GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

I AM QUIET IN MY CELL.
I read a lot in my cell. I lie on my bed a lot talking to you.

Those jokes about women behind bars—they’re all true. Jail is crawling with dykes, although most of them would never use that word. Not too different from what I found outside. But here they’re big into role-playing. For the girls who like to be manly, the kind who scare the pants off me they’re so real, so much the better. They rule with their heavy boots and bad haircuts, their chests puffed out like drug lords.

If a girl’s strong enough or the opposite, there’s more sex in here than you can imagine. Most do it for power, some to connect. Others want to feel anything at all. These are the women who let Mimi zap them with her vibrating needle. Ink siphoned from a ballpoint pen. She’s been after me since the day I arrived and asked her how she made the needle move. She lifted her transistor radio. There was a wire attached to a small motor in the back, but I still didn’t get it. She said I would know it all one day, when I let her tattoo me. I smiled but no way was I letting her brand me.

As the days go on, I want to give in. I like her silky green-black etchings and know she could copy one of my drawings, although I haven’t drawn anything in the month and a half I’ve been in here. My fingers won’t connect to my brain. So I pretend not to know anything about art and artists, pretend I never earned the praise of my painting teachers or interned at the advertising agency, pretend I never even owned a sketchbook, all for the sake of Mimi, who’s convinced she’s schooling me in the creative process. She’s the toughest of the tough girls and all the protection I have inside. The trick is I have to please her, if you know what I mean, which is much better than the other way, getting pleased, though she’s schooling me a bit there, too. I wonder if I’m still a virgin.

Mimi likes my doing but won’t say so. Even after she gets off a few times then throws me off, making what we are together worse than what got either one of us in here in the first place. “I’m going to tattoo the word on your stomach,” she says, and runs her hand along the haphazard hairs beneath my belly button. She tries to yank at one, but it slips between her fingers. “Right here, it’s gonna say pata.”

“Why does it have to be in Spanish?”

“Because it’s happy.”

I smile because happy is as good as anything gets for Mimi.

She uses the word the way other people say cool or excellent. It rolls from her tongue, sweet like strawberry margaritas, like her Spanish phrases I can understand thanks to Long Island’s exceptional public schools. In seventh grade, we were forced to check a box for either French or Spanish. Having no preference, I shut my eyes and dropped my index finger on the paper. It fell closest to Spanish.

Mimi’s got a guy and a couple of kids outside. They all do; gay for the stay is how they put it, and I get the feeling it’s not something they talk about otherwise. It’s hard to imagine most of them wiping dirty faces and throwing dinner on the table. I get the feeling women have been through a lot of shit in their lives before ending up here. You can see it in their eyes like smudged nickels, their sandpaper skin, no matter what color. Faces blend into one another after a while. But not Mimi’s. She’s got the look, and that dusky aura like the ring around Saturn. It takes my builtin 3-D glasses to see it.

This time, Mimi’s waiting trial on four counts of armed robbery and reckless endangerment. She shot the owner of an appliance store as she and a friend were loading her station wagon with television sets and videocassette recorders. She says the shooting was an accident and I believe her. She does not use drugs. She is an artist. She sounds like you.

The handsome attorney my father hired says I shouldn’t talk about you. He’s convinced I didn’t do it, although I confessed to those moron cops, and the evidence against me is mounting. But when the bottom of the Hudson spit up what they thought was my gun, it had no fingerprints and didn’t match the deadly bullet. My lawyer had the cojones to claim my gun never existed. There is somebody else who’s seen it, I warn him, not to mention one house missing a .38 Special and blue Tiffany bag full of bullets. But so far he’s managed to talk our way around that, too. Still, the D.A. postponed my bail hearing, railing to the papers, “We’re going to prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law!”

So I’m stuck at Women’s House. Sounds like a safe space: some warm and cuddly hippie commune. But let me tell you, I’m scared. There are gangs in here who kill people in other gangs ’cause they look funny, women who gouge out eyeballs with their fingers or pound in heads with a padlock wrapped in a sweat sock. At first my lawyer tried to get the case moved to juvie, but since I’d just turned eighteen and the crime was getting so much press, the D.A. said I would be treated as an adult. And adults without bail end up here, waiting to be shipped Upstate, where most of the big prisons are—literally, up the river. When I’m in a funny mood, I tell myself it’s like being sent off to college, but usually I hate myself too much to joke. I wish I lived in California where they have the death penalty. I would be gassed for sure because it’s a television culture out there.

In some ways, death would be easy. A quick electronic current or snap of the spine and it’s over. I’ve been having nightmares about dying—always violently. I’ve been nailed to a cross and stoned, shot by firing squad, had my limbs severed by the Long Island Rail Road. Dreams so vivid I wake up sweating and shaking, my body twisted in pain. So I try to stay awake, each night playing back your death in my head.

I messed up, I tell Jack and Nancy when they come to visit. They ignore my sloppy confessions. Jack wrings his fingers together. Nancy stares at the couple making out by the front windows. In her eyes, a wandering glow. Hands on the table, the guard shouts.

Jack asks if I’m eating right, if I’m talking to the shrink. Before they leave, he gives me ballpoint pens and yellow legal pads. Between reading up on my case and apprenticing with Mimi, I’m trying to write my story. One of the reporters asked for it, but I don’t give a shit about him. If I don’t tell it like it is, somebody else is going to get it out there first. I hear your mother’s been talking to some people. I guess she’s got a right.

The problem is I spend a lot of time scribbling notes and shredding the pages. I feel guilty because paper can be hard to come by, but not for me because I’m a famous prisoner. Because my daddy’s rich and my lawyer’s good-looking.

So hush, little darling.

Don’t you cry.

I DON’T REMEMBER THE WOMB or coming out or any of the other stuff that happens when you’re really young. Without the baby book Nancy kept my first couple of years or my grandmother in the desert, I might never have known it took me only eight months to pull myself up off the floor or that the white streak in my hair had sprouted from a bald spot, that I was a most verbal child, though I made up my own names for everything, and that it was me who’d started calling my parents by their first names, actually one name: Jackanan, short for Jack and Nancy, says my grandmother.

I spent a lot of time with her early on and then we moved out of the city and then my grandparents moved across the country and I hardly ever saw them. There were a few more houses and schools and summer camps before we landed on the northern tip of Long Island the day the president was shot. The day I met Blair.

I was eleven years old. You were fifteen. We didn’t know each other yet, but later I discovered it was a special day for you, too: the day you got into the summer program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I was opening the letter when I heard the news,” you would later say. “I thought it was weird I could be so lucky when there was so much violence and sadness in the world. I sat down and cried and cried and cried.”

Was it as bruised and foggy on that day where you lived? The weathermen in New York all predicted rain. April showers had come early, and Nancy wasn’t happy. The land was more tender where we were going. “The last thing I need is everyone tracking mud all over my new floors,” she said. “You hear me, Lily? No running around!”

“But what if it doesn’t rain?”

“Don’t get cute with me, just watch your feet.”

I stared down at my black high-tops, red laces strangling the tongue, and imagined they were stuffed with dynamite. One wrong move and I’d destroy the world. Was it better to hop and take fewer steps or glide on the tips of my toes? The fate of mankind rested in my feet. Go lightly, I decided, like walking on thumbtacks. I wanted to scream, “Look, Nancy, I’m watching my feet!” But she’d gone back inside.

I crumpled into my father’s car and took out a small spiral notebook from my back pocket, sketching the moving truck in soft pencil lines. Nancy promised this move would be the last. She finally found the perfect house, she’d said, and Jack and I rolled our eyes. She had a way of getting lost in her own sales. But when Jack had gone with her a week later, he came back gushing over the views of the city and a backyard that folded onto the beach. He was a salesman, too. He said I’d practically have my own wing, and I imagined a house like a bald eagle soaring over the shore.

Our new house was made of wood. And cinder blocks. And had all these curves and odd-shaped windows and a totally flat roof. It looked like a science lab nestled in the pine trees, a place where pro-nukers hatched plans to destroy the human race. Jack said the house was created in the sixties by an architect who worked with shorelines. We’d had the windows open on the drive out, and as we came closer, I could smell the beach. Slivers of muddy gray waves crashed behind the trees, growing bigger and bigger as we turned into the driveway.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Jack said.

I shrugged. “It doesn’t look like a house.”

“Ahh! That’s the beauty of it. Who says a house has to be something you’d draw in second grade? Huh … who? It’s almost the twenty-first century for Christ’s sake and we’re still living like farmers. Why go back when you can go forward? Be of the time … you hear me?”

