Soupbone

Contents Writer’s Statement Poetry (Part I) Soupbone Owl and Snake Packing Peanuts Autobiographia Literaria Room in Brooklyn, 1932 Daughter Woman Speaks on Shellshock Non-Fiction Hunkamunka: A Memoir (excerpt) Dramatic Sharpe Compromises

Poetry (Part II) Grey Streak Paper Well Bellies Up Ghost Races

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Writer's Statement As a senior in high school, having spent the past seven years in rigorous writing “bootcamps,” collecting all of the egotistical, inky, disorganized labels that writers are doomed to collect, I’m not going to lie and say that everything in this manuscript is new, unsullied work. But I’ve gotten into the habit of constantly going over old work and freshening it up; this has turned out to be a generally beneficial thing because I never run out of writing to work on. The pieces in this collection are examples of such “refurbished” works that have just recently tickled my fancy.

My work has never necessarily been focused on style, but rather on details and setting a very clear mood. Usually I work with poetry, as can be seen by flipping through the following hundred-some pages. Poetry is the one form that I find inspiration for everywhere: in a leaf, in my cheerios, in my bubble bath, in my cat.

Sometimes it is more difficult, but I always enjoy challenging myself by writing about something no one has ever written about before.

However, in the effort to include at least one piece from all four genres, I decided to include a short piece of prose. "Blush" is a full-length novella; although I wanted to include more, I opted for simply this one piece so as to not complicate the fiction section.

Many of the poems I included in this compilation were written while attending Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts this past summer. At this program I learned new techniques, performed my work in front of large audiences, and met other talented teens who rejuvenated my enthusiasm for the arts. At PGSA, we did exercises in both free verse, and in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter; the only form poem included in my selection, however, is “Daughter.” The rest of the poems included in my portfolio are free verse because I think that the freedom this non-form gives me as a writer allows for more creativity in the actual theme of the poem. The one rhymed poem is “Song of the Blatherskites” and it is a poem I wrote in 9 th grade after “The Jabberwocky.”

My piece of dramatic writing is a 10-minute play written in 11 th grade, and the memoir is an excerpt from a longer piece written in 10 th grade.

For the stereotypers of the world, a surprisingly immense majority, the title poet seems to gives off the idea of a messy-haired recluse with an explosive ego. Needless to say, I'm not an Emily Dickinson, but I have no problem being categorized in this way.

Despite being a personable blonde, not a typical reclusive romantic, I love the way being called a poet feels. I hope to further this stereotype for myself by submitting these works.

It isn't necessarily common for kids my age to want to embrace their literary fixations; however, I have been taught that it is something I need not only to accept, but to lionize.

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Soup Bone Tonight, my feet flop like swollen fish, scaly and cold in my snow-damp socks.

I have been bathing in alphabet soup to put off going to sleep, trying to make sense of the letters left in my bathtub, trapped in lukewarm puddles of broth at the rim of the rusty drain.

But nothing makes sense to me anymore so I slurp them up, slice my tongue on salty water.

Soon I am shaking, holding my ankles under the shadow of the little dipper; I am waiting for an apple to fall and shatter my skull so pieces of me will litter the lawn like the chipped porcelain of a china doll’s face.

I will find my ear resting on the front stoop, my nose dozing, bloody, in the gutter.

I won’t be able to find my lips, so I’ll ask someone to help, and they’ll pluck them carefully from the empty can of alphabet soup, thrown away, label shredded, in the dumpster.

The noodle-strewn skin will spell out “skis” and I’ll rearrange them to spell “kiss” and then my someone will kiss the lips until their mouth is as salty as mine, then we’ll kneel together; pray for my feet to dry.

Owl and Snake Rattlesnakes steal into dew-logged nests and cradle pre-hatched moons behind their fangs.

Owls belch foghorn hoots like rash and reckless nocturnes 5

into the steaming navy sky to call to lost young.

Rattlesnakes sleeping with owl eggs in their bellies leave spiral dents in wet earth like shadow vines.

Owls spread their wings and leap from soggy splintered rafters to stretch out their tears in grey river beds.

Packing Peanuts I watch the spot on the living room floor where I made cardboard castles and filled the chambers with couch cushions and teddy bears and Nutter Butters.

I’m sure there are still stray packing peanuts static-clinging to the underside of the upholstery.

We just throw our boxes away now, like the one we got our HSN pillows in, don’t even recycle them let alone turn them into spacious playhouses.

I feel so guilty about it all, like I do when someone sneezes and I don’t say “bless you.”

I’m so afraid of being smote with lightening afterward that I whisper it under my breath ten seconds later hoping that makes up for it.

I want to order a dish washer solely to have a box big enough to crawl through, and cut cubbies into, and write “Katie’s Club House” on the side in fat, magic-marker writing.

But that’s a waste of a dish washer.

So I whip linen sheets over chair backs and sit in my tent with a mug of jasmine tea, leaning over to check under the couch for packing peanuts.

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Autobiographia Literaria After lunch, the creases in my fingers ache and redden from keeping my grasp on the chain link fence.

The world is one hot blacktop lot.

The loose asphalt makes drum rolls on the rubber souls of my sneakers and I watch the kickball bounce off the boy’s toes— like a red sun—remembering the thickness of the blood in my throat the day I was kicked in the mouth.

I remember the red salt clinging to the back of my throat.

How I gagged on my words for hours unable to speak.

So I took up the pen and spoke with it and tried to imagine that the blood was ink.

I stand alone on the asphalt, my fingers curled around the knot in the fence.

I clutch the knot until raindrops burn my cheeks and my hair glues itself to my shoulders, and I catch the water in a valley I make in my tongue and feel the drops mist my eyelashes.

And I am so wet that I do not feel my pen leaking ink into my front pocket.

Room in Brooklyn, 1932 from an Edward Hopper painting The young woman leans forward in her rocker to the window, her pleated black mourning dress casting mossy shadows on the carpet that rustle and sway like the fractured boughs of an oak. Her boy-cut hair leaves the nape of her neck breezy and exposed as she cranes over, examining the Brooklyn street beneath her. The rocking chair is tall-backed, chestnut, facing away from the red velvet on a dining table, cloth hanging so loosely it sweeps the emerald floor, collecting little lint moons on its pressed corners.

Pink rosebuds like sun kissed eggs rest in their nest of trimly arranged leaves on a tea table 7

and the white vase gleams as it catches the sun like starlight on the porcelain wing of a sleeping dove.

There are three tall windows, each swathed in sun-faded drapes, positioned like the three crosses at Golgotha, the two outer blinds pulled down further than the other, leaving the center window to glow, to reveal larger expanses of hot, blue sky above the horizon of chimney-topped lofts.

Daughter The only noise I’ve heard you make all week was when you called out, sleeping, “Baby girl.”

I think that’s me, but I can never tell who you would really like to think I am.

One day I am your child, a baby singing, small in your arms, your honor, yanking curls of hair from your proud and trembling chest still painfully unsure of what to do now branded as a father. Next day, grown and leaving you childless. You call me love; your savior, student, daughter, god.

But I am not your Buddha, please don’t rub my full and fleshy belly. I won’t bring you luck. I only bring empty plates. Work.

The days grow shorter, I grow wiser, sprouting new sense, like crabgrass, from my sweaty scalp.

I know by now that you have never been to Greece, Atlantis, Lilliput or France, never swam with mermen in the Rhine, that all the bedtime truths are bedtime fakes, that though you were alright when I was young you now can’t hide the fact that you have lied about yourself as you invented me.

Woman Speaks on Shellshock Collaboration with Rachel Rodgers The gun barrel kisses my forehead—replacing his lips, replacing his warmth. The cat is my new bedmate.

I can’t sleep at night.

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I bet she’s a bombshell.

Bet she makes him happy— changes his pillowcase, serves sushi on Tuesdays, bruises his body with her lips.

These truths, like bullets, shatter my ribcage.

I can’t sleep at night.

Day is no different.

His absence is insomnia— the kind that marches in time, a gun slung over its back.

The ammunition sits cold in my belly.

I can’t sleep at night.

I don’t need guns— I’ve got my legs.

Got stilettos.

Got poise.

Here’s vengeance.

Trust me I’ll sleep at night.

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Hunkamunka: A Memoir (excerpt) Concord Elementary School is the small redbrick school you see when you are driving along the intersection of Brownsville Road and Biscayne Boulevard in Carrick. It is pleasantly tiny with a large stretch of green, grassy yard. There are two gigantic oak trees in front along with a serpentine garden that the kids plant tulip bulbs in every fall. It is seated comfortably between Zion Christian Church and one of the many local beer distributors.

The playground in the back is roughly poured concrete that has the outline of a kickball field and a few hopscotch courts painted in white. In the very center of the playground is a large map of the United States, each of the states painted a different color. The kids hop from state to state trying to name which one they were standing on. Before my fourth grade year, some tagger came along and spray-painted a dot where Allegheny County might be and wrote “We Are Here.”

On my first day of kindergarten, it was early September of 1995. I remember the weather was extremely warm and I was wearing pink and black plaid stretch pants and patent leather penny loafers. “I like your shoes,” said a girl with a round face, freckles and crooked teeth. Her name was Jenelle and we were instantly friends. I made more friends when I got into the kindergarten room. The room itself was mainly round with carpet and bright walls. In the

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middle of the room was a giant, rectangular “magic” carpet bordered with a rainbow alphabet pattern. We would all sit of the carpet for stories. From the beginning of that year, I had developed a crush on a boy with rosy cheeks and freckles named Mark. He always wanted me to sit next to him on the carpet, but whenever I did everyone in the room would start to chant “Mark and Katie, sitting in a tree….” Instead, I would go sit between Jenelle and Rachel, my other best friend.

Rachel was taller than me and had already lost three teeth before I lost my first.

She, Jenelle, Mark and I were an unstoppable foursome. Everywhere we went we went together. All of us but Jenelle sat at the same table during class time: the orange table.

Jenelle sat at the blue table, on the other side of the room, but we developed our own language so that we could communicate even from separate tables. We would always color when we sat at our color tables. I remember we colored a lot of fruits and vegetables, and fruits and vegetables got boring sometimes. Rachel decided to draw a house inside of her eggplant one day, despite my warning that she would get in trouble. I was jealous of her brilliant originality, and even after the Ms. Balk yelled at her, I still wanted to draw that house inside of my own eggplant.

One day in kindergarten, Mark kissed me on the cheek. Together we blushed and smiled at each other and held hands innocently beside the block pile during free time. But Mark moved on to a new girl in first grade, so I moved onto a new boy. My mom always joked that I had gotten over my cootie stage early, if I even ever went through it in the first place. My new guy was a sunny blonde with a rat-tail (they were apparently in style in ’96). His name was Daryl and together we would play coinflipping games under the desk to annoy the teacher and at the end of the year he gave me a gold ring and told me he loved me.

Nevertheless, new “loves” rolled around. The third grade one was named Tyler.

In music class we would hold hands behind the wooden seats and, walking together in the halls, discuss what we were going to name our children. My teacher in third grade was Mr. Dixon. He was my first male teacher and I thought he was the most hilarious person in the world. I looked up to him and the way he would always clear his throat and how he would point up at he number line about the chalkboard with his middle finger.

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One thing about elementary school that I always looked forward to was the Halloween parade. Every Halloween, the kids, kindergarten through fifth grade, would march around in their costumes in the playground and down a few blocks so everybody could see us. My mom made my costume every year, and each year they were intricate and made me feel different (every other kid had one of those cheap Scream costumes from the local CVS). In third grade, I was a potted flower, complete with vines and long white petals. Mr. Dixon was Elvis, complete with tight silk bellbottoms.

It was in fourth grade that I began to devote my recess time to helping with the kindergarteners. Rachel was now my best friend, since Mark and, tragically, Jenelle both moved away in second grade. Rachel’s aunt was the kindergarten teacher and she had asked if we wanted to come down and play with the kindergarteners during recess. I taught them how to jump rope and how to throw the stone onto the hopscotch court without it bouncing out of bounds. I not only taught, but I learned. I learned that innocence was a thing of the past. I learned more from those kindergarteners than I learned from any of my teachers, including that it was naughty to say “pussywillow” and that turtleneck sweaters were for prunes—I later found out they meant “prudes.”

