term paper. Before they carried off the silent child she named him Alejandro.

Chandon grabs my ends, I take the bottom, and we step again. It’s a good method, ours, and in the last few weeks we’ve narrowed it down to a science. Apart from the heat and skanky air, working in the laundry’s not so bad. The machines are noisy, but in a strange way it’s peaceful down here. We’re the inner sanctum. Clothes come in dirty and leave clean, like blood circulating through the heart, but not in Angel’s baby because his heart has the virus.

“You seen her yesterday?” Chandon breaks a few minutes of silence. I nod yes and hope that’s all to the conversation. She senses my discomfort. “She don’t look so good’s all I’m saying.”

I nod again. “Yeah, I know.”

We finish the last sheet and move on to the pillowcases, each of us standing at one side of the table. At home Nancy had kingsized pillowcases. Blair’s were silk. By the end of the night my cheek had always slipped down to the very edge.

“You scared?” Chandon says, without looking up.

“Scared?”

“She got it, you know.”

“Maybe she’s just the carrier. It can happen like that.”

“She knew all the time.”

“It takes two, it could have been the father.”

“Sorry, Long Island.” She finally looks up, her eyes injected with sadness. “That just ain’t the way it goes with this thing.”

Our faces lock a second, long enough to feel the weight of Angel’s destiny, and then, quietly, we return to the folding. The way Chandon works her fingertips over the pillowcases they could be bound for the fanciest hotel in the world. Bedding so crisp and pure I want to mess it up the way somebody messed up Angel with a contaminated prick or needle.

But I can’t think about that now. Not when I have pillowcases to fold. A job to do. At home I never had chores. Jack was against them on principle. He’d grown up helping out his mother and hating every minute of it. As soon as they could, he and Nancy paid people to do the laundry, mow the lawn, clean the cars, put the right amount of chlorine in the pool at our summer house. Everything always sparkled. Not an item out of place. The couches and chairs looked like people never sat in them. Another memory: After Blair left, I’d begged and begged for a cat, and Nancy said, “Where did you get that idea? This isn’t that kind of house. A cat would be miserable here.” I took my case to Jack who said cats gave him hives but it was up to my mother. I asked one more time, promising to feed it and let it out to pee, the way Blair had done it with the girls. But Nancy wouldn’t budge. “Do you have any idea what cats do to couches?” she said, and I remembered the frayed coverings on Blair’s bed, the pulls in her rug, those scratches on the coffee table. Cats’ll mess up anything, they don’t care. It was my mother who would have been miserable.

I grab a pile of towels and white socks with black numbers scrawled on the side in indelible ink, numbers Chandon and I match together in the final stage. Folding is an orderly business. We do one section at a time; first linens, then clothing, and everything matches up in the end. Even when we lose a sock, we know who’s missing it by the number left over. I had no idea I would thrive on this kind of order, just as I never realized the necessity of keeping my space neat. Outside I never even made my bed. As long as I kept the door shut, Nancy didn’t care. I could shut myself off from the rest of the house. In here I’m on display, cleanliness a reflection of my character. I bribe a guard for bleach to scrub my toilet every other day. The first time he handed me the paper cup covered with saran wrap I opened it and took a whiff. A sourness crept up my nostrils and made me think of Mimi. Bleach was all hers. Laundry detergent and scrap metal belong to Chandon. When we break we smoke cigarettes away from the chemicals. She’s afraid we might torch the place. I think it’s impossible. Or somebody would have done it already.

Chandon sits sideways on the windowsill, smoking, her other hand curled around a jaundiced paperback. The cover’s turned back so I can’t see the title. I could have brought something to read, I’m a big reader, anyone’ll tell you. But this is supposed to be our time together. My neck flushes, the taste of hot metal on my tongue. I move closer to Chandon to see what’s more interesting than me. She turns her shoulder further into the window. I stab my cigarette next to her on the wall, squirming behind her to get a look at the author and title on top of the frayed pages. Can’t see. Tight brown hairs pull her scalp into a part. It’s the color of those big white freckles on her face and arms. I like that she’s both light and dark. I am the same wishy-washy yellow all over. “You coulda just asked.” Chandon swings around, and I startle backwards.

She holds out the book, her forefinger planted inside to save her place. It’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A popular book in here, mostly with black girls. I sometimes forget Chandon’s black since she hangs with Mimi and Angel. She says she’s from the West Indies so she understands Puerto Ricans, but at heart she’s as black as Stella. “This thing with Angel’s too deep,” she says. “I need something to grab onto, some direction, know what I’m saying?”