“Where’s the front door?”

“Wait’ll you see …”

Jack led me up a path to what looked like a long cylinder. Hidden on the other side was the door. We stepped through, and the Long Island Sound spread out in front of us. The space was huge and open, with different levels and lots of sliding glass. Dipping down a couple of steps, we came closer to the view: big, watery, and expansive. Between the clouds lay bits of Manhattan. On a clear day, Jack promised, I’d be able to see the skyline.

He cracked open a cardboard box that said Stereo. “First things first,” he winked at Nancy, who was trailing behind a man carrying a couple of chairs.

“Jack, I need you,” she said.

“It’ll just take a sec.”

She grimaced.

“Come on, baby, we can’t unpack without music.”

“You’re impossible.” She walked over to him, messed up his hair like he was a puppy. She never touched my head. My hair was knotty and I hated brushing. Only my grandmother ever noticed. She thought I was trying to hide the white streak in front. It meant I was wise, she told me. Some day I’d appreciate it. “Wait, wait, halt!” Nancy grabbed a mover by the arm. “That’s a picnic table. It goes in the yard.”

“You said garage.” The mover sighed.

“No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t say that. Anyway, let’s go, move it outside … you’re causing gridlock in here.”

He hurled the picnic table higher over his head and shuffled off. Jack watched him, smiling. “Poor guys have no idea who they’re dealing with.”

Nancy was impossible. The movers cowered before her, thick sweaty men reduced to gurgling infants whenever she lifted her clipboard or pointed a finger. Carting the stuff is only half the job, she said. They were supposed to put everything in the right place, and only she knew where that place was. They worked for her, remember. She’d made them lay plastic over her wood floors, and it still wasn’t raining.

Hooking up the stereo took longer than Jack had planned. The wiring and all. I watched him for a while, then sat down on a folding chair in front of the sliding-glass doors. The waves looked icy. Someone had opened one of the doors, leaving only a screen, and I was freezing. I put on my down jacket but felt silly. Most of the movers were wearing T-shirts. Red. With the name of the company written across the chest. They spoke to each other in another language, and there was a sped-up, silent-movie rhythm to the way they moved, like the colonies of ants in the sidewalk cracks at our old house, rushing in and out of their sandy little hills with sticks and grass and other bugs for dinner. The movers carried furniture wrapped in waffled blankets and tossed box cutters back and forth to snip off the tape. They had their own cooler.

A static blast rocked the half-empty house. Crazy echoes. Everything stopped, even the mover-ants. Jack shouted, threw his hands over his head, and did his Mets dance to a jingle for a bank. “Whoo-hoo! How do you like that?” he shouted. “I’m the music man!” I giggled. A couple of movers smiled, then went back to their lifting and circling. Jack bent over, turned down the commercial, and started thumbing through the channels … an old Elvis song … more fuzz … stock market numbers … then the voice: “… No word yet on the president, who according to reports is currently undergoing open-heart surgery at a local hospital after a shooting outside the Washington Hilton this morning …”

“Holy shit!” said my father. A couple of movers locked to a couch stopped dead in their tracks. Some shouted in their language. A few more gathered around, all ant eyes and wide-open mouths. Their world shut down.

“Nance!” Jack screamed. The movers whispered, so sad and serious I wished I could understand them, wished I had someone to whisper with. Jack looked too weird. He called Nancy’s name a few more times, tried to find a new radio station. Nancy appeared on the balcony above. “Somebody got Reagan,” Jack said. “They shot him.”

“What? Who?”

“I don’t know … it’s impossible to get any goddamn information on the radio. I should’ve hooked up the TV first.”

Nancy stepped down the staircase, her long curls bouncing against her shoulders like she was walking into a ballroom, and joined us around the stereo. Jack found a station with less screaming and commercials. The announcer said the president was in surgery (this one didn’t say anything about his heart). A witness said he’d heard a sound. Like flashcubes going off. Then there was a big commotion. Shouting. The Secret Service tackled the president and shoved him into his limo. Three other people were left lying on the sidewalk. The president walked into the hospital himself, smiling, strong. He was a cowboy. Or he’d played one in a movie. Now he was ruler of the free world. Bullets didn’t scare him. Police had arrested a young man at the scene. An assassination attempt for sure.

“Not again,” Jack said, and turned down the radio. I thought he’d be happier. He hated the president. Last fall, when there was still hope, he’d tacked a bumper sticker to the refrigerator that said, Anybody but Reagan.

“This is different.” Nancy touched his arm, and I knew they were talking about John Lennon, who’d been killed a few months earlier. Jack and Nancy had been playing Beatles albums nonstop. Kids at my old school said it was Yoko’s fault for breaking up the Beatles. But they’d also said the white streak in my hair meant I was retarded. Jack said Yoko was good for John. She helped release his genius.

“Jesus, Lily, I was just about your age,” Jack said.

“What do you mean?”

“The last time.”

“With John Lennon?”

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Jack said, drawing out every syllable. Same name as his own: John-but-everyone-calls-me-Jack. “Didn’t I ever tell you about the day Kennedy was shot?”

“Only a million times,” Nancy cut him off, then glanced at the movers who’d gathered in a tight circle, a hand on a back, arm wrapped around another neck. A colony. Jack followed her gaze. I wanted him back.

“Let’s hear it again,” I begged my father. “Please …”

“Later, Lily,” said my mother.

“Come on.”

“She’s right, you’ve heard it a gazillion times,” Jack said. His eyes dropped, and I knew he was remembering how he’d come home from school to find his neighborhood spilling into the streets, people crying and praying and hugging each other, like the mover-ants, others walking around with transistor radios plastered to their ears. It was an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Jack Kennedy was their guy. So, earlier, they’d gathered in front of tiny black-and-white TV sets, congregated at Kelsey’s, or stood before the window at Sears, proud to see their guy and his beautiful wife parading through Dallas. And then …

This is the part where my father always got teary, especially if he had a few drinks in him. He even spoke kindly of his mother who’d let him spend the night at his cousins’ watching replays of the grainy loop since they didn’t have a TV set at home. My other grandmother—the dead one—thought television was the devil’s tool. But on that day the devil himself had come to America in the body of man called Lee Harvey Oswald. TV didn’t seem so bad.

Jack was right; we could have used the TV. To see the shot. Like flashcubes going off. Watch the Secret Service tackle the president.

“Okay, look, there’s no use sitting around,” Nancy said, and I thought she was talking to me. But she stood with the movers. “He could be in surgery for hours, and we’ve got half the truck to unload. Come on, let’s go!” She clapped her hands. A couple of movers looked shocked. Rolling deep-brown eyeballs. They hated Nancy. I hated her for making them hate her. “You are bosslady,” one smiled, then called out to the others in mover-words. He had big ringlets of brown hair and talked with his hands. He must have been the leader. Jack patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, man, I’ll let you guys know if anything happens.”

“He is a strong man, this president.” The leader-ant made a fist with his right hand. “He will live.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Jack flashed his JFK smile and the leader-ant’s face softened. They laughed together. When you had his attention, Jack could make you feel like there was nothing or nobody else in the world. You wanted to keep him happy, even if you thought he was full of it. The leader-ant guided his men back to work. Walking toward us Nancy whispered, “Ever think you’d see a bunch of illegal immigrants crying over a Republican?”

“Doesn’t matter what he was,” Jack said. “Now he’s gonna be a hero.”

“I’m telling you, this is different, we don’t even know him,” Nancy said, and stalked off.

“Are you kidding?” Jack popped up after her. “He rides horses. He got the hostages out. He’s a movie star for Christ’s sake; even Kennedy only looked like a movie star …” His words fizzled out. Left was the faint voice of a deejay. Clouds rumbling outside the sliding-glass doors. The waves, though small, were violent and white, thousands of hands shaking up the underworld. Confusion down there, too.

I slid open a door and slipped outside. A deck led down to our own little beach. One side was fenced in, the other had a few bushes and barky trees. The air smelled sappy, salty. Wind slammed into my face, nonstop stereophonic blasts of static, under a sky so blank and low you couldn’t really make out the horizon. Everything was gray. I walked a few feet to a big rock, climbed up, and stared out at the water. A light drizzle came. More of a mist really. Then a figure emerged through the fog, like it had popped straight out of the underworld. A mermaid or different kind of mover-ant, one that lived in the sea. But the closer it came the more womanlike it was. She wore a tight gray raincoat.