Throughout elementary school, I was known by any name a nine-year-old kid might give to a smart student: “Little miss perfect,” “Goody-Goody-Two-Shoes,” “Teachers Pet.” My mom told me it was because they were jealous, but I told her that no one would be that mean to someone they were jealous of. Luckily, I still had my own group of friends. We had our own recess clubs. There were about 12 of us total, but our group was co-ed, and some of the boys didn’t like it that way. So we split our friendship up into two groups: The Cats and the Dogs, cats being the girls of course. After lunch, on the playground, we would have our own little imaginary animal worlds where the cats and the dogs were enemies and would fight with each other. There were the occasional traders, of course—usually one of the guys that liked one of the “cats”— who would come in and help us during one of our “wars.” It was a game we kept up until the 4th grades when we gave up on it and decided we were too old for makebelieve games.

I always had a tremendous imagination as a child and would often spend my 13

nights before going to bed daydreaming about what I wanted to be when I grow up.

My initial thoughts were extravagant. Veterinarian and astronaut were two of them along with a ballerina. I had wanted a frilly pink tutu and satin ballerina slippers ever since I had seen a ballerina on Sesame Street, but one day my mom brought me home a leotard. She told me to try it on and I remember it feeling tight and itchy and I had to wear thick white stockings with it. I didn’t understand why I had to wear it until I heard her talking to my dad about taking me to a dance class. I was going to become a ballerina just like on Sesame Street!

My first class was in Dance with Laurie at the top of my hill and I had to go into a small room with a wooden floors and mirrors on the walls with other little threeyear-old ballerinas-to-be. I hated it. Within 10 minutes I was running out of the room in hysterics wailing for my mother. Nevertheless, I continued gymnastics, jazz, tap, ballet and baton until I was in 4th grade at Ann Shades Dance Studio across the street from my church. I learned to do backbends by leaning backwards over the arms of one of our instructors and also how to throw my baton up into the air and twirl around before having to reach up and catch it again.

Every year, my dance class had an end of the year recital and we all had ridiculous frilly costumes covered with itchy sequins and annoying satin trims and lace edging. They were always tight and uncomfortable, just like the leotard my mom had brought me home that one day. I still never got to wear a tutu. Our costumes were much more sophisticated. Bright red or purple with feathers and sequins glued all over like some sort of exotic, bejeweled bird. We would then take turns flapping our way across the stage, showing what we had learned that year. During the group performances I was always put in the back because I was the worst in the class. Well, second worst, only to a Down Syndrome girl named Maria that the instructor always put me beside. When I realized my apparent lack of skill equivalent to that of a mentally deficient person was the reason I was never in the front row, I decided that dance was not the art form for me.

Throughout elementary school, Rachel and I were inseparable. Our hobbies as children were more like strange play obsessions. Everyday after school, Rachel would come over and together we would collect rocks. We would host competitions for the 14

stones, naming them and voting on with was the pettiest or smoothest. We would also play imagination games where we would gather strange flowers and leaves and make “salads” and other “foods” that our characters in the game would “eat.” It was almost a hobby of ours to constantly come up with new recipes. Dandelion and mulberry salad was one of our many specialties.

Rachel and I both also took piano lessons up at a local music store: Caruso’s Music. Mrs. Caruso, a short, red-haired woman, sat with me every Wednesday night for a half an hour and played the piano next to me. I took lessons with her for seven years, learning to play everything from “Mary had a Little Lamb” to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5.” Sometimes my music teacher would make me play piano at some of our school recitals and I also had a good voice as a child, so he would try to give me at least one solo as well. This, of course, would only make those kids that called me “Teacher’s Pet” hate me more, but somehow, I didn’t mind, because when I was singing, I was happy.

Music class was one of my favorite classes. I enjoyed learning difficult songs in which the whole class would have to participate in to make the harmony just right.

Voices sounded so pretty together. The music teacher caught interest in my voice and that of two of my friends, Ally and Rachel. At the Christmas concert in 4 th Grade, the teacher, Mr. Biscup, assigned us to sing the third verse of “Ode To Joy” together, apart from the rest of the class. We were excited to have our very own trio, but the night of the Christmas concert, Rachel was sick with a sore throat and Ally was starting to show signs of chickening out. When we stood on the back row, I was between them and I squeezed their sweaty palms when our trio neared. When the time came, however, I was the only one singing. Our trio turned into a solo that led to much cheek-squeezing by old ladies after the show on my part. I was a hit, apparently, so I don’t really care that Rachel was sick and Ally was a wimp.

When I realized I had a knack for being up in front of people, I decided to join a local community theater group. In fourth grade, I signed up and soon I started to get really into it. The director noticed that too and she started giving me larger parts. I came into a new season that year to see that my name was on the front of a folder that was labeled “Charlotte.” I asked some older kid what show we were doing and they looked at me like I was crazy and stated plainly, “Charlotte’s Web, dumbass.” I was 15

Charlotte. I might have been more excited about the costume that I was going to wear, but whatever the reason, I couldn’t have been happier getting any other part.

Another thing I remember about elementary school was that there were a lot of big kids; big eaters. I was one of those big eaters. But I wasn’t really a “big kid.”

Chubby, yes, but no worse than pleasantly plump. Some times at lunch, I would challenge Joey Markowitz to eating contests. Joey was a really big kid. He was one of those eaters that could finish off a whole school pizza in one bite and go back for seconds. And thirds. And a snack. The only eating contest rule was that the winner not only had to eat the fastest, but they had to finish everything on their plate. The funny thing is, a side dish of crushed pineapple always came with our school lunches, and Joey didn’t like pineapple. I liked pineapple. I won every single eating contest.

On one of the last days of every school year, Concord hosted Fun Day, a min-carnival held in our playground. The principal rented carnival games with prizes and even a few “rides” like inflatable slides and moon-jumps. The games were all easy to win, so the prizes ran out soon, but it was always fun to see everyone walking around with stuffed-animals and blow-up hammers to bop your friends on the head with. We would get freeze-pops and candy and by the end of the day we would all have purple mouths and be completely hyped up on fun and sugar. The sad thing is, in fifth grade, it wasn’t until Fun Day that I realized I wasn’t going to be having any more Fun Day’s anymore.

Fun Day didn’t seem as fun that year.

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Until Rogers, where I went with a major in Creative Writing, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. It was there I finally realized my biggest love was art. Prior to attending an art’s middle school, my only exposition to art was through my aunt. My aunt Ruth, the one I always seem to remember dressed in massive white tee shirts, painting tall-backed chairs with olive leaves and golden scarabs, would take me to the art museum and let me look at all of the sculptures and colorful canvases. When we got home, she would ask me to make her art for her museum. By the end of the night, her refrigerator would be covered with stick figures and suns. I grew up familiar to the harsh smell of acrylic and paint thinner in my nostrils. But despite my fascination with the colors of the visual arts, the art form I decided to pursue at Rogers was literary.

At Rogers, I was always surrounded by someone singing or pirouetting down the hallway and the walls were filled with sketches and self-portraits. I was a good student. I got straight A’s on all of my report cards throughout those three years (which was expected considering the only B I had ever gotten on a report card was in third grade because I forgot my tennis shoes). The building was a boring brick building in Garfield with ugly blue trim and straight, grey hallways. Luckily, the drab walls were either covered with student work or colorful murals. It was a small school too, only with two floors and a small basement. I actually loved it. It’s surprising to me, however, that my most vivid memories of middle school were really not of the actual school at all, but rather of the bus rides to and from school.

Most of my closest friends lived in the same general part of the city as I did which meant that we took the same bus. It’s a classic school thing (you can ask any kid) that, on the bus, the cool kids sit in the back, the nerdy ones or the youngest ones sit in the front and then the middle is pretty much up for grabs. I wasn’t cool, but I wasn’t about to sit up next to the bus driver either, so on the first day of school, I grabbed a seat in the middle with my friend Sam. Throughout the year, the middle section grew to also include my good friends Rachel, Alex, Ryan, Ray, Noel and eventually Max. The eight of us originally called this central portion of the yellow school bus “The Middle Section”.

We were the strange ones—the ones that I am sure the bus driver hated beyond

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all else. We would hop from seat to seat being loud and playing Truth-Or-Dare, hand clapping games and other middle-school-esque amusements. We shared a common knack for the card game Bullshit—which, because of our sixth grade consciences, we called Bullcrap—and, somedays, we would play the whole way home, calling ourselves The Bullcrap Bunch" and singing about it to the Brady Bunch melody. One day, we brought in armfuls of Barbie dolls and spent the bus ride cutting their hair and drawing on their faces with Sharpie. The Bus driver confronted the bus after school that day asking which of us had been cutting each other’s hair (she had found some of the doll hair on the ground). Almost every day we brought in food and would occasionally start harmless food fights that would eventually lead to one of us getting sent up the front of the bus. Whenever that would happen, we would turn into ninjas and stealthily slide our way along the sticky floor, under all of the seats, to pop up under the legs of the punished one in the front.

The bus company that transported we Carrick kids in seventh grade was called “Rickets”, so you might assume that the majority of the buses had some major engine problems. And you would assume correctly. We probably broke down at least once a month. One stifling day in May, the bus broke down on the way home and we were stuck in that thing until 7:30 at night with no food or bathroom access. Some of the kids solved the latter problem by simply sneaking up to the front of the bus and opening to door running straight for a patch of bushes near by.

The promotion from 8th grade into high school felt like a high school graduation to me. Our principle ordered us the full cap and gown set all in a rich royal blue and we crossed the stage one by one accepting our certificates from her, shaking the hands of a full row of teachers. Middle School couldn’t have slugged by more slowly, but it hurt to see it end. The Middle Section stood in the hallway after the promotion hugging and knowing that 18

if we had accomplished one thing in middle school, it was creating the unique bond that glued us together as friends. After the tears were wiped and kissed away, I distinctly remember going home and playing a nice round of Bullshit.

When kids aren’t in school, they have a one-track mind for fun. I know that out of the school year, the two things that keep me running are food and holidays (which also include food). Even during the school year, the things I look forward to most are the special days off during the year: Christmas break and Spring Break.

Christmas break was always the same. It would start off with uncontrollable excitement for things I know awaited me. Presents, trees, snow (most years, at least) and holiday nostalgia pouring through the car radio. My dad was a Dean Martin fan so I grew up with the steamy, antique voice of the old crooner singing “Silent Night” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” We would sing them all the way up until December 30. On that night, we would head up to my cousin Raquel’s house (we spend most of our holidays there) and while the adults dip fondue and get drunk, the kids go downstairs and make masks and hats, preparing themselves for midnight. We would all be excited because midnight was past most of our bedtimes, though Raquel would often brag that she could go to sleep whenever she wanted.

A half and hour before the ball would be dropped, the kids would come back upstairs and rush to grab the color silly string they wanted. We would shake them until our wrists were sore, staring at the television screen, listening to Dick Clark.

When it got down to five minutes, my uncle would pour champagne for the adults and sparkling grape juice for the kids and make a toast to the New Year. We would rush back into the living room and count down from one minute together, getting louder at “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…Happy New Year!” We would all drink our bubbly and the run outside screaming and spraying each other in the faces with sticky silly string. One year, I had set my drink down on the counter and when I went back to drink it, it wasn’t until after I had downed the whole glass that I realized it had been swapped with an adult’s champagne. I’m not sure I made it to 1 a.m. that year.

The next big break was the five-day beauty that America calls “Spring Break”.