I nod, I do. I really do.

Chandon tells me she’s been talking to the Muslims for a while. This doesn’t mean much. In here everyone’s always talking to somebody or reading something that’s supposed to have all the answers. Prison is a philosophical supermarket. Not too different from college, I suppose. Only you don’t want to be putting Rikers on your resume. Chandon says Malcolm converted to Islam in the white man’s prison. “No offense, Long Island,” she says, “but white people got blood on their hands.”

I nod again, although I can’t figure out what that’s got to do with Angel.

“See, what I’m saying is, you got to believe there’s some order to it,” she continues, “some kind of rules guiding us. Shit, if you don’t, might as well sign on here for good.”

Her eyes wander toward Stella, who sits by the radio eating a Hershey’s bar. Privileges. “She on her way Upstate again,” Chandon says. “I heard her mother’s inside, too. Big reunion coming.”

“Can’t say I’m sad to see her go.”

“Why? Somebody else just gonna take her place. They come and go. You know Mimi been in three times in five years.”

Now she’s got my full attention.

“Think about it: On the outside, what she got? A coupla kids and some sorry-ass motherfucker draining every last cent of the white man’s handouts, when he ain’t disappeared himself. Here she got her people. She got everything taken care of, don’t gotta worry about nothing ’cept her enemies, but her people be watching her back. What she don’t know is it’s exactly what they want.”

“What who wants?”

“The system.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s complicated,” Chandon says, and taps her paperback against her other outstretched palm. “You gotta read the book.”

I nod, say maybe I will. Chandon smiles and shakes her head like she does whenever I make a joke, but I’m not kidding. I want to understand the system and say so. “Guess it can’t hurt,” she says, then shoves Malcolm into the back of her pant seam. I follow her to the pile of clothes we’d left before the break. Blue shirts stacked by number. Matching pants. “Executive wear,” Chandon jokes, as we fold and laugh together, but that book hangs between us like a drooping sheet, one we can’t sort by number and tuck away.

Angel’s got the virus. No matter what kind of prophets we summon, no matter how perfectly we match the numbers or how neat we keep our cells, there’s no order in the universe that can knock the bad blood out of her.

THAT PAPER I BOUGHT FROM SUSAN FINKELSTEIN earned me an A and more attention from Mr. Belgrave, who grilled me in class like I ought to know things; so I had to keep up with The Canterbury Tales, even when I was wasted and couldn’t understand the tangled writing and was convinced Belgrave was testing me to see if I was really Finkelstein-smart or if that paper had been a fake. I’d re-typed it before turning it in to cover my tracks. Consistency was the key to deception. Learned that earlier in the year when I’d stupidly turned in an absence note from Nancy after forging a few of my own. They called me down to the office and accused me of penning it, but when the assistant dean phoned Nancy and she said no, it was really hers, what could they do? People are such morons. I would have hauled Nancy in and demanded she account for all the previous notes, but that’s me and I don’t trust anybody.

The hippies used to say don’t trust anyone over thirty. Makes sense, although that was almost two decades earlier which meant even the youngest hippies had hit thirty by the time I was in eleventh grade and were all walking around not trusting each other. If you ask me, that’s how Ronald Reagan became president and how former hippie Ted Belgrave with his corduroy jeans and turquoise pinkie ring ended up teaching Chaucer to a group of kids who without him might have thought Chaucer was a type of sneaker or sports car. None of us paid much attention to the book, though I did like the idea of having these different people telling their tales and together they made a village, kind of like how it happened on World. People were always repeating their own little histories and connections.

Of course I hadn’t read “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” on that numb Tuesday in January and knew Belgrave was on to me. There was an undercurrent beneath his words, warnings transmitted from his brain to mine. Like you, he knew how to speak with his eyes. Looking at him almost hurt. I tried staring out the window but that only made things worse. It was one of those blistering sunny days that looked like winter on television, the entire world glossed to make even my faded army coat seem the most vibrant green. Or maybe that was the ganja I’d bought from the Ayatollah.