Stopping a few feet away, she smiled, and I turned my head, thinking one of my parents must have snaked up from behind. People never smiled at me. But it was just the two of us, almost the same height with me on the rock. “Nice day for a walk,” she said.

Her voice was hard and soft at the same time, and I felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. She said days like this she loved the beach. “The sky, the water, everything’s bursting at the seams.”

That’s what I was thinking. About her.

“You live here?” she said, raising her chin toward our house, her eyes all squinty, like she knew how way past ugly it was.

“Yeah, but I didn’t pick it out,” I nodded.

“I should think not,” she smiled again. “What’s your name?”

“Lillian G. Speck.”

“Well, hello, Lillian G. Speck. I’m Blair.” She pointed a long red fingernail through the fog. “I live over there.”

“In the water!”

“Next to it. In a little cottage.”

“Cool.”

“Want to see? I have tea and cookies. We can be neighbors.”

I followed her along the beach and around the back of our trees. Right there was a little white house with a normal roof, two front windows with bunched-up curtains behind them and green shutters outside. It was closer to our place than to the mansion on the other side, but it looked like a key-chain version of the bigger house. Blair said the cottage was originally a guesthouse; now the people in the mansion rented it out. She said she liked listening to the waves before she fell asleep, and it was close to the airport. “Unless I’m flying overseas, but lord knows I try to avoid that. Long flights make my skin flake.” She bent down at the front door and lifted a mat that said, Ring My Bell. Underneath was a shiny gold key. She picked it up and stuck it in the keyhole. “I never take it unless I absolutely have to,” she smiled. “Now you know my secret. Promise you won’t tell.”

“I promise.”

I stepped inside behind her. Heat pumped loudly, and everything smelled perfumed. To the right was a tiny kitchen, to the left what looked like a living room. Before I could take it all in, two hairy white cats rushed to the door, sniffing and pushing their faces into my shins. Blair bent down and pet their heads, same as my mother had touched my father. Like she owned him. Staring up at me, she said, “These are my girls, Grace and Marilyn. Yes, you …” She nuzzled her lips against theirs for kisses.

Rubbed behind their ears. “Such gentle babies … yes …” She looked up at me. “Maybe you’ll take care of them when I’m away. They haven’t been doing well at the kennel. Do you like cats?”

I nodded yes, though I had no idea.

“Then it’s settled,” Blair smiled, stood up. She unbuttoned her coat and hung it in the front closet. “May I take yours?” she asked, and I wriggled out of my down jacket. We were both wearing sweatshirts. Mine was plain and bulky, hers cut off at the waist, just below the Delta Airlines logo. When she stretched up I could see her belly button. An inny.

She told me to have a seat on the couch, while she went to the kitchen, filled a kettle with water, and set it on the stove to boil. The couch was white and slippery. I had to plant myself all the way back so my feet barely touched the floor. Grace and Marilyn jumped up with me, fluffy little armrests. I couldn’t tell which was which. Blair brought over a tin with pictures of butter cookies on the cover—the same one my grandmother kept on top of her refrigerator in the desert—then returned to the kitchen. The house was so small I could see everything. She poured steaming water into two mugs, dropped in tea bags, then set them on a tray with a few packets of Sweet’N Low, tiny containers of nondairy creamer, and napkins that said Delta Airlines. She’d taken them from work. She was a stewardess.

“Wow!” I said. I’d never met a stewardess. At least not outside of a plane.

Filling our cups with water, Blair apologized for not having real milk. “I can’t keep it in the house with the girls around,” she said.

“It’s okay.” I dumped a couple of creams or whatever into my cup. The steam rising from it felt good after being outside, but it started my nose running. I covered one nostril with my finger and sucked up the other, no use: A few seconds later the runoff was back. Blair didn’t seem to notice.

She kept on talking about the cats and milk. “They love it but it makes them vomit. People think milk is so good for cats … I don’t know where that comes from. Anyway, I feel too guilty drinking it around them …”

I tried to nod, but felt the snot escaping and tilted my head back. A glob of it landed in the back of my throat. I reached for my cup and choked on a mouthful of steam. Blair smiled. I took a deep breath, relaxed. Then this small cough ballooned into a fit, with so much spunk to it I slid forward, forcing the cats away. I couldn’t stop hacking.

“Easy there,” Blair said. She reached over and grabbed my cup. Pulled me back up. I was still coughing and smoldering with embarrassment. Feeling like a two-year-old with her hand rubbing my back, her hair so close I smelled the burnt-vanilla scent of the dye. Same as Nancy’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too hot. Here …” She handed me a napkin. “Blow your nose. Sometimes that helps.”

I blew so hard my eyes watered. I was all liquidy, but she didn’t care. Guess it wasn’t as bad as milky cat vomit. Everyone should have to have pets. I let the coughing go until there was nothing left in me. Blair gave my arm a quick squeeze. “All better, little flower?” she said, her smile so cozy it was worth the goopy mess. I slid back closer to her. Neither one of us said anything for a few minutes as we drank our tea and the cats came back and she turned on the TV and there was the news about the president. Blair shouted, “Good God!” She had no idea, she said, and if she’d known … Wasn’t it just so dreadful? Who would do such a thing? She looked grave. Like stewardesses in airport movies. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything nice about the president and remembered a teacher or counselor or somebody telling a group of kids who’d been calling me skunk puddle that if they didn’t have anything nice to say they should keep their mouths shut, and I couldn’t believe people actually said that kind of stuff in real life, not just on after-school specials. I decided to zip it. Blair stood up and paced, making me nervous, and I wished she’d never turned on the damn TV.

She stopped in front of it and bent down. On the shelf below were a few bottles that clanked between her fingers. “He’s a movie star and he freed the hostages,” I blurted out, thinking of what my father had said, only making it sound better. “He’s going to live.”

Blair lifted a bottle that looked like a genie could make a nice home of it. “Oh, let’s hope so, Lillian,” she said, and popped the cork. The booze rushing into her teacup smelled sweeter than Nancy’s gin. Stronger, too. After a few sips Blair’s face untangled, her smile veering upwards as if someone had attached a line to the corner of her lip and lightly tugged. She leaned her body into mine, everything more rubbery. I liked her like that.

Watching the news we learned the guy who’d shot the moviestar president had been planning it for weeks, to win the love of a pretty blond actress. It was a Hollywood thing. But an outsider, one of the president’s men, who’d never been in the movies, took the worst of the bullets. They weren’t sure whether he’d make it. Meantime, the president would be out of surgery shortly. The news people said he was expected to make a full recovery. They talked about his strength and good nature. When they brought him in he joked about forgetting to duck, they chuckled. At one point, I looked over at Blair and, seeing her close to tears, wondered why she was so upset about a Republican. Maybe she was an illegal immigrant.

The more she drank the more teary she became. Like my father when he talked about John Kennedy, but Ronald Reagan … It’s not like he was a real politician. Or a rock star. Blair was quiet and breathy, her shoulders rising into hiccups. She kept saying it was awful, just awful …

“Are you a Republican?” I asked.

“Me?” She crossed her hands over her chest. “I don’t even vote.”

“Then—”

“It’s just too much. All of these, these guns … and … Any loser can pick up a gun and … I was in the city right after Lennon.”

“John Lennon!” I shouted. It was like she’d read my mind.

“Such a tragedy.”

“I thought about him, too.”

Blair turned toward me, eyes focusing through her rubbery mask. “I’m so depressed,” she said. “Lillian, will you stay?”

I SIT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE BED in my cell with a brand-new legal pad and write your name: Brooke Kelsey Harrison. You never used your middle name. I didn’t even know you had one until that last night out on the Island, when stumbling through a fiery afterglow, I discovered an old-fashioned drugstore and jumped ten feet upon opening the door and hearing the bells announce my arrival. A couple of people looked up. Heart beating wildly in my chest, I lifted a pack of bright orange peanut butter crackers. Overhead light made the plastic glimmer, the squares a radioactive orange, salt chips like diamonds, and to think I’d never noticed how beautiful they were when I used to steal them from the deli, all cotton mouth and craving, and suddenly I wished more achingly than a stoned-out longing for salt and sweet to go back and undo it all, when the words burst through the TV set behind the cash register: Brooke Kelsey Harrison died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. She was twenty-one years old and star of the popular daytime drama World Without End.