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Of course, such a break for me didn’t mean partying hard in Tijuana, but rather spending 2 hours every day inside of my church preparing for and following the resurrection of Christ. Even though I am a Christian, a Catholic even, I celebrated Passover Seder with my uncle George. It was a tradition. Every Passover, my uncle (who I still don’t think is actually Jewish) would come over from wherever he was living at the time and my aunt would make roasted lamb. My cousins would come over too, which was always a fun thing because I didn’t get to see them very often. We would say Hebrew prayers over our food and eat the bitter herbs and unrisen bread and—even though it’s not traditional—we would eat our lamb smothered with fresh mint jelly. My uncle would hide matzo somewhere in the room and my cousins and I would scramble to find it. The winner received a whopping five dollars. I don’t think I ever found the matzo.

After Passover, my cousins and uncle would stay over at my aunt’s house for Easter. In the morning, I would wake up and find a trail of jellybeans leading from my bed, down the stairs and to my Easter basket. I would spend the early hours alone with my mom and dad, opening up the little wrapped presents in my basket and searching for the Easter eggs my dad would hide around the house. Every year, the “Easter Bunny” wrote me a letter telling me how many eggs there would be to find that year.

The letters were signed with the Bunny’s paw print (which I sadly discovered later was my cat’s paw dipped in an ink pad). I would then go next door and wake up my cousins and stay with them while they opened their baskets, eating strawberry frosted donuts from the donut place up the street.

The next big break wasn’t really until school was out for summer vacation. But, I had something to look forward to immediately because my birthday is always only a few days after the last day of school: June 19th. Up until the age of 9, my mom made my parties themed. The theme would always be the newest Disney movie to come out. Lion King one year, another year, Pocahontas. My mom would decorate the cakes for me with icing and Disney action figures and I would have friends and family over to do movie-related things. After everyone was gone, my parents and I would lie outside in the grass and watch for lightening bugs. The first ones of the season always visited around my birthday, so I always thought they came for me.

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Fifteen days and a lot of leftover birthday cake later, The Fourth of July would roll around. My family drove over to my Uncle Rick’s cabin where he would greet us with a large wooden crate of hundreds of illegal fireworks and sparklers. Waiting for the sky to darken, my cousin Raquel and I would climb up into the tree house we built and play dolls. Sometimes we would go down to the creek and look under rocks for crawfish. It would mainly be my cousin Zac that did the rock-flipping because Raquel and I were both scared that the crawdads would pinch us with their claws. Sometimes, us daughters and our dads would step up to the BBgun range and shoot at little painted targets. One year, after aiming sharp at the bulls-eye of the farthest target, my arm slipped and the bullet ricocheted off of a different tree and came back and hit me under the eye. I thought I was blinded, but I only had a little welt. It was already gone by dinnertime. Corn-on-the-cob and hamburgers were always on the menu along with hotdogs and baked beans; all classic summer barbeque food. While the charcoaled goodness settled in our stomachs, my uncle would drag out the crate and one by one set off the fireworks and firecrackers. The flashes and booms were settling to my country cousins while I would sit with my ears covered and eyes squinted. I was a little scared ever since the time one came down and caught the picnic blanket I was sitting on aflame.

I spend a lot of time with Raquel and Zac and my Uncle Rick and Aunt Shelly because I spend almost every holiday with them eating good food. Over Thanksgiving weekend, my aunt Shelly has me over and we bake cookies for Christmas. Actually, we bake 500 cookies for Christmas, 500. Lady locks, nut rolls, apricot rolls, peanut butter balls, sugar cookies and chocolate chip. My responsibility is always the lady locks. I roll out the pastry dough and wrap it around a little metal tube and when it is golden brown in the oven, I take it off the metal tube and fill it with butter icing. I usually get a bit sick from eating all of the rejects. When my belly is full with butter and crispy pastries and cookie dough and peanut butter, we pack them in tin foil boxes and store them in the refrigerator for our Christmas Eve party.

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Sharpe Compromises Characters: E (Evangeline Priscilla Sharpe IV): A 16-year-old girl. She should be dressed in a school uniform, if possible, but normal teen clothing—jeans and a tee shirt—should suffice.

MRS. SHARPE: E’s mother: Middle aged. Dressed primly in a knee-length skirt or dress pants and a blouse with her hair pulled back in a tight bun.

23

(Opens to E slouching in a chair in a school office and popping her bubble gum.

MRS. SHARPE is pacing around, looking upset.)

MRS. SHARPE Evangeline, do you have any idea what my reaction was when your principle called and told me what you did?

(E shrugs) I got this phone call in the middle of a very important business meeting, Evangeline, a meeting with a very important client. And I had to just apologize and leave. Do you know what this could’ve meant for the company?

(MRS. SHARPE takes a seat next to E. She sits tall and prim on her chair, her legs crossed.)

E You didn’t have to come.

MRS. SHARPE After finding out what you did? Of course I had to.

E It’s not a big deal.

MRS. SHARPE Walking out of school is a very big deal, Evangeline, what were you thinking?

E I wasn’t. I usually don’t.

MRS. SHARPE The principle just told me there hasn’t been a walkout at Embleton in over a decade.

E I don’t doubt it. I can’t even see any of those stuck-up prudes blowing their noses without permission.

MRS. SHARPE Evangeline Priscilla Sharpe.

Please mom, I’m begging you.

E

MRS. SHARPE I’ve already told you, Evangeline, I’m not calling you E. E 24

It’s what all my friends call me. You’re the only one that calls me by my full name.

MRS. SHARPE I’m not your friend. I’m your mother.

It just sounds so—

E MRS. SHARPE

Elegant and appropriate?

E I was thinking more along the lines of stuffy and “old-ladyish.”

MRS. SHARPE You are Evangeline Priscilla Sharpe IV. You are part of a proud bloodline. Your grandmother and great-grandmother would be disappointed in you. We’ve kept the maiden name Sharpe through all these generations. Evangeline is a very striking and prestigious name, to be sure. Unlike “E,” it is actually a name, not a— E I know, mom. God. We’ve had this conversation about a million times. And that’s why I’ve begged you to just compromise for Ev or something like that. Can you go now? And maybe take me with you?

MRS. SHARPE I didn’t leave work to take you home just so you can sprawl around like a rag and ruin your mind with some brainless television.

E Television, mom? You know I don’t watch television. I want to go home to work on that project I was trying to tell you about. The portrait, remember?

MRS. SHARPE The portrait? No, Evangeline, I don’t remember. And neither of us is leaving. Not yet.

We need to talk.

(Takes a deep breath) Would you like to explain yourself?

E I already told you, it’s not a big deal. I just got bored.

MRS. SHARPE And just walked out?

E 25

I guess so.

MRS. SHARPE Didn’t you realize you’d be caught?

E

Honestly, I didn’t care much.

MRS. SHARPE Walking out of a school with standards as high as Embleton merits expulsion.

Suspension, at least.

E I don’t mind.

MRS. SHARPE You don’t mind being kicked out of a private high school? It is not cheap, Evangeline. I won’t allow it.

E And all three of these years I keep telling you how much I hate this place. All these rich kids. And the art teacher is horrible. Personally, Mrs. Sharpe, I’d rather drop out.

MRS. SHARPE And put that black mark on your records? Oh no. No Sharpe is going to do that.

Harvard would never accept you then.

Can we not talk about college right now?

E

MRS. SHARPE It is exactly what is expected from the women in our family. My mother expected it of me, and her mother expected it of her.

E (Mumbling under her breath) But you both wanted it.

MRS. SHARPE What did you just say?

(E sighs)

E Harvard’s not for me. (Beat) Business isn’t for me. I want to be an artist.

MRS. SHARPE 26

I know. I can’t even walk into your room because your easel blocks the door and the floor is completely littered with sketchpads and old canvases. The whole house smells like grease paint.

E Oil paint. (Beat) I’m going to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

MRS. SHARPE I am not paying for you to go to a school on the other side of the country where you won’t be learning anything you’ll use in the future.

E I am going to use it. I’m going to California and becoming an artist.

MRS. SHARPE You know exactly what you are doing and it doesn’t involve anything pertaining to beaches and oil paints. It’s all in Sharpe Corporation, Evangeline.

E I hate kitchen utensils.

MRS. SHARPE Every woman in the Sharpe family back three generations has been the general manager of Sharpe Corporation. President of the company. Knives and forks are a good business.

E And a good way to die of boredom.

MRS. SHARPE This business is not boring. How dare you even say that about something that is your past and future?

(E sucks her teeth.)

It may be frantic and stressful, but it’s not boring. (Beat) There is no argument involved in the matter. Evangeline, you will not be going into art. Personally, I am concerned for you. You have this golden opportunity spread out in front of you. All you need to do is say the word and a multi-million dollar corporation is yours.

E If you were really concerned for me, you wouldn’t be here because you would know that I am perfectly happy. I mean, I’d be happier if I got out of this marble-floored hellhole and just went to a public school. Cyber if I have to. And, if I could, to the Academy of Art. MRS. SHARPE I already told you that I will never let you do that.

27

E And I already told you that I don’t care what you say. I am going to San Francisco even if I have to pay for it myself. with

(E stands up in frustration and crosses to the other side of the desk and plays a pen that is sitting on it. MRS. SHARPE sighs and puts her head in her hands.)

E I’ll be an unfortunate, artsy outcast. I’ll flunk out, mum.

MRS. SHARPE (Again straightening up.)

No daughter of mine will ever “flunk” anything. Sharpe women are doers and we always succeed.

E Sharpe women. They’re all so perfect. I feel obligated to be perfect. And that’s just one thing I can’t be.

We aren’t all perfect, Evangeline.

MRS. SHARPE

E Then what would you call it? Perfect grades, perfect looks. Every woman in the Sharpe family is a Harvard alumni.

MRS. SHARPE Alumna.

(E rolls her eyes.)

It is preparation for a life of management and precision.

E You’ve had my entire life planned out and written down since before I was conceived.

You didn’t let me join choir in elementary school. You made me take Latin.

It’s important to know.

MRS. SHARPE

E You took me out of swimming lessons in second grade because you decided piano was a more distinguished sport. What a great thing to know. Now if I’m on a sinking ship, I can save us all by playing “Beethoven’s Fifth”.

MRS. SHARPE Evangeline—

28

E You forced me to do girl scouts over space camp and a posture course instead of softball. I really wanted to do softball, mom.

MRS. SHARPE It was the same way for me and I lived through it.

E Well maybe I’m not like you. Maybe I don’t want to be like you.

MRS. SHARPE You’re father would be so disappointed with you.

E Don’t you dare bring dad into all of this.

MRS. SHARPE When he died, I promised him I’d take care of you. Raise you like a Sharpe woman. I am sure this is what he would have wanted for you.

He wanted me to do softball, too.

E

MRS. SHARPE In 1950, my grandfather died leaving Sharpe Corporation to his wife, my grandmother.

When she died, instead of leaving the business to her son, she left it to my mother. And my mother left it to me. It is a tradition for the females to go into business and inherit the corporation.

E I know. I’ve heard that speech a billion times. It’s time for you to hear me out.

(E gets close to her mother and sarcastically articulates every word) I have no interest in the field.

MRS. SHARPE When I retire, the corporation will be expecting another Evangeline Priscilla Sharpe to walk through the doors with a briefcase and a smile.

E A briefcase and a smile. God. I swear everything you say is rehearsed. You’re like a goddamn robot!

(There is a pause and MRS. SHARPE looks at E as if struggling to find a rebuttal.)

Fine. If your not leaving, I’ll just go back to algebra and bang my head off the desk

29

some more.

(She starts to walk out of the room.)

MRS. SHARPE I am not paying for you to go to San Francisco, and that is final.

(E stops as she gets to the door and turns her head toward her mother.)

E If it’ll make you happy, I’ll find a compromise. Do art and minor in business.

MRS. SHARPE

A compromise?

(Exasperated) I am not compromising your future, Evangeline.

E Dad called me Ev.

MRS. SHARPE Your father is dead, Evangeline. Let it go.

E I can’t just let go of my best friend. I wanted to be just like him. I still want to be just like him.

But not like your mother?

MRS. SHARPE

E Everywhere I go it’s “Oh, Evangeline Sharpe? You have some very large shoes to fill.”