No matter how sunny it was, Belgrave never pulled down the shades. He liked playing the shadow man, dodging streams of sun as he paced up and down the aisles. I had to tilt my head back to see him. In the sun you could make out the gray hairs around his temples, the thick lines in his forehead, and the beanbag eyes bulging into his cheeks. He must have been about Jack’s age but he looked a lot older. Sadder, too. The radiator squealed. As if it had to pump harder to keep up with the killer-hot sun outside and wasn’t thrilled about it. I wondered if Belgrave had been any happier when he was a hippie, wearing tie-dyed shirts, brown curls rolling down his shoulders.

A few sunbeams stabbed my eyes, and my neck collapsed. I leaned against my right arm, let my hair flop over my face. School was worthless. In a couple of months I was going to the Garden to a world hunger concert, even if Edie wouldn’t come with me. I’d ordered two tickets on my credit card. You might show up, you’d mentioned it in your newsletter, Babbling ’Bout Brooke. It was our responsibility to help feed the world, you said a few weeks later at a press conference with one of the guys from Crosby, Stills & Nash. You were going to perform with them. It would be historic. Nobody knew you could sing.

Long as you didn’t make a record. I hated when famous people thought they could do everything. But you were made for the stage. You would wear white sailor pants, cowboy boots, a sparkly halter top, hold the microphone close to your lips as the crowd called out your name … Brooke, Brooke, Brooke!

“Lillian!” Belgrave’s voice jolted me upright, sun jammed between my eyes. I think I said, “Huh?” The class laughed.

“Okay, settle down. I don’t hear any of you racing to tell me what the Wife of Bath sets up in her prologue. What is it? Is it Chaucer? You don’t like Chaucer? He too boring for your excitable, modern minds?”

Silence from the class. Belgrave shuffled out of the sun, moving even closer to my desk. The radiator was going haywire, hissing and squalling like a trapped animal. My stomach dropped to my knees: Something bad was about to happen, I could feel it.

“Well, let me tell you, Chaucer is not boring. There’s more farting, burping, drinking, and screwing in here than in …” Belgrave’s voice floated into the whining radiator. Every so often I picked up a phrase … post-industrial complex … too much television … the warfare of stupidity … words I probably would sion have agreed with if I could have followed them. There was too much going on in the room with the radiator and sun at war, and all of us on edge, and Belgrave talking about the Wife of Bath like she was his favorite character on World. He said somebody had to say something or we would all have to write five pages about her that evening. “I can’t believe there’s not one person in this room who’s going to try and save you all from an essay,” he said. “Nobody? Not even you, Lillian? I thought this would be right up your alley. Come on, help out your classmates, give us something, anything, about the Wife of Bath.”

He stared down at me, clasping his paperback copy of The Canterbury Tales to his chest, holylike. The sun shifted once more, turning its beams on the stuffy oxygen particles, and I thought I was going to pass out for lack of hydrogen, nitrogen, and whatever else freshened the air inside at my grandparents’ condo. It was missing here, in the heat. My armpits got hot. We were in for it. Belgrave was about to speak again, when a man burst into the room. “Ted! Get your class, come quick! The space shuttle blew up!”

“What!?” Belgrave jumped. A few people gasped, whispered.

“Just after the launch, they were, like, two thousand feet into the air and the thing exploded.” The man—a physics guy named Erlichman—circled his arms out above his head.

“Oh my god! How?”

“Nobody knows. They’ve got the TVs on in the auditorium. Get your class, let’s go!”

“All right, everyone take your stuff and follow me,” Belgrave said, his face bleeding pure jaw-dropping horror, so exaggerated he seemed like a mannequin posed in shock: weak, defeated, and confused. Erlichman looked the same. It was weird being sixteen and feeling more stable than most adults. Not that I had any recycled claims about not trusting anyone over thirty; more often I felt sorry for them. Big deal. It was just another spaceship. But I had forgotten one thing: the teacher in space. A high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire.

Weeks later, the cleanup still in high gear, her lesson plans for space would be found floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The crew compartment would reveal that some of the astronauts had been alive during the three- to four-minute fall to sea. By then we would also know the accident had been caused by a routine booster failure and could have been prevented, which made people very mad at NASA. But on the day the space shuttle exploded there was wholesale grief and confusion as Ted Belgrave pushed open the door to the auditorium, his fingers still gripped to that copy of The Canterbury Tales.