I saw my face on a Wanted poster. Walls closing in, heat fizzling under my sweatshirt, I bolted from the store back to the beach and threw myself down on the sand. KELSEY!? The name hung between the blackening clouds, mocking me. Like an echoed scream on a basketball court … Kelsey … elsey … else … Everywhere I turned was that name and cantaloupe-orange crackers, and my throat lumped up realizing how much of the world I’d barely registered before smearing my shit all over it.

I throw the pad against the cinder blocks. My heart pounds and I’m wheezing. If only my breath would stop. But whenever I try and hold it I end up coughing worse than that day at Blair’s—I’m a total wimp. I pick up the pad and tear at the pages. Somebody shouts, “Shut the fuck up, psycho!” I fall back onto the bed and dig my fingers into my wrist, my nails wrapping around that vein I know won’t burst without major assistance. Like I said, I never had the guts, not even … What was I supposed to do? Huh? You tell me. After you’d broken the covenant, burned me … literally. I was just trying to help. That play was attracting the wrong kind of people, those who’d heard you took off your shirt and wanted to see Brooke Kelsey Harrison’s tits. Guys, of course. Girls were more interested in the real you. There I go generalizing, but I can because I’ve never felt like a guy or a girl.

And I don’t give a damn about politics. I would never shoot the president or any other politician. Dead or alive, they become heroes too easily. My father was right. Ronald Reagan was more popular after the assassination attempt, and the actress wrote a magazine article. I am not making this up. It’s how things go in America. Scratch that. My lawyer says I’m not supposed to talk about America, says it makes me sound fanatical. I know the difference between love and fanaticism, I tell him. I know I never really dated you, that you weren’t my actual girlfriend. He says I’m not supposed to mention you, remember.

So I keep it in, like always. We never needed words, it was deeper with us anyway: the kind of bond most people only dreamed about, like something out of a buddy movie. I didn’t have to tell you what I was thinking, you just knew, and maybe you weren’t my girlfriend, but you could have been once you got rid of that idiot boyfriend and we … I don’t care what they say, you knew why I’d come. You had the look, the dusky glow I’d first seen in Blair. It starts in the eyes, the way a girl holds a stare too long before her face lights up, how she’s not afraid to get her lips wet when she speaks.

This is different from the women who write me letters. It’s crazy how they want to claim me only to pounce all over me. I never said I was part of their group; never took any oath or entrance exam. They talk about visibility, saying if “we” were seen as normal I might have been less ashamed and found better girlfriends. They tell me I am self-hating. If so, it’s got nothing to do with girls, it’s because of you, Brooke; you who died by the bullet though you visited children’s hospitals and raised money for leukemia research and went on the Jerry Lewis Telethon and talked to every single person waiting in line for an autograph at the mall. That’s what the world saw. What the world needs now.

Heroes and villains.

Want to know who’s who? See how many women in here become your biggest fan when I’m around. They sneak up on me in the shower, or when I’m alone in my cell and can’t scream for Mimi.

If I bleed enough afterwards I can go to the infirmary, where the doctor winces, unable to hold back his disgust. I see myself through his eyes, only a kid. A white girl at that. Privileged. It’s a damn shame. I want to break through the wrist guards and smack his face, left right left, shouting, “That’s the point, you racist motherfucker!” But instead I look down and count the specks. Sad, there’s so many of them. Count the Lillian Ginger Speck, the John Homer Speck, the Nancy formerly Cooperstein never had a real middle name maybe that’s why she’s so fucked up Speck …

I see the three of us smiling on a Christmas card.

Wishing you happiness
and love,
The Specks

If I’m lucky the doctor turns away long enough for me to grab a handful of tattoo needles. Mimi says we can’t reuse them because of the virus. Mimi has a strong name: Miriam Adorno Colon. She says her family was royalty back in Puerto Rico.

Sometimes I don’t know why she bothers with me, why she slipped into my cell those first weeks they had me on suicide watch and told me she was going to take care of me. It was her job, she said, and I wondered if she’d been assigned to me the way they’d given her the mop and pail before I arrived. “Muñeca,” she named me, early on. “You know what it is, muñeca?”

I nodded no. The word had never come up in Spanish class.

“It means baby-doll, and that’s what you are now, my little muñeca.” She held open her mouth on the ca, the closest she ever got to smiling, and I was touched. For some reason this tall, muscular woman with sleeves rolled up over her biceps and hair held back with scotch tape had taken a liking to me, even after everything she must have heard. Or maybe because of it. Whatever her reason, I vowed not to let anything slip by me this time.

I WAS WALKING HOME, NOT UNHAPPY, when Blair found me. It was late afternoon, the sun still alive. Summer. I heard the hum of her 280Z before she idled up and slid down the window, slowly revealing herself: blond hair, sunglasses, bright red lips, stewardess’ uniform. “Hello, little flower,” she said, and I felt her Blairy warmness. Nobody had ever called me anything but my own name. She asked where I was coming from.

“Camp. The bus just dropped me off.”

“And where are you off to now?”

“Home, I guess.”

“Me too! I was in Houston and Chicago this morning.”

Yawning, she stretched her arms up and out. Her right palm landed on the stick shift. Blair loved her stick. It was why she’d plucked the 280Z from the used car lot in Bayside. That and the color. White. Like the crests of waves spilling off the Long Island Sound and always wet-looking. Cruising, the wheels even swished. Inside vinyl seats sparkled. White teacups. Blair wiped them down every morning with window cleaner. I could see her driveway from my bedroom window. I got up every morning that summer to watch. Blair. In her uniform or cutoffs. Bent over the front seat, caressing it with a clean white handkerchief, her thighs bumping back and forth as she hummed along with the girls on the radio.

Someone was singing now. About a man with a slow hand. Easy. Like the words added up to something. Sexy. But I didn’t know that word yet. I thought of the magazines delivered in brown paper packages to my parents. There was always a hose and sudsy water and, sometimes, a stewardess.

Blair turned to me, lifting her glasses. “Let’s go check on the girls.”

The lock clicked open. I rubbed my muddy high-tops against the curb. Didn’t want to offend her car. Her. Everything about her was so clean and perfumed. Like my mother. But with Blair it didn’t bother me so much.

Sunglasses back in place, she pushed the stick into first. The car jumped. “I was going to ask you to feed them,” she said. The stick went down. Her left knee extended. “Then I figured I’d be gone less than twenty-four hours so why bother you.”

“I love those cats.”

She smiled and shifted into third. I wished I could see under her sunglasses. She had great eyes: big and sweet and always reminding me of the day she’d come up from the underworld and given me tea. Her grip tightened around the stick and she pushed down, all knuckle, strong. We jolted back a second. Suspended in time. I stared at her legs, so close her knees touched when she shifted. She made the most boring stuff look like fun.

We swished down the road. Blair turned up the radio and swayed. Every so often she sang out a line. Opening my window, I felt the warm air. Smelled the salt and pines. I loved how spread apart the houses were here, the cover of trees. “Mmmm, aren’t those pines heavenly!” Blair shouted, and it amazed me how she always knew what I was thinking, how great it was that we’d moved in right next door, how she always seemed to find me on the nights Jack and Nancy were in the city, like we’d had an invisible, unspoken plan.

Downshifting, she turned onto our street. “You want to stop off at home?” she asked, slowing up a bit.

“Nope.”

Blair pushed her left leg down, her palm on the stick, and shifted back into third. And music pumped from the radio. Her knees grazed each other. And her shoulders rocked as she sang about turning upside down and round and round, and I watched her body go up on the inhale and down on the exhale. Blair was movement, and you couldn’t get that from a magazine, no matter how you twisted and turned the pages.

The car hiked forward, and I startled.

“Why are we—?”

“Look.” My mother was backing out of the driveway. Blair honked, waved. Like it was all part of the song. The muffler in my stomach buckled. I didn’t want Nancy anywhere near Blair. She was mine.

Nancy backed up behind us, then inched forward and slid down her window. She was dressed all sparkly, wearing tinted driving glasses. Blair turned down the radio. The two cars growled at each other, sides almost touching. Nancy’s was bigger.

“Hi!” Blair said. “I found this one meandering along the yellow brick road.”

“She’s quite good at that.”

“What?” I said.

“Meandering.”

“Aren’t we all,” said Blair. So on my side. “But don’t you look phenomenal, Nancy! Big plans tonight?”

“Just dinner.” Nancy looked right over Blair to me, which was odd. When it came to talking, particularly about food and restaurants, Nancy was expert. She always said, “You know me, I can do twenty minutes making dinner reservations!” But that day there was no gloss, no cover. “How was camp?” she asked, sarcastic-like, as if she already knew the answer. We’d been waging silent war since the letter from my counselors had come. They said I refused to integrate with the group. Nancy’d shoved the letter in front of me the other night while I was eating cold pizza. “What is it with you?” she said finally. “What’s your problem?” Heat like an electric blanket shrouded me.