I’m living in the shadow of you, mom. You and grandma. You were all successful. You all took the same path. I feel like if I do, I’ll never be in my own spotlight. And I really want that. But then if I don’t do it, everyone will just see me as “that Sharpe girl that didn’t manage Sharpe Corp.”

Do you want to be that?

MRS. SHARPE

E I want to be my own person. I just want to do something that no other girl in the Sharpe family has done.

MRS. SHARPE Be expelled from high school?

30

E If that’s what it takes…yes.

(MRS. SHARPE looks at E, stunned.)

E Mom, I’m not going to be successful at managing a business. I really don’t want to disappoint you. I just want you to be a mom, not a drill sergeant. I need you to be a mom. You’re the only thing I have left.

MRS. SHARPE I am your mom, Evangeline. I know it’s been difficult for you without a father. I know I’m away on business a lot. I’m leaving a lot of responsibility up to you.

E When dad told you to take care of me, he just wanted me to be happy, mom.

(Hesitant) Are you?

MRS. SHARPE

(E shakes her head.)

E I’m not going to be happy if I can’t do what I want. And I want what dad wanted. Why is it so hard for you to see me grow up more like dad than you?

MRS. SHARPE You are a Sharpe woman and Sharpe women— E But I am also my father’s daughter. And I like that. You’ve always said I look more like dad than I do like you. Does it really surprise you all that much that I want to be an artist like dad too?

MRS. SHARPE You used to watch him paint all day. Sometimes he’d let you make a brushstroke on his paintings. I always sort of knew you’d be like him.

E Then why don’t you want me to follow in his footsteps, mom? Are you trying to forget him?

MRS. SHARPE I don’t want to forget, but sometimes it is better if you do. I miss him, and I know you do too.

31

(Pause) Your father could never be disappointed in you. He’d like for you to be an artist. Just like he was.

E That’s why I was painting a portrait of him.

MRS. SHARPE Was that the project you were trying to tell me about?

E I thought it would have made him happy.

It would.

MRS. SHARPE

E Mom, I never would have walked out if you weren’t bothering me with this Harvard crap so much. I guess it just all piled on so heavily I got stressed. I didn’t know what to do. It was the only thing I could think of that would be drastic enough to get your attention.

MRS. SHARPE Ev… It’s true.

E

MRS. SHARPE Ev, Why didn’t we just talk about this before?

E I…was scared. And—did you just call me Ev? (MRS. SHARPE smirks for the first time) MRS. SHARPE I thought maybe we could make a compromise.

(Long pause) You still have two hours of class; do you want me to take you home now?

You’re actually asking me?

(MRS. SHARPE nods) I’d like that a lot.

E

32

MRS. SHARPE All right, but just this once.

I could finish dad’s portrait.

E MRS. SHARPE

(Leading E to the door.)

You’ll have to show me when you’re finished.

E Don’t worry. I will.

33

34

Grey Streak Awaking today with coffee breath and early morning mania, a craving for nostalgia like bitter chocolate, I feel the frenzy get the better of me.

I amble into Anthony’s, of all the pizza joints in Pittsburgh, with its Palmolive musk and sticky linoleum.

Still four minutes ‘til opening time and I’m in the ripped pleather booth, letting the greasy jukebox spin a Bowie album.

Out and about in bare feet and pajama shorts I walk East Carson, pressing sun-burnt nose to bakery windows.

Today my love is a pot of peach oolong.

I order at the Beehive with an extra teacup for Tim, to give him a break from working the register.

He looks like Kurt Cobain with red hair and smells like stale bagels and cigarettes.

My teacup is chipped and it cuts my lip.

Keeping curfew in mind and peach tea in belly, I jump the five-foot drop from the Southside bike path to that hobo camp right on the river, brown water dirtied with empty gin bottles, hypodermic needles, and torn pages from the Bible. Leviticus.

I stir the limp paper through the water with twigs, feeling alone in a content kind of way.

The wind is thin as I navigate the Mexican War Streets, air so cold in my lungs that it chills through me: the same clumsy affection I feel when I wake up on days like this, desiring nothing more than to reunite my bare feet with sidewalks I’ve walked before; feeling a whole-body brain freeze, like sucking a malt through the straw too fast.

Paper I pull the pillow under my head and clasp my fingers underneath.

I am raccoon eyed and messy haired and I want to disappear.

You make me want to disappear.

It’s already 9 and the sky is purple.

You talk to me about paper and I am not sure if I am listening because I am watching your eyes 35

and waiting for a reason.

You’re telling me about paper.

Paper and glue, and how when glued sheets of paper are pulled apart, pieces of them are lost.

For a moment, the world is a sheet of paper.

My tears are paper, and my fingers, a fan of pale paper struggling to hide the brown paper of my eyes.

It’s now an hour past 11 and I don’t bother taking off my mascara because I like the way the black streaks look under my eyes.

I tug the comforter up over my head and fog the sleepy eyes of an old teddy bear with my hesitant breathing.

Pulling the matted plush face toward me, I wipe the salt away with his paw and smell his musty campfire scent that I once tried to cover with my mother’s pepper-corn perfume.

My eyes are shut tight in a forced half-slumber and I listen for your dirty work boots on the steps, knowing it’s not over.

I don’t feel a wave of comfort when you tenderly kiss my forehead where scalp meets sweaty skin and I don’t want to listen to your bedside prayers.

I never liked the way you say “Amen”.

I lighten my breathing and force a snore.

I know this trick has never worked, even when you pretended that it did.

I am a prisoner.

Always under the sharp paper eyes of a man who tries to love me.

I am supposed to be a daughter and daughter’s aren’t supposed to cry.

That’s why I’m hiding, and maybe that’s why you closed the door.

But what you don’t know is when you closed that door, I had already ripped up that piece of paper and grabbed a new, clean sheet.

36

Because I don’t want to tell you that I am my own and that it’s you that makes me cry myself to sleep.

Well Feel your body grow elephant heavy and let yourself sink into the bowels of a soggy patch of earth. Line the walls of your sinkhole with pebbles and doll hands and sandbitten sea glass. Savor the subtle refraction before finding a way out. Juice the onyx pupils of crows or ravens for murky water at the bottom, and with a willow limb, mix in honey and cyanide, all the soft yellows and wine-green hues of stillness. Let it sit there, stew, become stagnant, collecting a skin of chalk-beige moths and pollen for a few months. Then fill in the hole, shovelful after shovelful so that no one drinks of it.

Bellies Up I. Before breakfast I pour a pitcher of creamer into the fish tank to cloud the water; to kill the fish.

When I am asked why, I confess that I could no longer look into the eyes— how they bulge from scaly sockets like pearl earrings pressed into pears.

I needed to see the eyes close, to watch the bloated fish float, bellies up, to the surface of the milky water like hot air balloons in a cloud-clogged sky.

II. I see you standing around like some happenstance comic villain with clumsy black paint smeared around your eyes and try to remember the girl you used to be when you wore mascara and red lipstick. Lobster red.

The type of lobster that’s claws 37

wash up next to the jellyfish flesh and the broken sand dollars whose star shapes glow against the grains of glass and fish bones.

III. You say the fish need fed and open the refrigerator pulling out slimy bacon and a carton of eggs.

The egg melts in your hand.

Pops. An embryonic grenade in the pressure of your palm.

You drop the rest, their shells shattering against linoleum, sticky with yolk and spilled kool-aid.

And even the fish are startled by the sound.

Ghost Races The moon is halved— a segment of syrupy pear— sickly yellow under swarms of night clouds. We huddle together under goose-down bedspreads, your head rests on my shoulder, the unwashed hair tickling the corners of my eyes, and your small, skeletal body rises and falls with each breath.

You asked to sleep in the backyard tonight because the monsters only hid inside, in the moth-eaten sweaters in the corners and beneath the beds and dressers.

So I carried you outside and spread blankets over the grass. I told you stories from when I’d stay at your house for weeks at a time; everyday we’d flip rocks in the creek looking for mudpuppies, the orange-brown ones with tiny black freckles and slimy bellies.

You used to fall asleep watching 38

the moonlight throw itself at the ground and make ghost races through the gardens.

Now we watch the passing headlights wind their way along the backstreets and search for the stars only to find that they too have moved away.

The Song of the Blatherskites Frowzy mist falls on droogish hills, wobblegongs sound, and the boondoggle trills.

Nipperkins screech; The quincunx yowls while clerihews waltz to the jobbernowl’s howls.

The blatherskites limn and bafflegab, and sit sipping smouch from their kismablab.

On their gongoozle kafuffle, The rain lappet-wumps; The fantod lifers, and the oojah kerplunks.

Syzygy stars twinkle prib in the blue, and the blatherskites sing songs monastic and new.

Peeling Back the Petals 1. Stars On late fall nights, my fingers are cold and smell of cloves and the wood of the tree house splinters and digs into my thighs.

I drape my hair over the edge and wink at the oak tree, imagining it spewing acorns that fall 39

like stars over the midnight ground until you can not see the green of the grass anymore.

2. Tropic My father loves palm trees.

He points out the window as we drive to every coconut and almost-ripe banana.

At the sand, the tremendous paws shade my face.

I dig up fallen palm leaves from the dust and remember the Sundays I used to get the blessed palms at church, and how I would crease and contort them into little crosses with the delicate intricacy of origami.

I kept them in my room until they browned and smelled of avocado in the rain.

I stapled them so they wouldn’t unravel because I didn’t make them properly, and are now more metal than memory.

2. Jousting I imagine the tiny lace cactus stretching into a mighty saguaro, its arms poised, its chin raised; an armored knight with its helmet down.

It aims a menacing barb at my pathetic, defenseless body.

It begins to charge.

I fight back by poking ignorantly at the cactus only to find a growing circle of red on my fingertip.

4. Wilting Tiny yawning mouths of violet lounge between the ferns.

They are wet, miserable and bedridden.

Umbrella trees don’t stop the rain.

I stroke them like sleepy eyes and when they are almost asleep, I hum them a lullaby.

Danny 40

after a painting by Emily Wobb Thai jungle spreading fierce and yolk yellow.

Plum trees with arthritic coffee limbs, touching its toes, picking itself.

Motherless son, blue boy with slant blue eyes.

Embodiment of innocence.

Scraping at tangerine dust with pathetic blue boney fingers.

Hungry blueberry bear breathes color onto the barren grass, tongue of chalk dust, sneezing grapefruit into lemon water.

Touching the Sun I want to swallow my insecurities, be swarmed by swallowtails, delicate fluttering tickling my thighs.

I want to dive a cliff but never fall.

I want to sunbathe on an organdy rooftop and blow the puffs off a dandelion.

I want to slither into the pages of a leather-bound book.

I want to stay up all night braiding my hair and calling myself Delilah, open the window and free the clumsy fly.

I want to tickle an octopus and watch his eight tentacles quiver with laughter.

To wrestle a crocodile, his scaly green skin against my own.

To whisper to a moth and have it listen.

I want to wrap myself up in corduroy, velvet, lace, satin, cashmere, whatever.

I want to taste the sugar cookies I left out for Santa the year mom spent Christmas in the hospital.

I want a day where I can sit out in the grass and just breath in the honey sweet scent of fresh air, a daisy and honeysuckle crown arranged on my head like a halo.

I want to touch the sun without getting burnt.

I want to embrace the man in the moon.

Errata Ignore the structure of the syntax.

Read the periods as gong blows, the commas as tinny triangle taps.

Replace all letter Ls with knee joints, bandaged and bound in seaweed capes.

When you see eyes, read pearl earrings pressed into pears.

41

Where you see harpoon, think sewing needle threaded through my pin-cushion tongue.

Think popcorn kernels and hail.

I never even thought to correct the food bowls, fishbowls, foghorns; learn to train your eyes to skip over all words that begin with F. Particularly the four-letter ones.

Alligators stay alligators, however, as do mothers and fathers except when they follow “my”.

Mothers and fathers, when prefaced by “my”, are quilts and waffles and waking up early to find your frog which jumped its tank in the middle of the night.