I ducked out of the harmonic grieving session soon after Belgrave and a few other weepy teachers took to the podium. Belgrave had said it was okay for us to mourn as we watched the shuttle burst over and over again with the sound muted, leaving commentary to the adults. A total mistake. They were wrapped up in the mythology of outer space. Ships with romantic names like Apollo, Viking, and Venus. Guys in space suits giant-stepping with the American flag long before the man on the moon became the MTV logo. The space race might have ended a decade ago, but today, if you believed the teachers, marked the end of an era. A teacher! How could NASA blow up a teacher?

When I was a kid I’d told my third-grade class my father was an astronaut. Every morning I watched him board the silver cars of the Long Island Rail Road and pretended he was plunging into the solar system, off to explore worlds unknown. I had the coolest father in my class. Then one Saturday at the supermarket, Jack and I ran into my teacher. He said it was an honor meeting an astronaut and wondered if Jack would come and talk to the class. Stroking back a few strands of shiny black hair, his eyes like sparklers, Jack said thanks but he didn’t like public speaking, just the thought of it sent him into a cold sweat, he didn’t know how teachers did it. My teacher smiled. Flattery was Jack’s business. Later he told Nancy the story, and she laughed. My father could barely ride a bicycle without dosing himself on Dramamine. “I really like those silver suits, though,” Jack said to my mother, and she smiled, and my lie had become something funny between them. I told people he quit the space program.

Seventy-three minutes after takeoff, the space shuttle Challenger had flamed into the most beautiful stream of white smoke, and mission control shouted, “THERE’S OBVIOUSLY A MAJOR MALFUNCTION!!” and the town of Concord, New Hampshire, cried.

Outside by the gym, people huddled smoking cigarettes in the shifting rays of sun, pretending it was a normal day, only we’d gotten out a little early. The steps were crowded. I found Edie high on top, sitting next to the Ayatollah. He held a ledger book in one hand and punched numbers into a calculator with the other. Every so often he stopped and blew into his bare hands. It was freezing out.

I wedged myself in front of them and lit a cigarette. Edie rolled her eyes, stomped her purple boots on the cement. “You’re killing yourself,” she said.

“This is smokers’ corner. Don’t tread on me.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Not really,” muttered the Ayatollah, still engrossed in his calculations.

A jappy guy from my social studies class shoved his way through the crowd and stood over us, casting a shadow like a giant robot. He slipped a black leather wallet from the inside pocket of his ski jacket. It had a European name stitched into the arm. The Ayatollah looked up, shielding his eyes with his right hand. “The usual,” he said, and the guy nodded. He leaned closer to the Ayatollah, slipped him a few bills, then backed away.

“You inside before?” the guy asked.

“For a little while.”

“It looked like a video game.”

“More like skywriting,” Edie said.

“Yes, skywriting,” the Ayatollah nodded. He scribbled into his book, then closed it and handed it to Edie. “A message from the CIA, no doubt.”

The jappy guy burst out laughing. “You’re paranoid, dude.”

“Oh, I am paranoid. You Americans are really something. You never see the connectedness of things, you don’t want to believe that your government can betray you. You think because you elect these people they will do exactly what you tell them and only what you tell them. That’s so naïve. Have you read the newspaper lately? Central America has been contaminated by the CIA.”

“So they blew up the space shuttle?”

“I have no conclusive evidence, but the timing is suspicious. This thing is so big. It’s a global disaster. Everyone is involved—Russia, the Middle East, everyone, and it’s all going down in these little countries where people are so poor they don’t know any better. Do you have any idea how many lives this country is responsible for? How much blood has been shed already?”

The jappy guy backed up a step, nodded. He was either frightened or bored. “Hey, don’t look at me, dude. I’m antiwar.”

“What war? There is no war. This is not Vietnam. We’re talking about global terrorism, about total U.S. domination. The information is there if you want it, but you don’t. You come to me, smack my hand, ‘Hey, dude, I’m antiwar.’ You don’t know the first thing about war. None of you do.”

Edie put her hand on the Ayatollah’s thigh. “Relax, baby,” she said, “it’s not Nathan’s fault if the CIA blew up the space shuttle.”

Baby! She called the Ayatollah baby, her fingers digging into his leg like it was her turf, she’d been there before … when? A couple of weeks ago, she’d said he was too girly; I was the one who told her he was cute. And he had tons of coke. My throat contracted. I took a deep pull of nicotine and exhaled close to Edie’s face.

“Ugh—Lil!” she flagged her hand in front of me. “How many times do I have to tell you, keep that shit away from me!”