That day I’d waited as two boys and two girls picked teams for a tetherball tournament, and every time someone called a name that wasn’t mine, I stared at the counselors smacking that dumb yellow ball back and forth, dust spreading from their cool leather sneakers and landing in the back of my throat. It was the easiest game, you wrapped a ball on a string around a pole, but my grandmother said those were the best kind. She and her brother had grown up playing kick-the-can and tag. They couldn’t believe it when they’d gotten a ball. Two generations later someone had attached it to a stick. We always wanted more. But there was a rush to the winning whack—that point where speed and strength combined and you slammed the ball over your opponent’s head, sending it coiling around the pole so you barely had to tap it when it came your way again. The laws of brute force were on your side. Like magic. Someone called my name and I jumped up but was shoved aside by another girl who whooped over and high-fived her friends, I think her name was Lydia, and I stood paralyzed like that damn pole, the string coiling around my neck as every last girl, even those with long fingernails and those who forfeited turns for their boyfriends and those who always missed the ball but jumped so high their asses leaked out of their shorts—even they were all chosen before me. Finally a counselor steered me toward team four. “Aw! We didn’t pick IT!” said a boy with a baseball hat turned backwards. My captain. “This isn’t a democracy,” the counselor smiled, and walked away. The boy glared at me. “Mess up and your ass is grass.”

“More like a whole field,” said a stickish-thin girl, and they both laughed.

I felt exposed, as if the whole vaporous memory had materialized on a screen in front of Nancy. But when I looked up from the letter she was gone. A couple of days later I’d heard her laughing into the phone, “Of course we’ll be there, unless Lily manages to get herself thrown out of another camp.”

No way would I give her the satisfaction, even though I hated this camp more than the last. I told her it was great.

“Really?” said my mother, her nose scrunched up, eyebrows floating above her glasses. Gold dots in the frame. Her initials.

Before I could tell her how we’d done archery and I’d hit the bull’s-eye and only once had (accidentally, I swear) skimmed the shirt of the skinny girl, Blair broke in. “You heading into the city, Nancy? It’s a fantastic night for it. Just perfect for walking around the seaport or downtown.”

“We’ll be on the east side,” said my mother. A chill wind brushed through the car, raising the hair on my arms, and I wished I could climb under a thick comforter and shut my eyes. I was so sleepy. The engines hummed even louder. Purring. Like the girls when you touched behind their ears.

“Well,” Nancy cleared her throat. “I guess I’ll be off … I have to catch the 6:10. Lily, there’s some chicken in the refrigerator. We’ll be home late.”

“She can eat with me,” Blair said.

“Really, don’t feel obligated.”

“Not at all.”

“She’s good on her own.”

“It’s my way of saying thanks.” Blair turned from Nancy to me and tapped my thigh. “For me and the girls …” She kept her hand there a few seconds and when she lifted, it felt cool. Right through my jeans. They were cutoffs like she wore on her days off. Mine fell below the knee. Nancy hated them. She never wore jeans, even if they had somebody’s name on the back pocket.

“Well, then …” Nancy said. “I guess we’ll see you later.”

I nodded, said bye. Blair said have fun and tilted her stick into first, second. I looked in the rearview mirror as Nancy signaled left and out of sight, and my stomach slowly released. We rumbled past my house into Blair’s driveway, this time sliding into neutral. She shut off the engine. My ears adjusted to the wind, the waves, the cry of a sea gull. “Ready?” Blair smiled. Then popped open her door.

Outside the air felt heavier. Cooler. Summer nights had the damp chill of clothes pulled too soon from the dryer. We lingered a bit before heading inside. Blair put on the kettle and went to change out of her uniform. I heard the closet slide open, a drawer pull, her feet creaking across the wooden planks, cat claws clicking like high heels behind her. “Lillian,” she called to me. “You can put on some music if you want … or the TV.” She glided into the bathroom, and I heard water splashing in the sink. She always left the door open, even when she peed. Scanning her albums I found mostly disco music. Girls with one name and tons of hair: Donna, Diana, Barbra—the guys at camp said disco sucks but they’d never seen Blair swing her hands above her head as she danced around the kitchen counter, like she felt each beat in a different part of her body.

The kettle screeched, and I jerked forward. My hands landed in the white shag. I steadied myself on all fours and like a cat leaned into the wall. Blair came out in faded jeans and a pink V-neck. All soft and powdery. Walking by she rubbed the back of my neck and I said, “Meow!”

She couldn’t hear me over the wailing kettle. “I swear it used to whistle and then one day it became a foghorn!” she shouted, and with her hands covering her ears rushed over to turn it off. I pushed myself up onto the couch.

Blair brought over the Delta tray with steaming cups of tea, Sweet’N Low, and those tiny containers of creamer. “Let’s relax a bit, then we’ll see about food,” she said. “Are you terribly hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither.” She pulled out the tea bag with her spoon and curled the string round and round. Once I’d tried that at home, but Nancy said it was bad for you. You ended up drinking chemicals from the bag and they caused cancer. I didn’t mention this to Blair, who was still wrapping and wringing to get out every last drop. Imagine if I picked up a tetherball and simply walked the ball around the pole, pulling tighter and tighter as I circled, so tight the ball eventually popped like a dandelion head from the string or the pole bent forward—that’s what she liked to do to her tea bags. Squeeze ’em with a slow-mo kind of force. Like what happens when you wrap a thread around your finger. Tension makes it stronger than the skin beneath it. Squeeze hard enough and eventually it’ll slice right through the skin. That’s the thing about slow-mo force: it can be just as deadly, as brute, and even more insidious. You really have to work it. Blair’s tea bag puffed out between the lines. Like a purplish finger, or my stomach around my mother. And then it happened. The string broke through. Little leaves showered over her cup. “Dammit!” she said, and looked close to tears. “My nerves are shot. I need something better than tea.” She stood up and grabbed the genie bottle from the shelf. The label said V.S.O.P. I remembered Jack once telling me it meant Very Special Old Product. It was the only alcohol Blair kept in the house. She took down a fat glass and looked inside. I wanted one, too. And asked.

“I don’t know,” Blair hesitated.

“Jack lets me drink from his wine glass,” I said. Not a lie.

Gustave had told him it was what kids did in France. What I didn’t say was I’d been sneaking sips from Nancy’s gin glasses for years. She left them half full around the house, like she left her half-smoked cigarettes, an offering to some invisible god or ghost. Sometimes I smoked the ends, trying to determine where my mother’d just been by the freshness of a lipstick stain, the size of a remaining ash, the lingering scent of her perfume, and through this put together a life in pencil drawings: Nancy talks on the phone, Nancy watches TV, Nancy supervises the cleaning lady, Nancy touches up her eyebrows, Nancy hangs out in the hot tub.

Blair tilted her head toward the ceiling, then picked up another glass. “You’re sure?”

“Totally.”

“Well, why not?”

She set down the two glasses on the coffee table, poured one half full, the other less so. She handed me the emptier glass. “Prost! “ she said in a funny accent. “That’s ‘cheers’ in German. I do JFK-Munich sometimes, and let me tell you, you’ve never seen such a clean city. It sparkles like Oz. You’re supposed to sip now.”

“Huh?”

“After the toast.”

“Oh, okay.”

I did. It tasted like cough medicine only it made me cough “Slowly,” Blair said, and I sipped again, this time feeling the liquid warm the back of my throat. “Very good, Lillian,” she said, and the way she pronounced my name was so feathery, like everything in that house of grays and pinks and whites. I turned my head and came face to face with a poster of an old cruise ship. I was so right: Blair was motion.

We played a game. I pointed to cities in her Delta book with a ballpoint pen, the kind that clicked into action. Then she took the pen and wrote down words about the city I’d chosen … clean, dirty, small streets, big buildings, museums, cafés, cemeteries. Under her thumb, the pen clicked maniacally and sounded like Morse code. I used to bang out Morse code on empty Coke cans with some kids on another block. All I remembered was S.O.S. I wanted to tap out V.S.O.P. Blair was my very own very special old product.