42

43

Blush

By Katie Bouvy Harley knew if her mom were there, she would be scolding her for leaning on the flimsy chair legs. She would push the chair straight and then run her soft fingers across Harley's forehead. Harley would laugh and twist the feeble plastic legs until they threatened to crack. Her mother would tell her that she was worried she would get hurt, that she would fall on the cement and skin her elbow. But Harley knew just how far to lean to not quite teeter over.

It was one of those foggy mornings when Harley crawled out of her bedroom window and climbed barefoot down the trellis that leaned against the house’s side, threaded with thick dead vines, shriveled remains of Spring’s morning glories dangling limp from broken necks. One of those mornings when she hopped down onto the back deck and let the air condensate on her face.

She rubbed the calloused skin on her heel against the patio concrete, watching the pink dust bunnies on the mimosa trees shiver in the light breeze that stirred the daylight. Her skin on the stone made a gentle scraping sound and she flared her nostrils, breathing in chilled buttermilk air. It was too early for the neighbor kids to screech and howl in the street and too late for there to still be night crickets and cicadas. In fact, it was nearly silent.

Between the strands of her dark hair that blew in front of her eyes, she studied the trees speckling her backyard. She and her sister had tried to build a tree house in the maple on the outskirt of the lawn; Harley had slipped while nailing the second floorboard, tumbling from the bough and slicing her left knee open on the nail her sister was hammering into one of the ladder rungs. She fingered the scar on her leg, looking sadly now, at the tree, warped and sappy boards still poorly hammered randomly around the trunk. They had never finished the tree house.

Now, Harley knew, they would never be able to finish anything else, either. It's hard to initiate teamwork when your only team member is three states away, probably, at the moment, unpacking her two sad suitcases into cold dressers, too scared to cry but too alone not to.

Harley's dad had offered to help her and her sister finish their endeavor after 44

Harley's emergency room visit. He even drew up plans for the ultimate tree house on graph paper, applying the college degree in architecture he earned but never took advantage of. He was a smart man; Harley always knew he was. That's why she couldn't fathom the jail sentence he was living out for insurance fraud.

Continuing to grind her heel against the pavement, she felt her cheeks grow warm, the way they feel when she's angry or blushing or ready to cry. The light wind dried out her eyes. She wiped the sweat from her palms onto her bare thighs. They were warm from the friction, so she hugged her knees close to her chest, feeling the black prickles risen on her shin, and the softer hairs on her thigh that she rubbed against her cheek.

The woman next door was out in the raspberry patch that grew in thorny bushes along the siding of her house, probing the freshly turned mulch with a spade.

Harley heard the sound of a door opening and closing and saw the woman's little daughter burst from the back porch to her mother's side. Her hair bounced and shone as white-blond as the strings of ears of corn, the apples of her little cheeks flushed hot pink. Her mother put down the spade to pull her close and give her an Eskimo kiss. The girl giggled and plucked a raspberry from the plant, squeezing it into her mouth with chubby fingers, red juice bursting all over her lips.

Harley never had a raspberry bush, and even if she did, it would be overgrown.

Harley was too spiteful to care for anything on Helen's property, and Helen was just too lazy. Harley always had to go outside to think just so she could get away from her stepmother. The woman never removed herself from behind a magazine or in front of the television or computer, eyes glued to a seemingly never-ending round of Internet solitaire. It was a whirlwind of cold glares and dirty bathrooms and stacks of dishes as soon as she stepped a foot past the sliding glass door. Since Helen was obviously far too ‘busy’ with her own matters, she assumed Harley would do the housework. Even a toe through the threshold was a step into a war zone; an immediate bombardment of shouts and demands.

"Harley!" Helen shrieked from the living room. A raspy smoker's cough followed the beckon. Harley could hear the ashtray clatter on the glass-top coffee table, signaling that another cigarette was being put out.

45

"Jesus Christ." Harley rolled her eyes and shouted. "What?"

Helen appeared behind the sliding glass door, still in her pink bathrobe, a fresh, unlit cigarette dangling from her Chapstick-moistened lips and a shredded envelope clutched in her hand.

"Got a letter in the mail," she said as she lid open the door and waved the envelope in Harley's face.

"Yah, I see that."

"You know what the letter says?"

Harley shrugged "Should I?" "It's a shutoff warning. You didn’t mail the phone bill last week, did you?"

"Is that a question or an accusation?" Helen's face tightened and reddened as Harley rose from the chair and began to walk into the house. “No, I didn’t. I was preoccupied.”

"With what?" Helen said. "Hey. Don't you walk away from me. I'm not done.

You're about one step away from being out of here, too." Harley knew the threat meant she'd be sent off to boarding school like her sister, but she couldn’t help but imagine that Helen meant off to her dad or off to her cousins’ in the Bermudas or to her own apartment where she could paint the living room green and buy a Beagle and not have to die of second-hand smoke. Catching herself before saying something too smart, she simply stated that Helen wouldn’t dare send her away.

"You’re only keeping me around here so I can do all the work that you're too lazy to do as it is. And as soon as dad gets out I'm telling him about everything you try to pull."

"Oh? And what is it you think he's going to do about it?" Helen said.

"I just hope to God he's got enough sense to end things with you." She turned on her heel and ran inside.

She needed to get away. Helen would have it in for her by the time she got upstairs. Whether this meant a riding crop and paddle or a train ticket to a pretentious New Hampshire boarding school where the teachers are nuns with long chins, skinny lips and metal-trimmed rulers, Harley was not going to be around to face the consequence this time. If there was even the slightest chance Helen would have the 46

heart to send her to the same school she sent Harley’s sister, maybe she would have stuck it out for the punishment. But Helen would not have the heart. She never had the heart. So, instead, Harley ran upstairs and into her room, immediately bursting into her closet to gather as many necessities as she could in the limited time she was allotted. *

*

*

Another great thud rattled the framework of the house as Harley tore out the second drawer of her dresser, sending shirts flying across her room and the drawer crashing to the floor. Ripping up clothes from the rug and bed, she shoved fistfuls of them into a grey duffle bag on top of black lace demi-bras, Converses, and three pairs of ripped jeans. Hot tears were burning under her eyelids. Sweat-damp strands of hair kept falling out of her ponytail into her eyes. Cursing and raging, she tugged furiously at the stuck zipper. It broke in the struggle and she grabbed one of her cheap vinyl belts and lassoed the duffle with it, tightening it to the first notch.

Slippered footsteps stormed up the stairs and Harley could hear Helen yelling incoherently. Or maybe the incoherency was just Harley's selective hearing switching on. It was as if a heavy drabble of slurred consonant sounds were raining down on Harley's head, but words never fully making their way into her ears. Helen pushed open the door to Harley's room and stood for a moment. "What in the name of—" Harley cut her off by hurling a pillow from her bed at Helen's head. The projectile hit the lipstick-stained mug of coffee from her hand and onto the berber carpeting, leaving a brown soggy puddle to spread around Helen's feet. Helen swore as she bent over to pick up the mug and looked at Harley, a sentiment beyond hatred stretched across her red lips. Her eyes moved from Harley to her duffle. "What the hell is this?"

Harley glanced back at her bag as well, observing the overflow of clothes. "I'm cleaning." Helen grabbed a towel from the cupboard and threw it onto the spilt coffee, stepping on it with her fuzzy slippers.

"Running away to your sister? To your dad?”

47

“I’m not running away from anything," Harley snapped. Helen drummed her fingernails on the ceramic handle of the mug.

"Of course you are." Harley looked up at Helen.

"What do you mean by that?"

Helen shook her head and turned away, pretending to avoid conversation by looking at her fingernails. Harley knew she was waiting for her to give her a reason to punish her, so she spitefully remained silent as she closed her drawers and turned out her light. The last things she grabbed before stomping down the stairs were a couple of bills from the smashed remains of a porcelain bank. She thrust the cash down the front of her shirt, despite the pockets in her pants, and stormed downstairs, across the living room, to the front door. Helen’s pile of Ladies’ Home Journal magazines sat at the edge of the coffee table and, in passing, Harley knocked the lot of them to the floor in one swoop of the arm.

She heard Helen stumbling down the stairs behind her.

Harley whipped the duffle bag over her shoulder and kicked open the door. "So just where exactly do you plan on going?" Helen stood at the bottom of the stairs with her arms crossed, mug dangling from its handle on one outstretched pointer finger.

The hinge of the screen door popped as Harley forced the rest of the way through the narrow frame with her bag. When she was out, the door swinging like a loose tooth from the wall, she twisted to face Helen, spitting the hair out of her face.

"Don't know, don't really fucking care."

After Harley was out and on the sidewalk, Helen walked to the door, lifting the screen back onto its hinges and carefully shutting it. She walked away and fell backwards onto the faux-suede couch. “You’ll be back." Surprisingly calm at finding the mess, she took a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal up from the floor and opened it to a dog-eared page somewhere in the middle. Harley watched her pretend to read from the magazine, eyes, squinted with anger and middle age vision impairment, racing across the page.

Harley spun on her heels and marched away. She could almost sense the stares of the people in their SUVs and new “environment-friendly” mid-sizes as she walked up the hill, still not letting the tears out, mumbling under her breath. Helen wouldn’t be 48

seeing her back for quite a while. She continued to walk and push the flyaways from her face until she got to the end of the street.

Right was Canton. Left was Toledo. She had nothing in Canton. Turn left.

Ironically, Harley felt her stride weaken the further she got from the house; she had expected a sense of accomplishment, of necessarily rebellion, of success. Instead, the defiance left her feet and her arches ached. She slumped forward under the weight of her bag. The strap was digging into her shoulder with such force that her entire arm shook. She was alone. She was unbelievably pissed off. She had nowhere to go. And she just remembered that she had forgotten to pack extra underwear. *

*

*

With home, Helen, and suburbia, with all its hellish perfection, behind her, Harley blinked up at the red morning sky and breathed deeper than she’d breathed all week. Somehow her feet had held up through the night and she made her way beyond the shadow of the city’s first tall buildings. She knew that red in the morning meant a sailor’s warning. She needed to find a destination before it started to rain.

The cement smelled warmly pre-storm and everything was too silent to be a big city. Automobiles swam the asphalt canals between the sidewalks and Harley made a game of judging the people inside based on the exterior of their vehicle.

Man in dirty pick-up truck with school of Jesus fish pasted to the bumper: conservative hick. The type of guy who sits with his feet on the dashboard, radio turned to a broadcast preacher while playing a Brad Paisley cassette on his Walkman.

Dyke in brown jeep with a special edition "Save the Animals" license plate: treehugging activist chick.

Short-haired, older, kind of androgynous person in pink Cadillac: either a Mary Kay consultant lady without her makeup on, or—this was a tough one—a very flaming man who wished he could be a Mary Kay consultant lady. The answer for that one became clear when the traffic light changed to green and the car sped away, revealing the cosmetic company's logo decaled onto the back window. Harley hated decals. She thought they were tacky.

49

When it finally did start to drizzle, Harley took it upon herself to stop in a little café with a yellow awning. She chose the yellow one over the others because yellow was her favorite color. She liked it because, like the energy of a bright sunny day, yellow brings clarity and awareness. It’s supposed to bring relief from 'burnout’. Also, it’s said to protect you from lethargy and depression during dull weather. And city rain is duller than the dullest dull. Not to mention the rainbow would look completely hideous without yellow.

The bills were warm from chest heat and damp with sweat and rain when she paid for the skim milk and cinnamon bun at the café register. The flavors churned and squashed in her mouth, under her tongue, in the crevices of her molars. Her mom used to make homemade cinnamon buns on Sunday mornings and she’d serve them with warm milk. Harley always used to ask why she served it warm first thing in the morning, told her she’d heard that was supposed to make you sleepy. Expecting a strict and motherly response like how the warmness combats the sugar rush she’d get from the sweets, Harley was always pleased to see her mom just shake her head and say, “It just tastes better that way.” Harley drank her milk warm until her mom died of heart failure when she was twelve. Helen served milk iced.