She barely looked at me, concentrating on the Ayatollah and Nathan who were patching it up. “No, dude, you’ve actually given me something to think about,” Nathan said, holding out his hand to the Ayatollah who took it and clasped it in between his palms.

“Don’t think, do,” said the dealer, as if he were a prophet and not just a foreigner with major connections and long eyelashes. He let go of Nathan’s hand. I took a final drag of my cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke so straight and white it hypnotized me.

“Fuckin’ A!” Nathan said, and everyone stared at the smoke as it splintered into a big white Y across the baby-blue expanse as if the letter had been carved by a skywriter to follow the path of the space shuttle.

We were all transfixed, even the Ayatollah. Here was something the CIA couldn’t have planted. A natural phenomenon. We watched the smoke fizzle into a grayish haze, and I wondered if it had been that way with the shuttle, whether it simply withered away or the people standing at the base of Cape Canaveral had to run for cover under pieces of scrap metal and spaceship debris. It didn’t seem right how some things shot up into the sky and came crashing down while others arched as perfectly as a flipped cigarette.

I was overrun by a chill so deep I thought I had pneumonia. Nathan bounced off the steps, his robotic arms slipping out into the afternoon, everything preprogrammed. The Ayatollah put his arm around Edie’s shoulder, this time like he’d been there before, and I could have kicked myself for not seeing it coming. They all became her boyfriends after a while. She barely said goodbye before they walked off arm in arm, and a few minutes later I saw the Ayatollah’s Jaguar take off down the street. I smoked a couple more cigarettes in the brutal cold, listening to the bells ringing at the junior high as the younger kids flocked outside, screaming and laughing and bouncing up and down like they hadn’t heard about the national disaster. Or didn’t care.

Finally, I stood up and balanced myself against the cement wall. I was about to leave when Belgrave found me and asked for a cigarette. Eyeing him curiously—he was a teacher and all—I flipped open my box of Marlboros and we shared my last two cigarettes, the sky wisping into its deep-winter palette—azure, cyan, indigo, Air Force blue, space shuttle silver. Like names on pastel crayons. Gray-blue smoke rose above our heads. It was weird smoking with a teacher; if anyone saw me I would have been laughed out of smokers’ corner, and even weirder, Belgrave wasn’t saying anything. I kept expecting him to nail me for not reading “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” but he just smoked and tipped his head toward the spiraling blues above us. “My brother is a physicist,” he said, after he’d taken his last drag and crushed the butt with his penny loafer. “I have no idea what he does, really. Something about splitting molecules. He’s always telling me he’s on to something revolutionary about negative space. Do you have any idea what that means? Negative space?”

I nodded no. In chemistry, we’d learned that negative ions were attracted to positive electrodes. In algebra, negative numbers plotted less than zero but they didn’t really exist. You couldn’t have negative two cigarettes. When they were gone they were gone. I looked down at the crumpled-up Marlboro box in my hand, thinking, I have no cigarettes. A negative statement. What was the equivalent for space? In painting, it was the part you left blank. I said this to Belgrave, and he borrowed my curious eye.

“And if you cover the whole canvas,” he said, “what then?”

I shrugged. “It’s all positive?”

A full pack of cigarettes.

“Hmmm …” He nestled his chin with his thumb and forefinger, then summoned the sky once more. “And up there? Is that positive or negative?”

“I guess it depends where you’re looking from,” I said, thinking of Edie and her claims to be from the planet Andromeda. She liked looking down on the stars.

Belgrave turned to me, nodding his head up and down, affirmative. I was almost sorry when he thanked me for the cigarette and told me I’d been good therapy for him before wandering back through the gym. I rushed to the late bus. It was full of kids from the basketball and swim teams. Nobody would let me share a seat. They laughed, whispering to each other, and occasionally I saw a spitball loop overhead. They’d be sorry one day when I was a famous painter. I was going to draw negative space. It would be a major development in the world of art, explosive in a good way. I would be interviewed by People magazine. You always thanked your first drama teacher at the Blue Bell Recreation Center. I would thank Belgrave. He wasn’t an art teacher, but he had this theory of negative space …

The bus pulled in to the last stop, and the few of us still remaining walked off into the clear, dark night—hyacinthine, purple-ebony, shiny-combat-boot black with glowing white stars. Like Blair’s fake diamond earrings. A longing to go by the swimming pool passed quickly this time. I took a final look at the night sky, shook a few spitballs from my hair, and headed inside, where I knew I’d find you waiting at my window.