She high-fived me whenever I chose Paris or Nashville, her two favorite cities, and I thought, this is what it’s like to be picked first. A warm drizzle of tea leaves. Blair refilled our glasses. She told stories about traveling. She didn’t sound like anyone else I knew, even when her words slurred. I thought it was because she traveled to other countries. After a while, tired from the game, we leaned back and looked at the faces on television. They seemed smaller than normal, but I could understand them better. My body felt warm and tingly and I couldn’t stop laughing. And the brandy’d started tasting really good.

“Oh no!” Blair said. “I forgot about dinner.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No. But I promised your mother.”

“She’ll never know.”

Blair pushed herself straight up and yawned so big I could see all of her teeth. “Excuse me!” she said. One of the girls—Marilyn, maybe, Grace had the bigger ears—meowed and jumped from the couch. “Then I guess we’d better get you home. Your parents’ll be back soon.”

“I doubt it.”

Blair’s eyes sunk.

“They stay out really late when Jack’s got clients. They go dancing and stuff.”

“And they always leave you alone?”

I nodded. “When I was really young I stayed with my grandparents, but they moved to Arizona. Sometimes they let me stay at Gustave’s—that’s Jack’s partner, he shoots the commercials but Jack’s the one who makes everything happen. My grandmother says he could sell oil to an Arab.”

Blair stared at me, biting her lower lip to hold back the tears. I liked that she was sort of a crybaby. In commercials stewardesses always smiled, in movies they had stone faces. Blair was the real deal. I could imagine her going out of her way to find a passenger an extra pillow, track down a special meal, sneak a kitten on board.

“It’s not right,” she said. “You’re eleven years old.”

“Twelve. My birthday was June third. I’m a Gemini.”

“I’m Scorpio,” she said, then stood up and held out her hand.

“Come … you can stay here tonight.”

I followed her into the bedroom, faking a yawn, though I was anything but tired. Blair gave me a T-shirt that said Delta Softball and went into the bathroom to pee. “If that doesn’t fit there’s plenty more,” she said. I’d already taken off my other shirt and slipped Blair’s over my head. I turned and saw her sitting on the toilet. “This is okay …” I stammered. She stood, and before pulling up her pants I caught a look at her bush, which like Nancy’s had all of this stringy hair—Nancy liked to walk around naked after her shower. Air-drying. I didn’t have any hair and decided I wouldn’t. Wasn’t that kind of girl. Blair flushed, splashed a little water on her face, then shut off the light. The bedroom went dark, except for the dim shadow of her Statue of Liberty night-light.

“You look adorable,” she said and tickled my side. “Now let’s get you into bed.”

She tucked me underneath her bleachy white sheets with the big cotton comforter we sometimes dragged out when we watched TV, and I remembered earlier in her car, how I’d gotten so sleepy and imagined a blanket settling on top of me. It was a vision, the way I’d first seen her come up from the sea. Grace and Marilyn jumped up on the bed, sniffing around me as Blair slipped out of her jeans and V-neck, stopping every few minutes to sip from the brandy bottle. What happened to her glass? I lifted a cat and she purred. An electric powder puff, cooing … V.S.O.P. … V.S.O.P. …

Peeking through her white fluff, I watched Blair. Body like a brandy bottle, lips mumbling a song about angels, doing a slowmo kind of dance. She slipped on a silky white nightie. Everything in the bedroom was white and pillowy. Heaven. I laughed.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”

She was standing there in a short terry cloth bathrobe looking like she was born for those airline commercials. Hi, my name is Blair and I’m gonna fly you like you’ve never been flown before.

“Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not.”

“Good, ’cause you’re safe here …” her voice cracked, “and ya know, I dunno … you just shouldn’t be alone like that.” She took a long sip from her bottle and sat down next to me. I was, in fact, terrified. I’d never been in bed with another person. You didn’t get into a bed with someone unless you were married or … maybe Blair and I were going to get married. Stretching out one leg at a time, she leaned up against her elbow so her boobs were almost popping out of her nightie. “Lillian G. Speck,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She stared at me for a minute, then rolled her head back, laughing hysterically. When she came back up her eyes were all teary. “Do you have any idea how much I hate flying?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” She sipped from her bottle. “I’m sorry, did you want some?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay, then, it’s bedtime.” She put down the bottle and snuggled under the sheets. One of the girls lay between us. “Meow,” said the cat, and Blair rubbed behind her ears. “Yes, my good girl …”

“Meow!” I said, and Blair smiled.

“Are you my good girl, too?” I fluttered my lips, purring. She stroked the back of my neck. I folded into her body and put my arms around her. She held me tight around my waist, moved her legs against mine, and there was her smell—the brandy, the hair dye, the powder—and there were her hands rubbing my back beneath the Delta T-shirt, her silk nightie soft against my cheek, and the motion, the rocking together as she hummed the angel song softly and wrapped me up slow-mo, tight as that string around her tea bag, and I had a vision or memory, I couldn’t tell the difference sometimes … my parents, naked, with another woman in their bed and they’re touching her body and licking her titties. There’s soft music and Jack’s insect eyes. He smiles, Go to bed, Lily. And they all laugh.

But that was years ago, before I’d made it into a bed of my own. Blair’s.

She held me a little longer, then slackened her arms and whispered, “Good night, little flower.” My head drifted into the crook of her elbow. Like this we fell asleep.

JACK COMES TO SEE ME WITHOUT NANCY. He says she’s gone away for a while, gone to a place where famous people go to have breakdowns. Jack thought he was famous long before I made us all infamous. It was the business that swelled him, all of the restaurants and wrap parties, the drinking and dancing and drugs. Same shit that did in Nancy.

Not that my own past is clean. When the lawyers scratch the surface, they find the usual stuff: pot, coke, speed, tranqs, pills I knew only by color, shape, or size, but never heroin. None had come my way. By now, thanks to the witness—the one who claims to have seen the gun—the entire world knows I lifted quite a bit of contraband. Everything from my parents’ scrips to the gun that allegedly killed you. The gun the cops can’t seem to find. My lawyer says the witness is jealous and delusional and would give anything to be involved in such a high-profile murder. Better hope that gun doesn’t turn up, I warn my lawyer. I’m getting wary of his tactics, and my father knows it.

“I saw the rabbi yesterday,” I goad Jack. I’ve been seeing the rabbi since the priest started bumming me out. All his talk about confessing and following Jesus really meant I had to stop doing Mimi and keep my hands off myself, too. I like the rabbi better. He says I’ll find forgiveness through hard work, discipline, and prayer.

“We talked about evil.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Jack says. “You want a soda or something?

I got all these quarters today.” He taps his fingers on the table and looks over at the woman next to us. She’s squeezing the bones out of her two young children. I imagine the guards prying them apart with a big wrench.

“He says I should plead guilty.”

“Who?”

“The rabbi.”

The way Jack stares we could be sitting in a ski lodge or at the cafeteria at the Museum of Natural History and about to go home together. I never thought I would see him like this: speechless. He retreats behind his black-Irish eyes, the circles beneath them a deeper purple than the week before.

“Did you hear me?”

More silence.

“It’s what he thinks—and I want to, too.”

Almost religious, my father’s wordlessness. A droplet forms in the corner of his right eye.

“We can get this over with, maybe. Move things along. Know what I’m saying, Jack? Jack?”

Droplets called back: false alarm: his face ices over.

“Come on, you don’t understand what—”

“Stop it, okay, just shut up!” he shouts, and I can’t remember ever hearing such pain in his voice. Around us women talk, smiling when they touch their people. Some couples grope furiously. They should be home on their couches, not sitting in folding chairs, one dressed, the other in green pajamas. Keeps us all equal inside but nobody’s really the same. There’s a hierarchy, a social ladder not too different from on the outside, how pretty girls got picked first for tetherball and my mother always thought she was better than everyone ’cause she drove a fancy car. In here I’m on the high end because of Mimi and because I’m a tabloid prisoner. I get the TV people, the journalists, the famous shrinks and experts in youth crime, even a renowned feminist. Makes me pretty well hated by a lot of girls in green pajamas. I want to explain this to somebody, but the only one here is Jack and he’s in no mood.

I need a visitor who’s not family, not a professional or parasite. In biology we learned about parasites—most of the time they cause diseases in their host. I want a different kind of parasite, a new disease. I wish I had a boyfriend to slobber over while everyone tries not to look. It’s all boys out here, no girls together, and that’s strange considering how much of it goes on inside. Here it’s about a quick kiss, hands fiddling with zippers underneath the table. Cock. I’ve never seen Mimi with her man. That would piss me off royally and we are trying to control my anger. The rabbi says anger is our way of acting out our mortal fury, the fear we’re going to die expressed as rage at the almighty. I don’t believe in any god, I tell him, and he says this itself is a form of anger.