She left her table dirty with used napkins and bun crumbs and got up to use the pay phone in the back of the little café. There was a phone book under the booth and she lugged it out and flopped it onto the floor. Squatting, she scanned the white pages.

Although she had no set place to bunk, she knew that she had a relative somewhere in Toledo. A great-aunt Lola. Not great-aunt as in one of Helen’s family members. Her real mom’s aunt—she’d only met her once when she was maybe five or six, and it was Christmas Eve. She had apparently forgotten that her niece had a daughter at all and had given Harley a ten-dollar bill from her pocket that she folded into an origami balloon of sorts. It was one of Harley’s favorite presents she had ever gotten.

Spontaneity always thrilled her.

So, it was time for Harley to give spontaneity a try. There weren’t any Lola Harpers, but she found the address of a Ms. Lillian Harper and, assuming this must be her great-aunt Lola, tore the page from the book. She folded the page and put it into her bra with her money.

50

*

*

*

The sidewalks were still moist with summer rainwater and they gleamed as Harley walked. The windows of the tall office buildings caught the light in a hostile way, reflecting in sharp, rectangular patches on the asphalt. The car grills flashed like strobe lights, sending the whole city into a sort of pseudo-grunge rave. With all of the slamming doors, bus breaks, car horns, slap of shoes on cement, and bikers revving the fierce engines of their stenciled Yamahas, Harley’s head began to pound and she sat down at a bus stop bench to catch her breath.

She reached into her shirt to pull out the page she hard torn from the phone book and studied the address. She looked around to see if she could see Tenth St. from where she sat by Fifth Third Field. She asked an Asian man that walked past her if he could point her in the right direction, but he just smiled to expose elfish teeth, waving his hands and mumbling in Chinese before walking off. Apparently he didn’t speak English and had no inkling of what she had asked him. Finally, Harley got a guy with an afro and leather jacket to gesture the way she needed to walk to get to Tenth.

She followed the street in the direction the man pointed as if his finger were a compass needle, stumbling over curbs, nearly getting hit by minivans at every intersection. Harley was never any good at crossing streets. She knew she had to look incredibly stupid, wide eyed and wandering, hair sticky with warm rain and sweat, a huge grey duffle dragging along on the concrete behind her.

Relief clutched her paper-stuffed chest when she saw a bent street sign marked Tenth just a block away. But, when she got to the address on the phonebook page, she saw that she was stopped in front of a bar called Blush, with painted brick façade and a purple neon sign. Harley could see that the lights were on, though dimmed, inside, and she could hear 107.3 "The Juice” playing from a radio above the door. She pushed at the door to see if it would open, and it swung ajar, revealing an empty bar. No bartenders, no customers, no sweating glasses sitting out and leaving puddles on the counter. Then again, it was only eleven in the morning. Harley let herself in.

Once the door shut behind her, she could smell a musky mix of gin, Palmolive, 51

and last night’s cigarettes. The sun shone through the neo-noir venetian blinds in white shafts that striped the hard wood floor. It was a sort of class-meets-trash joint, with elegant ceiling lights and aluminum-trimmed bar stools and kitschy vintage Playboy posters and bras strung from planter hangers around the perimeter of the establishment.

There was no way this could possibly be right. She rechecked the address on the phonebook paper, walking in and out of the bar to reread the silver-plated street numbers nailed into the doorframe outside. This was the address. There might be apartments upstairs. Maybe Lola lived above Blush. Harley walked to the other end of the bar, checking the corners for shadow-hidden staircases. In the far left end of the room, there was a door that blended into the wallpaper, only distinguishable from the rest of the wall by a thin crack where door and wall met and a whole where a doorknob would usually be in a door. Harley nudged the door with her pointer finger, horrified to find that it creaked open with an unbearably loud groan "Hello?" A panicked, raspy voice rang from either above or below Harley, she couldn't tell which. Harley ran back to the entrance, the voice’s padded footsteps slowly thudding their way to the bar floor. Stairs creaked and Harley heard a woman clearing her throat. The wall-door opened and a skinny, ally cat of a woman peeped her head out. She stood there, raising an eyebrow at Harley. "It's a little early for the fake-IDers. You realize it’s eleven, right?" The woman's voice was so gruff that she hissed. A voice like that indicates at least a pack or two a day since the good old smoking-in-the-high-school-bathroom days.

"I didn't come for a drink." Harley picked her duffle bag up form the ground because the woman was looking at it with such a face on you might have thought she was looking at a dead armadillo on the road.

"Look, I don't have any more jobs to give out right now, if that's what you came for."

"I don't really need work, either."

"Well, what for then? I'm not feeling quite up for a sleepover tonight, doll."

The woman shuffled her way behind the bar and pretended to be a good barkeeper, shuffling glasses around out of Harley's frame of sight, running dry rags 52

across the counters as if they had beer spilt across them. Her hair hung down as she worked, frizzy waves streaked every shade of blonde. An aging hipster, type B. Not the type that ended up as angsty yuppies with four Abercrombie & Fitch-shopping children and a suburban lot, but the rock and roll kind. The kind that thought they were still back in the seventies, hugging tight to the fit abdomen of they’re biker boyfriends as they wheelied their way down Route 66. The woman's eyeliner drooped below her bottom lashes, giving the impression of extreme bags, and her lipstick was purple-red, like cheap wine. She wore a light bohemian-style frock, cream cotton with maroon embroidery around the square neckline. Especially when she was bending over to wipe the counters, Harley noticed some definite sag. It should be a law for any woman over the age of 45 to wear a good, supportive bra.

Harley took a step forward. "Are you Lola?" The woman lifted her head, then stood, resting her clenched fists on the bones that jutted from her hips. She moved out from behind the bar and Harley noticed the seam of her tight leather pants pulling at the crotch area. She imagined this woman peeling the pants off of her cellulite thighs at the end of the workday like an extra layer of sun-damaged skin. What an ordeal that must be.

“Yes, I am. Who’s asking?” She jutted her chin out at Harley, throwing the tough chick card.

“Well,” Harley started, adjusting the way her duffle sat on her arm, “I’m pretty sure you’re my great-aunt.” The woman raised an eyebrow. Something softened in her cheekbones.

“One of Marissa’s girls?”

It struck Harley to hear Lola use her mother’s name. She hadn’t heard the name Marissa used in years. Usually it was just ‘mom’ when she and her younger sister, Monica, were reminiscing, or discussing their dreams of her on Saturday mornings.

“Harley. Yah.” “Which one are you? The older one of the younger one?”

“Older.” Lola seemed to be computing something on her fingers. Her brow was creased and she fluttered her eyelids.

“So that makes you about…fifteen?”

53

“Seventeen, actually,” Harley nodded, watching Lola pretend to recalculate the age with her hands. She eventually looked back up, shaking her head, muttering “Right, right.”

Lola reached behind the bar, grabbing a bottle of bourbon and unscrewing the cap. She poured a few shots into a tumbler and downed the lot of it in a gulp. She didn’t even flinch or close her eyes or purse her lips like Helen did when she drank. Obviously Lola had the tolerance of a bartender as much as she had the attitude of one. As she poured more into the glass, it almost seemed as if she were about to offer some to Harley, before obviously realizing that she was seventeen and turning away from her to pour the rest. After putting the bottle back on its shelf, she turned back to Harley, the glass in her dry hands. She tapped at the glass with black-painted fingernails that were chewed down to the quick.

“It’s been almost five years already, hasn’t it?” Lola again surprised her by mentioning her mother. Yes, it would be five years in June. She came over and took the duffle bag from Harley’s hands. She swung it on top of the bar counter, making a heaving noise as she did it. It really wasn’t all that heavy. “So, I can see by the way you pack that you’re planning on staying here for a while?”

“Only if you would have me.” Harley bit her bottom lip. Until now, the thought hadn’t even occurred to her that Lola might not allow her to stay with her. She would have nowhere to go then. She’d be wandering the streets of Toledo for the rest of her life. She’d be begging for change on the street corners, her jeans in tatters, the duffle bag still dragging behind her until her dirty, hobo demise.

“Seems to me it’d be awful rude if I didn’t. But, if you don’t mind me asking you, how and why exactly did you find yourself in downtown Toledo? Honestly, of all places.” Lola smiled for the first time since Harley had first seen her. Her teeth were yellowed but fantastically straight. The crows’ feet around her dark eyes deepened, her eyelashes nearly getting lost in the wrinkles.

“I didn’t really have any other option.”

“You just needed to get away from her?”

“Uh, who?”

“Helen. That is who you’re talking about isn’t it?” Harley nodded confusedly at 54

Lola. “Of course I know the little bitch. Your dad and I were pretty close while he was married to your mom. You didn’t think I’d know about the woman he remarried?”

Harley smiled when Lola had called Helen a bitch. She couldn’t say that she expected Lola to know Helen, but she was sure as hell glad they saw eye to eye on the matter. Lola tilted the glass to her lips and sipped the bourbon. Harley had never really drunk much before, but she knew liquor well enough to know that sipping it burns the lips. Lola licked the alcohol from her chops and sat on a bar stool, crossing her leather legs.

“I just needed some space. You’re the only relative not living in Oregon or Arizona or some other crazy place.”

“Well,” Lola sighed, “can’t say this is a five star hotel, by any means, but I’ve got no problem with you bunking here for a while.” She gestured around the room when she said ‘here’ as if by ‘here’, she meant Harley would be sleeping right there on the counter. Harley pictured this, the inebriated patrons slamming their mugs of beer and shot glasses on the bar all around her, her, sleeping through their drunken shouts and brawls. “Where’s the younger one? What’s her name again? Monica?”

“She’s at some summer boarding school. Not by choice.”

“Did the bitch send her away?”

“To Maryland.” If Harley were a camel, in the metaphorical sense, Helen sending her little sister three states away had been the straw that broke her back. She remembered the fight she had with Helen after she told her. Monica had long since ran off to cry into her pillow, but Harley, fighter that she was, stayed and battled Helen to the end. She swore and hit, threw couch cushions across the room, broke a lamp; of course, Helen already had all of the papers signed and ready. There was no going back.

Monica was going to boarding school regardless of how many lamps Harley broke.

That had been nearly two weeks ago. Harley knew the only reason Helen had kept her around is so that she could do all of the dirty hours work that Helen would be afraid would chip her fake manicure. This morning had just been another of their fights. It was, in a manner of speaking, the final blow to the already broken Harley camel.

55

*

*

*

Over the next few days, Harley acquainted herself to bar life.

She slept on the floor of Lola’s apartment, which was the level above Blush. She discovered that you get upstairs by going through the barely distinguishable walldoor. There were stairs leading both up and down, but Lola told Harley to not ever go down.

The apartment was a tiny 1-bed 1-bath, plus kitchenette, a double bed and loveseat crammed cozily into one space, a small, dirty kitchen complete with mustardyellow mini-fridge and pale green countertops. An Ohio apartment kitchen straight out of the 70s. Harley had to sleep on the floor because Lola’s implausibly obese cat, Booger, practically took up the entire loveseat, and Lola insisted he couldn’t sleep anywhere else.

It was an odd way of living. Usually Harley would go upstairs before midnight, entertaining herself by teasing Booger with bits of string until she got so exhausted that she would pass out on Lola's bed. She'd hear Lola come up after closing time and use the bathroom for an hour, applying her homemade pore treatment carefully to every inch of her face. She’d move Harley to the floor and fall into her creaky bed smelling of nutmeg and mint and crushed basil leaves, cucumber slices pressed lightly over each closed eyelid. Lola always woke up with odd greenish crust flaking off of her face, and Harley always woke up feeling hungry.

Lying with blankets on cold linoleum between Lola’s bed and Booger’s loveseat, Harley would listen to the sound of snores, not sure whether they were coming from the woman or her cat. She would think about Helen and her father, and she thought about Monica. Mostly she thought about her mother. Perhaps staying with Lola, a direct blood relation of Marissa, provoked more daydreams, for there was barely a waking moment that Harley did not see her mother’s face or hear her mother’s voice.