My father taught me to be an atheist. He hates religion.

His mother had believed in the Son of God. She hung his picture in every room and near her bed raised a statue of his dying body. When she passed, she kissed her fingertips then let them graze against his smooth little arms. She believed in his power to drive away demons and heal the sick. To save her people from their sins. She knew what he might say in any situation. He was inside her always. Kind of like you and me, but I wouldn’t say that to anyone.

The first bell sounds, and I am relieved. No more avoiding my father’s face. Guards start breaking up couples. This is when the tears come, but not mine. Jack stands to leave. “Listen,” I say.

“Would you just think about it, okay? I’m going crazy in here.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s better this way.”

“Better for who?”

“That’s what Brickman says.”

“I don’t trust him. I think I need another lawyer—there’s this woman.”

“Forget it.” He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and a few black satin strands fall forward. For one second I hate myself for turning his life upside down, making everything unfamiliar to him. Me in here, and Nancy gone, too.

“Look, Brickman’s your hire,” I say. “He doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t want to hear it.”

“So what? It’s not like your marrying the guy. He’s being paid to get you out of here, not listen to your problems.”

“My problems are his problems. The other lawyer says—”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, stop it! I’ve got problems, too, you know. You think this guy comes easy—he’s the best there is and he bills more per hour than Jesus, so I don’t want to hear it, okay? This is your lawyer—Jonathan Brickman—and you’re gonna listen to what he says and stop talking to the fucking rabbi!”

The second bell rings. Jack puffs out his cheeks, flutters his lips. “Look, I’m—”

A guard taps his shoulder. “Let’s go, pal. Save it for next week.”

Jack nods. Opening his arms, he turns toward me. I reach out and hug him around his stomach, hating myself. When I let go, he tries giving me his J.F.K. but is waylaid by droplets.

I watch him angle his broad shoulders past the guard and hop into the elevator.

After he leaves, I have someone take me to the library. I check our clippings almost every day as I sit by the window near the case law books. There are a few new articles, some stuff about all the journalists swarming around your family. If she does tell their story, your mother says in Time, it won’t be sensational, and I know it’s a jab at me. Like anything I do’ll be sensational. I shove the magazines off the table and look out the window at the tomato plants. Though it’s late in the season, they’re exploding in red and orange. A girl in green pajamas digs her fingers into the soil and that’s the job I want. They’re almost ready to let me work, my lawyer says. I’m no longer dangerous to myself and others.

For a while, I watch that girl dig and pick and point to where she wants a guard to cut back the leafy vines. I imagine kidnapping her and filling the position. I grow the fattest tomatoes of the season. They feed the entire city. And win prizes. I end up on television, this time for the right thing.

I was supposed to be helping Mimi with Angel’s tattoo. A devil with a pitchfork, which Mimi says is happy since her name is Angel. Angel’s not much older than me, but she’s been schooled on the system, in and out of detention centers and jails for drugs, stealing, cutting people up, troubles that began when she was twelve. She says she used to have sex with other girls’ boyfriends just so they’d fight her. Once she participated in a human autopsy. “You know what that is, Long Island?” she asked, and I could only guess. “It’s when you cut somebody from their neck down to their private parts and they’re still alive, you know? You pull ’em open and poke around with their organs.”

It was straight out of a horror movie, what I might have fantasized when I was really mad, but there is a big jump from saying I’m gonna rip your guts out and actually doing it. It makes pulling a trigger seem chicken-shit. Angel’s one of the toughest girls I’ve ever met. I almost can’t believe she’s got two kids, would have had three if she didn’t miscarry after a fight last year. Now she’s pregnant again.

Sometimes she lets me put my hand on her stomach and feel the baby. “You have to talk to her,” she says. Her her sounds so much like huh it reminds me of the girls in my high school. They’d all drop their Gucci purses at the sight of Angel with her scarred neck and arms, the extra piece of s kin hanging over her right eye.

“What should I say?”

“I dunno, anything. Sing something,” she nods, her hand on mine on her stomach. “Sing to my baby, Long Island.”

Like I’m going to say no to her. So even though I’m tonedeaf and can only remember the tune to the theme from World Without End, I hum to Angel’s stomach. She loves the song and asks me to do it whenever I see her. That’s another reason I’m hiding out in the library—afraid of messing up the baby’s karma humming the theme to a show forced to change more than a few story lines after I murdered its star. Instead, I watch the lucky girl clip tomato vines and try to remember your unsensational face.

NANCY’D PLANNED A PARTY for my thirteenth birthday and told me to invite some friends. Nothing big, she said, just a cookout. She had the food delivered from the supermarket. Around noon Jack rolled the grill out of the garage and puffed two yellow umbrellas over the picnic table. Nancy brought out the good plates and napkins and silverware. From my bedroom window, I watched the back-and-forth, excited. Blair was coming at two.

Gustave and Pamela arrived first—they always came for parties—Gustave in one of his baseball hats and dark sunglasses, Pamela in a bright dress and high heels, her thick brown hair styled differently every time. She was Gustave’s second wife and younger than the rest of them. She had been studying photography at a university in France when they met, love at first look for Gustave. She called him a romantic boy. They were full of champagne bottles and gulpy laughs and loved parties. For my birthday they gave me a little white box with layers of tissue paper and, underneath, a silver necklace in the shape of a thick bubbly L. I said thanks and kissed them on both cheeks the way Gustave had taught me. For years I’d thought this was a French kiss, until I overheard a couple of girls at camp saying, did he French you? did he use his tongue? and knew it had to be more. The rest I learned from movies. Nancy brought out a pitcher of gin & tonics and eyed the necklace. “It’s positively gorgeous,” she said. “Put it on.”

I did, even though I hated things hanging from my body. “That looks great,” Nancy said. “Doesn’t it?”

“Fantastic, I’m so glad we went for the silver,” said Pamela, who was wearing quite a bit of it herself. She was born in Morocco where her father had been a jewelry maker.

“Yep,” shouted Jack, over his shoulder. He was at the grill. “The thing about silver is you can wear it with anything.”

Talk about the necklace went on for some time. How I was going to love it, could even wear it with jeans, blah blah, meow meow. They were so loud, their gestures exaggerated. Like I was deaf or something. I couldn’t care less about jewelry or my parents or Gustave and Pamela, all I knew was Blair hadn’t arrived. I walked over to the side table where Nancy’d set up hors d’oeuvres, ate a few chunks of bread loaded with brie and pâté, some olives and chips, then poured a g & t and headed to the beach. It was almost three and I was getting worried. What if she’d gotten stuck in another city? Or one of the cats was sick? But she would have called. But she never called. I just went over, mostly at night, and we played the traveling game before squeezing with the girls into bed.

A few times there was someone else in the bed. I watched from my window as she stepped out of a car that wasn’t her own and a shadowy figure followed her inside. Much as it killed me, I knew I wasn’t supposed to go over. Maybe whoever was there now, but not in the daytime. That’s when I’d go over, boil water for tea, and carry the Delta tray to bed, where she lay with a washcloth over her forehead. “You’re my savior,” she’d smile, and I felt important. We had to get her ready for work. It was tough when she had a transatlantic flight. She was terrified of sailing over oceans.

But she wasn’t flying, and I’d told her three times about the party.

Jack called out, “Hey, birthday girl! It’s chow time.”

I climbed up on my rock and stared at the Sound, its still blue cover a torment. Blair only came out in the mist. I picked up a stick and tried to sketch her in the sand. Maybe whoever in the dark car had taken her into the city for lunch. She loved the seaport. And whoever would want to make her happy, she was so great, who wouldn’t want to make her happy? Thousands of strings clenched around my stomach. I hated Blair.

“These burgers are raring to go!” Jack said again.

I hurled the stick out to sea and decided to go find her. Halfway to her house she appeared through the trees, practically glowing in a white sundress and hat that looked like Saturn. She held a package wrapped with a shiny silver ribbon.

“Didn’t you hear me!” Jack was pissed. “We’re almost ready up there. What are you doing?”

I suppose it looked funny. Me, standing in the pines with—she was gone! I swallowed and said nothing, I was doing nothing, then crunched over the fallen pine needles behind my father in his chef’s hat. Gustave had taken over at the grill, where he stood pressing a couple of hamburgers with a spatula, charcoal clouds rising above him. “Whoa, Gus!” Jack said. “You’re searing too heavy, the outsides’ll burn.”