The morning were loneliest, but also Harley's favorite time. She'd make herself a mug of tea and sit at the kitchenette, stirring Lola's cigarettes through the ashes in the ashtray. Although the smell reminded her of Helen, Harley couldn't deny that she loved the way cigarettes felt pinched between her fingers. Sometimes, when she'd have to clean the ashtrays as a chore, after her father first married Helen, she'd pick up one 56

of the cold cigarette stubs and hold it up to her lips so that the filter grazed her mouth.

Usually, Harley was up before nine and would take walks down the streets of downtown Toledo for an hour of so. It was the most pleasant time to be outside because no one was on the streets at seven thirty in the morning. Too late for the business crowds, too early for anyone with half a brain. And it wasn’t hot yet. Summer heat irritated Harley. She didn’t like to sweat. And Harley knew it was safe to go out in the morning because Lola never woke up until ten, at which point she would shower and dress and go down to set up the bar for 10:30 opening. Not that Lola would care that Harley was out and about anyway. She didn't really take much notice of her.

On top of this, Harley had anticipated having numerous amounts of tearful conversations surrounding her mom and Helen and how miserable life has been since her father left. But, their conflicting bedtimes mixed with the bar bedlam proved not to be a very conducive environment for family time.

So, Harley was usually alone.

When she wasn’t up in the apartment—watching television on a small black and white portable, playing with Booger, snooping through Lola’s drawers and medicine cabinet, or plucking strings on Lola’s very out of tune acoustic guitar—she was down in the bar, people watching. To avoid being hit on by drunken slobs, being pointed out as under-age, or having beer spilled all over her, Harley mostly stayed in the far corner on a stool, where she watched people or doodled on napkins.

She especially liked it when Lola had to use force and kick an excessively intoxicated man or woman from the bar. She would always make a big scene, coming out from behind the bar and throwing her rag onto the floor, pointing at the exit. She would shout at them, telling them to go home, sober up. Sometimes, on slower nights when she had more patience, she would coax them from their stools like children, convincing them it was closing time, almost seeming to whisper sweet nothings into their ear as she walked them to the door. Sometimes this was Harley's job. She enjoyed hauling the extremely smashed patrons to the front of the bar, watching them stumble onto the sidewalk, making sure they don't fall into the street.

Sometimes it was pretty heartbreaking. One woman came into the bar every single weekday at 2:00 PM on the nose and stay there, throwing bills from her breast 57

pocket onto the counter until closing time. Harley saw her so often that she eventually asked her name. She called herself Honey, and she would sometimes pause from her binge to make small talk with Harley, discussing the weather or sports scores or some other petty bits of information that Harley didn't follow. Harley would watch her swallowing vodka after vodka and thought of relatives and friends who were alcoholics. She had a friend once who had to go into treatment in the 7 th grade. Last she had heard of her, she was a sophomore dropout, pregnant, and stocking drug store shelves to earn enough for daily gin shots. Harley hated to generalize, but she couldn't help but imagine up depressing childhood stories like this for people like Honey. She wondered if she was a dropout, if she earned the few dollars she threw away on liquor by shelving deodorant and tampons, but she never got up the courage to ask about it.

There weren't too many fights. Cop shows and westerns played up the whole image of saloon scuffles way too much. Even when Harley did witness her first bar brawl, she was surprised as its mildness. She had expected it's severity to encompass crashing head over heels over the bar, knocking bottles of alcohol from the shelf, screams and shouts, blood splattering the hard-wood floor. It was nothing like that at all. Some guy accidentally took a sip from some other guy's beer while he was looking the other way and the one who had his beer stolen threw a punch and made a little trickle of blood drip from the man's nose. The bleeding guy immediately left, cursing the son of a bitch that hit him, and the one who punched him just went right on back to his drinking and drunken flirting.

The thing that bothered Harley most about the whole thing wasn't the fights or the hopelessly depressing alcoholics. It wasn't even the lonely life she was living up in the apartment. It was that at least seven or eight times every night, a man would come into the bar looking real shifty with their hands in their pockets and walk right up to Lola. She'd watch them whispering and then Lola would gesture toward the wall-door and the man would go to it, push it open, and never come back through it. Harley would watch the door all night, but not a single man who went through the door ever came back.

Of course, Harley's bored brain thought up all sorts of absurd explanations.

Perhaps Lola lured young, vulnerable men into the lairs of some sort of underground 58

dungeon where, late at night, she crept down and took advantage of them before letting them run away the next afternoon. Lola did seem the type to keep rooms of male concubines for herself. She was a loose cannon. But this explanation seemed a bit kinky, too kinky for a humble little barmaid to think up. Maybe there was another floor to the bar, one that served aged wine and caviar instead of beer and oyster crackers; the kind of joint that makes those million dollar, gold-leafed ice cream sundaes. A less extreme option was that there was a bathroom down there and whenever the men had finished their business, they simply used some back exit.

However, because she had the time on her hands, she investigated her suspicions. She stayed awake all night to see if Lola got out of bed to go romp with her man slaves, but she slept like a log, snoring like a lumberjack,. She checked over the bar bills to see if any extraordinary amounts of money had been going into a secret "golden sundae" fund, but Lola's spending showed no irregularities. She walked around the building in circles, and only found one back door. However it didn't open and she shrugged it off, assuming that it simply led to a janitorial or boiler room.

One night as she listened to Lola running water in the bathroom, Booger tackling her feet with his crushing body and swatting at her toes that stuck out from under the quilt, she decided she was fed up with all the guessing. "Lola, I've been wondering, what are all the people who go downstairs doing when you send them down there? I mean, I thought maybe there was just another bathroom down there, but none of them ever—" "Hmm?" A mint-muffled noise came from the bathroom. Harley heard Lola gargle and spit into the sink. "Sorry, doll. Where you talking to me?" She walked into the room a few seconds later, towel wrapped around her head like a turban, wiping toothpaste spittle from around her mouth.

"I'm just curious about what's downstairs."

Lola bent over and began to unwrap her turban, rubbing at her damp scalp as she removed the towel. She flung her head back up, water from her long hair splashing across the room. Booger hissed and yowled and ran out of the room to lick the droplets of shower water from his fat paws. "You mean the bar, sugar?"

Harley laughed. "No, I know what that is. I mean, in the basement."

59

Lola threw the towel into the other room, not even watching to see if it landed on the floor on the table or on the stovetop. "Oh, that." She smiled and fell back onto the bed. “You know, I've been wondering when you'd ask. What the hell kind of teenager actually listens when they're told not to go somewhere?" Harley shrugged, looking sheepishly at the wall. She was right. “That’s a bit of a secret.”

“Lola, you’re not getting rid of me for a while. Can’t I know what’s in my basement?” Lola yawned and threw her arms behind her head. Harley came up on the bed and sat beside her.

“Guess you’d find out anyway,” Lola sighed. “Do you know what a bordello is?”

Harley creased her brow. “I know the band Gogol Bordello. Crazy European guys. That’s…about it, though.” Lola smiled as her head bobbed up and down.

“It’s a cat house. Whorehouse, knocking shop, brothel? Hopefully those ones ring some sort of bell up there.” Harley’s neck snapped forward.

“No. Lola, you don’t.”

“Oh, I do. And I’ve had it for the past ten years.”

Harley didn’t even realize how far her jaw had fallen until she felt a puddle of drool collecting under her tongue. “Is this even a red-light district?” Lola gave an odd sort of shrug-nod. “You mean I’ve been taking my morning walks through hooker infested streets? Some fucking pervert could’ve mistaken me for a curb-crawling harlot. You can get in ridiculous amounts of trouble for having that downstairs, Lola.”

“Don’t talk to me like I don’t know that,” Lola looked angry for the first time since Harley had arrived. The darkened crow’s feel on either eye crinkled. “You insult my business, you insult my girls, you insult me. It’s good money. And we take all precautions necessary. And we’re clean. You know, I mean we test the girls for STDs and stuff regularly. It’s a valid business, Harley.”

“It’s a sick business.”

"Don't call my livelihood sick."

"You're livelihood? Then what's the bar supposed to be?"

Lola sat up, giving a fierce glare. "I did a pimp friend of mine a favor back in the nineties where I let him rent out my basement for a while. Just a place to keep his whores, you know? That’s all I thought of them as back then. Dirty whores who were 60

too dumb to go get a real job. I was only doing it cause he was giving me half the cash he got from them every night as his rent. I saw how much fucking money was in the business and then, when he ran off one night and never came back, I just kept the thing running. Now they're like my daughters. And I get a new girl coming in here asking to work for me at least once a week."

Harley's throat went dry. She was almost afraid to say anything else. She's been living two floors above a working, breathing brothel for four days. Lola shook her head and lay back onto the pillow. She flipped onto her side away from Harley the way a child does. Harley sighed and turned off the lights before sliding onto the floor. *

*

*

In the morning, Lola was already awake when Harley got up for her walk. She was sitting at the kitchenette with a mug of tea squeezed between her palms. Harley began to walk past her to the stairs when she mumbled over her steaming mug, "Want some? It's peach oolong."

Harley stopped and looked down at the cracked linoleum tiles. She pivoted her heels so that she was directed at Lola, but not looking at her. "You aren't mad at me?"

"All I said was if you wanted tea." Lola turned to Harley. She couldn't tell if she was smiling or frowning by the way the sun was shining in patches through the window. Harley walked closer and put one hand on the counter. She stirred the plastic spoon in Lola's tea, watching the teabag string wrap around the handle and the liquid create a tiny whirlpool.

"I'm really sorry. I just had no idea—" "You know its better to just leave an apology at 'I'm sorry'. No attachments necessary." Lola looked up at her. Her eyes were grey. Just like her mother's. Harley hadn't noticed that before and it caught her off guard. "I know it sounds completely insane, but its there. You're living above it. We're safe. I promise."

"I'm not afraid. I just wasn't expecting a brothel to be in the basement.

Anything else, a dungeon, a hookah bar, a petting zoo for God sake, any of those I would've reacted totally normal."

"Well its not that strange. Plenty of bars have strip clubs or brothels beneath 61

them. They tend to go hand in hand in big cities." Lola took the spoon from Harley and stood. "I'll get you some tea."

As Lola rummaged around through the cabinets to get a mug and a teabag, Harley made her mind that she would never go down there. She wasn't about to accustom herself to a hooker's lifestyle. Then again, the girls down there, how old would they be? Maybe 23 or 24? Young enough that she could finally have someone to have fun with. A glass fell from the cabinet where Lola was standing on her tiptoes to reach and shattered on the floor. Lola swore and pulled a mug down. Harley bent to clean up the mess, dusting up the razor shards into piles with a rag that lay on the counter. As Lola filled the mug with water and Harley scooped the broken glass up into the garbage can, Lola spoke.

"You know, I was actually meaning to talk to you about something." Finally, maybe mention of her mother. Harley raised her eyes expectantly, pale face gleaming with the hope of getting some answers. "I can't have you just idling around here all day, wasting my electricity, disturbing my bar customers, being a stick up my ass."

Harley's heart sank. "Are you…asking me to leave?"

"If you would've asked me that last night, I would've said 'yes'," Lola gave a cold laugh, not really joking, but not darkening the mood any, either. "But, goodness honey, no. God damn me if I don't enjoy your company a little. It's almost been like how it used to be when Marissa and your uncle Fred would come over to their grandmother's, my mother's, house for the weekends. We'd barely see much of each other cause I had a jobs back then, too, mainly as car hops, if that shows you how old I am. But still, just knowing they were there was so nice."

Again, hearing her mother's name used came as a shock, an almost electrical pulse that hit her between the ribs and sent a shiver down her neck. "I…I don't really understand, then."

Lola pulled the hot mug from the microwave and dropped the teabag in, handing it to Harley. "I just mean you have to start being an asset to my business. " "You want me to work for you? Like, in the bar and stuff?"

"Shit, I can't have a seventeen-year-old bartender. I'd get shut down." Lola snorted as she breathed in a long sip of oolong.