“It’s the way the hamburger should be enjoyed.”

“But keep mine raw inside!” Nancy called out from the end of the table, where she and Pamela huddled together smoking cigarettes.

“You are some kind of wild animal or something,” Gustave growled.

I sat down a few places away from my mother and noticed all the settings around the table. Slow-mo strings worked deep into my stomach. Gustave dropped a burger on my mother’s plate and she nudged it open with her fork. It was pink and slimy but the meaty smell cut a trail to my nostrils. I wanted to sink my teeth into the flesh, feel the juices running down my chin. I was starving AND I felt like throwing up. If I could get away now, I thought, I’d be fine. Escape to my room and watch TV until the sun set and Gustave and Pamela returned to the city and I could get over to Blair’s. “Okay, Lily G-for-genius …” said my father, for a moment taking a break from emptying the grill, though still holding a pair of tongs and brushing the back of his hand against his forehead. Weary. Steamed out. “I burned these babies just the way you like ’em.”

“I forgot to call back Grandma!” I blurted out. “To thank her for the check.”

“You can do that later,” Jack said, and plucked those remaining hot dogs, blackened for me. But I was too queasy.

“I want to do it now.”

“What’s your problem?” Nancy said.

Gustave brought over the platter full of hamburgers and hot dogs. “It is finished,” he said, and sat down next to Pamela.

“No problem, it’s just I don’t want to forget is all.”

“I’ll remind you … later. And where are all your friends? You did tell them it was an afternoon thing, right? I am not going to start feeding people all over again in a few hours.”

Nancy stared, slow-mo turning brute, and the tea bag burst. “You don’t have to feed anybody, okay?” I snapped.

“I don’t—”

“Nobody’s coming!”

“Nobody? What happened to—”

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. “I just want to go to my room!”

“Your room! Why!?”

“Let her go …” said my father as I stalked inside.

Wind carried their voices upstairs over the clatter of silverware, ice cubes shifting in tall glasses, the smell of graying barbecue coals giving way to coffee, cigarettes, and a thicker, sweeter kind of smoke. Summertime. I sat at the window, listening. At first they talked about it, Nancy saying she was at the end of her rope with me, and Pamela comforting, “They’re all sulky at that age,” and they both laughed, which raged me up. I wanted to scream, “I am not sulky! I’m like Gustave: a romantic boy,” but soon they moved on to other things and hummed along with my father’s jazzy records and carried the pitcher of gin & tonics over to the hot tub before the birds, tired of competing with sad songs, settled in for the evening, and the floodlights shot on … like flashcubes going off. A picture: two loud couples in a hot tub at dusk. There’s nothing more depressing.

When their voices melted into the clanking of plates and turning of car engines, I knew the coast was clear. I went downstairs, sipped from a few half-drunk glasses on the counter, licked their powdered leftovers off a portable mirror, and opened the refrigerator. Inside was my untouched birthday cake. White with blue flowers and lettering: Happy Birthday Lily. I took the box and went over to Blair’s. She opened the door in her bathrobe. “Do you hate me?” she said, so soft and crybabyish I couldn’t stay mad at her. She let me in, poured us a couple of glasses of brandy, and explained that she’d been home all day, something had gotten into her. “I just couldn’t get out of bed,” she said.

“But I saw you.”

“What?”

“Outside. This afternoon.”

“Oh, honey, I am so sorry,” she said, and put her arms around me. I hugged her back, forgiving her for running off and missing my party. It was okay, I said, all I’d wanted was to be with her, and look where you are, she said. Now, did I want my birthday present? She handed it to me and I didn’t question why it was different from the box she had earlier. This one was in a plastic bag from the art store. I pulled out a gigantic black book and my chest swelled. “For your drawings,” she said. “Now you can keep them all in one place.”

“It’s amazing.”

“And whenever you draw you’ll think of me.”

“I think about you all the time.”

“That’s very sweet.” She stroked my cheek, then looked away. She was sadder than usual and could barely keep her eyes open. “Should we have some cake then?” she smiled, and I nodded, thankful a bit of the Blairyness had returned.

She put on the soundtrack to A Star Is Born and brought over the cake. For good luck I smeared my name with my pinkie and cut us each a big square. We washed it down with brandy, listening to the record. Blair cried when Barbra Streisand sang at Kris Kristofferson’s funeral. “It’s so sad. He turned her into the person he wanted, made her this big fantastic star, and then hated her for it,” she heaved, and I sat there not knowing what I was supposed to do. She took a gurgly breath. “Come and give us a hug.” She held open her arms. I hugged her and it was the longest I’d ever held anyone, the two of us in that little cottage, candles burning, three-quarters of a birthday cake and a bottle of brandy in front of us. Surfacing, her eyes tinted pink, she said, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ve been going all day.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She rubbed my arm, then bit her lower lip. “And everything … it’s just …”

“What?”

She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “You know that I tried, right? I really really tried, but I can’t be your mother.” A thousand floodlights beamed in my face. I was red-hot, exposed, and felt like I was being slowly strangled. I didn’t want her to be my mother—who would want to be someone’s mother? If I could’ve I would’ve stuffed that word back behind her faded red lipstick. But it hung between us like a rain cloud. “It’s okay,” she continued, “you’re very smart, you’ll figure it out someday, and they won’t have me to kick around anymore.”

“What do you mean? Who’s kicking you? Why are you talking like that?”

She laughed, then her eyes pooled again.

“Are you okay?”

Big sigh, head thrown back, she said, “Be a stewardess, they told me. You’re the perfect height for it. A lot of women are too short or too tall, did you know that? There’s a perfect height and a perfect weight.” She’d told me this before, all the rules. Everything down to the color of lipstick she was supposed to wear. “Half the people I know eat laxatives for days before, but I never had a problem with that. It was the flying that got me, Lillian. How’s that for irony? Nobody ever said anything about what happens to your brain when it’s stuck up in the air day after day. Everything’s got something hidden in it … there’s a lesson for you. I can still teach you things, even if …” She was tearing too much to speak. I put one hand on her shoulder, the other on her arm, and managed to get her standing, thinking how weird we’d look if anyone saw us, but that was the beauty of it: it was just between us. We needed each other. I took her into the bedroom and helped her kick off her jeans. “Thank you, darling,” she said, and sat me down on the bed, taking my hands in hers. “When you remember me, Lillian—” she paused for a long breath, “and you will … please be kind.”

The next morning she flew to Paris. Not long after that she was gone. No note, no forwarding address, nothing. It had been days since I’d seen her, so I went over to her place. Shutters closed up the windows, and when I lifted the mat, the key was gone. I walked around to the bedroom window and through a crack saw the empty white walls. “Blair?” I said, tentatively at first, then screamed and banged on the front door until a man came out of the mansion.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Where is she?”

“Beats me,” he said. “She never told me where she was going.” She’d left the key in his mailbox a few days ago. At first he was upset she didn’t give notice but after thinking it over he and his wife decided to trash the place and build a swimming pool. I could use it if I wanted, he said, and disappeared up the slate pathway to his house.

I walked to the beach, sat down on my rock, and stared out at the water without really looking. Afternoon became evening and I knew she’d gotten lost somewhere and couldn’t come home or didn’t want to. I’d driven her away.

My house was dark and emptier than ever. I went upstairs but turned toward my parents’ bedroom instead of mine. Opening the top drawer of Jack’s dresser, I found the cigar box where he kept his pot under a cover of bunched-up pairs of thin black socks. I rolled a joint and sat back on the steely gray sheets and smoked. This bed was bigger than Blair’s. King-sized, my father had said, and it could have held the entire royal family, even with the pretty new princess, or two parents who entertained after dark, or me and Blair and the girls. I couldn’t imagine sleeping alone every night, never again hearing her whisper, “Give us a hug,” then clamp around me like an octopus. It wasn’t fair. I went into the bathroom and ran burning hot water in the sink and shower. Steam fogged the mirror, condensing on the pale green tiles and black window. Lights dim, my face a skeleton, I punched the mirror until my knuckles stung and little knives shot up my arm. The face was still there, mocking me. Guess she didn’t really need you after all … I picked up Nancy’s round, plastic razor and rubbed the blade against the purple veins in my wrist, watching as a few dots of blood rose along the frayed skin. I cut deeper … and deeper … until I should have felt it. In the mirror, the face: That’s not a kill-yourself kind of razor, shithead.

There was blood all over the sink; I was numb. I stuck my wrists under the scalding hot water and screamed.