62

"So you mean chores?" Harley, too, lifted her mug to her lips and took a swig.

The liquid was molten and Harley quickly spat her mouthful back into the mug to avoid any further injuries. Lola apparently hadn't noticed the whole scene.

"Little odds and ends."

"Like what?" Harley choked over her burnt tongue. "Wiping the really hammered ones' asses?"

"No, smart ass. Though that'd probably get me some bigger tips—" She trailed off, laughing to herself. Harley imagined Lola picturing it all very clearly in her mind. A man, so piss drunk that he can't even get up after he falls off of his bar stool, complains that he has to use the bathroom. Harley puts one arm under his dead-weight shoulders and lugs him off to the john, keeping him sturdy on the toilet and papering his bottom when he manages to get onto his feet. Somehow he sobers up, remembering the good deed, and it turns out he's a rich man and he places a crisp hundred in Lola's hand before wandering off into the night. Something straight out of a twisted prince and pauper story. Lola must've snapped out of her daydream before Harley did. "Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of ashtray duty. And maybe a bit of glass washing at the end of the night. I'll let you have any tips particularly generous people may give you for shining up their ashtrays."

That didn't sound too bad to Harley. Nothing worse than Helen ever made her do back home, and there was the prospect of money. "Yah. Fine. Whatever."

"Oh, and bed sheets."

Harley nodded and sipped her tea. It took her a few seconds to comprehend that Lola didn't mean the bed sheets from the bed in the other room. Harley stopped nodding. "No." "There're only four in-house beds. Just four." Lola wasn't convincing enough for Harley. Harley explained that she felt a little uncomfortable going down there at all.

God, just think of the stains. And the smells. And everything about the entire chore.

Harley felt nauseous.

"It's really not as bad as you think. I'll take you down to meet the girls later.

They don't usually stick around here after they're done. Only one actually stays down there. Pays me rent and everything. She's a real sweetie."

63

"Lola, I just really don't think I could do that."

"Don't you know how to do laundry?"

Harley didn’t want to seem like a baby. She had no reason to not want to go down there, just the prospect made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t exactly a virgin, but sexual experiences still made her slightly more uneasy that most girls her age. Her first time had been on a dare, a sort of twisted version of spin the bottle the girls in her school liked to play. It had been in the drivers seat of his mothers minivan, the steering wheel digging into her back the whole time, seat creaking, threatening to pop from its mechanical bolts. She ended up having to clean the van because the guy was too wasted to notice the stains on the seat. He would’ve driven the van right home and left it in his garage to await the horrified and disgusted arrival of his mother the next morning if Harley hadn’t dawned the Clorox wipes.

“Come on. You’ll only have to be down there on off hours, I promise. You throw the bedding in a bin and toss it in the washer. No hassle, no mess.”

Before she had time to agree to it all, before she even still had any solid grasp on the information supplied to her in the last twenty-four hours, Lola was leading Harley down into the basement for the first time. She had told the other bartender to watch over the patrons while she had business to attend to. The stairs were carpeted in short, green rug that reminded Harley of Astroturf. The further they made their way down, the sicker Harley felt. The basement smelled of dust and sex and cologne-soaked mattresses. It was divided into multiple rooms with an adequately sized foyer. Harley guessed that was where they held their line-ups when customers came in.

“Girls! I want you to meet someone. Come out to the hallway.”

A few girls already sat in the atrium, their legs crossed as they sat on the floor in small circles. Soon, at least twelve women, probably anywhere between 21 and 50, were standing in the hall between the two walls of doors, which, Harley assumed led to the rooms in which she’d be stripping beds. “This is my great-niece, Harley.”

Some women waved, others stood forward enthusiastically, reaching out to shake Harley’s hand. Other’s yawned. Some, like lacey vegetables, didn’t react at all, apathetically admiring their hands or staring at the floor. Harley surveyed the lot of them, amused that the majority actually fit the prostitute stereotype. At least five of 64

them wore black fishnets, spotted with tears, under leather or jean miniskirts. The shirts were low-cut and tight; a few of the women were only wearing their lace bras or kinkier corsets.

“I’m Camille,” one of the younger women said, stepping forward and punching Harley lightly in the shoulder. She, besides being especially young, was also especially lovely. While some of the others had flab, rather unfortunate under-eye circles—most, Harley noticed, must have been in the beautification process when Lola called them out—and unflattering clothing, Camille had on cut-off shorts and an AC/DC tee-shirt that she had tied up above her belly-button. Her purpley-brown hair was cut short and fell naturally in a sort of wavy curl. Her face was bright, her cheeks dewy with light blush, here eyes lined with purple eyeliner. Lola was smiling.

“Harley, this is the one I was telling you about. The one that stays down here.

Maybe you guys can be friends.” Camille was smiling broadly, her pointy teeth catching the dim fluorescent light. A girl behind her popped her gum. A few wandered back into the rooms they came from. Lola shrugged and walked back upstairs. A pounding began in Harley’s chest as she watched Lola disappear up the stairway. Don’t leave me alone down here.

Camille took Harley’s hand and began to lead her into one of the rooms. Too shocked to move, she let the pixie prostitute drag her into a tiny space that reminded her of a college dorm. It was plastered with vintage movies posters; Chinatown, The Clockwork Orange and The Goonies. Pungent oriental incense hid the scent of sex in the room, and the bed was spread with a purple comforter and black sheets. “This is my room. People sometimes pay me extra after we do it in here because it’s more fun than the shitty décor in the others.” She grabbed a remote control and pressed the power button on it. The Shins sang from a stereo that sat in the corner of the room.

“Plus I have music.” She looked at Harley, perhaps noticing that she was still uncomfortable. “Listen, the girls here are really cool. We aren’t all you think we are.

And I’d really like it if you’d come down and visit me sometime, okay?” Harley paused before nodding slowly, the incense making her lightheaded.

Camille made Harley promise she’d come down to see her the next day before she got up to go back to the apartment. Harley promised. And the next day, she went 65

down. Camille taught her how to strip the beds with no mess and how to do a backbend. She was a crazy girl, something about her seeming very immature. Even the way she led her into her room for the first time, like a child showing an adult a popsicle-stick sculpture they made at daycare. She reminded Harley of her sister.

Although it was only less than a month ago that Helen had sent Monica to Maryland, Harley knew Camille was exactly the godsend she needed to ease her loneliness. *

*

*

Blondie was playing in Camille’s room when Harley came down on Sunday evening. Camille was standing, a silver flask catching light from the ceiling lamp in her hand, and she whipped her short hair around in circles, jumping around and playing air guitar. “Look at me! Isn’t this great?” Camille lifted her head to Harley and smiled hugely, her eyes squinted so tightly they almost disappeared into her face.

“Yah, great,” Harley flashed Camille an amused smirk and jumped onto the bed.

She folded her legs and sat Indian style, watching Camille rock out. She raised her voice to be louder than the stereo, “Can I ask what the hell you’re doing?”

“Waking up!” Camille shouted above the music. “It’s morning for me still and this is the only way I can shake all the sandmen out.” Harley nodded, laughing as Camille stumbled backwards over a pillow that sat on the ground and slammed into the wall with her back. She slumped down and lay in a heap on the floor. Then the heap started to shake with laughter and Camille raised her neck up and shook her head. She stood and skipped to the stereo, turning down the volume until the music was barely audible. She hopped up next to Harley on the bed. "Almost two-thousand dollars last night. Can you believe it?"

"Shit, son. You must be exhausted."

"That's why I sleep 'til five." Camille smiled at Harley knowingly. Harley studied her face. There were no bags under her eyes and her cheeks were flushed with rosy glow. She really actually liked what she did. She didn't think it was bad or invalid. She was actually happy. "Here." Camille tossed her flask to Harley. "Cheers."

Despite practically living in a bar for nearly a week, Harley hadn't drunk since the last high school party she went to. Some girl that Harley didn't even know was 66

hosting it. Unsupervised; her parents were on an out-of-town business call. There were bottles of beer and Zima strewn all over the kitchen, handles of rum and gin throughout the house. When she got to the address with a group of her friends, they could barely even get in, there were so many drunken teenagers squeezed in there. And the girl had installed strobe lights to the ceiling fan so that they spun and flashed, and after a few shots, the lights made Harley feel as though she were blasting through outer space in turbo drive. It made her sick. She couldn't even stand when the host began to freak out after things got a bit out of hand and sent all the kids to trudge drunkenly home through the January snow.

Harley unscrewed the lid of the flask and downed an entire mouthful. She coughed and sputtered. "Down the wrong pipe," she spat. It burned so ferociously in her throat that she worried it might have damaged some thing and she might not be able to talk again. Camille laughed at her as she pulled a soft pack of Marlboros from her back pocket and lit a cigarette.

"Gee," she said through inhales, "Hope I didn't pop your gin cherry."

Harley swallowed hard and choked. "No. No, don't worry about it." She was going to tell her she's drank loads of times, but she thought that might sound like the type of lie a little kid would tell a cool older kid to make them like him. "Down the wrong pipe," she repeated.

"Oh, okay." She took a long drag from the cigarette. The smoke swam in little grey helixes up to the ceiling. "I started drinking when I was twelve." She held the skinny cig between her thumb and pointer finger like she was smoking a joint. Harley liked that. "Then I got hooked when I was fifteen. Guess I was too much to handle at that point cause my parents kicked me out a year later. Almost got sent to jail when I turned eighteen, too." She had been staring blankly at the wall throughout her little anecdote until that point, where she turned and looked Harley directly in the eyes.

Although she was smiling, it was almost too intense for Harley to handle. "And now look where I am. Barely twenty, a hooker, and one of the happiest people I know." She leaned forward and nudged Harley's forehead with her own. "That's just how you've got to live. No matter what life throws at you, you've got to catch it with a smile on your face."

67

Harley cleared her throat. "You're such an optimist."

"I try." Camille grinned flirtatiously and lifted the cigarette back up to her puckered lips. The way Camille almost sucked on the stick made smoking look glamorous. She would shut her eyes and she inhaled and tiny streams of white would erupt from her nose and mouth. When she exhaled, her lips simply opened. They didn't pucker and blow like the tacky women on television. The jaw purely unclamped and a wave of fog crept off of her tongue. Suddenly she stood with a start. "Shit. Lola's gonna kill me."

"What? What is it?"

"She told us we weren't allowed to smoke in here anymore. Come outside with me." Together they walked behind the building, climbing on blue and orange milk crates in order to sit atop the cement wall that surrounded the dumpster. They swung their legs over the side, brushing the tops of trash bags and soggy pieces of cardboard with their toes. Camille wrapped her plump lips around the cigarette and breathed smoke out through her nose. "Look, I'm a dragon." Harley pretended to be terrified of the ferocious beast and then laughed. "Your turn." She handed Harley a cigarette.

Harley waved it away. "I don't really smoke."

"You don't? Have you ever tried?" Harley shook her head. "Awh, come here. It’s the best." Harley hesitantly yet instinctively leaned toward Camille, who stuck a cigarette between her lips. There was something magnetic about Camille. Something about the way she looked at her that made Harley's mind lock up to the point that she wasn't even in control of herself anymore. And the lack of self-management felt refreshing. Camille raised the lighter to the end and instructed her not to inhale too deeply. "Just let the smoke into your mouth, but keep your throat open the way you do when you swallow a pill." Harley did, and didn't even cough. She held the cigarette the way Camille did. It cooled her insides instantly, like her intestines were flooded with liquid nitrogen.

They sat and talked for an hour, sharing Camille's flask and box of Marlboros. "I promise you, if you like this, the next thing we smoke will not be cigs." It was almost eight when Camille flicked open her cell phone. "Damn. Today was my day off. Lola'd think I was crazy if she saw that I was still here this late on a Sunday." She hopped off 68

of the wall and landed cat-like on the gravel. Harley had to climb down on the cartons, feeling inadequately graceful and a bit buzzed. "I'm gonna go get dinner. I'd offer for you to come with me, but I'll probably hit up a few clubs afterwards, and I don't think they'll let you in." Harley waved her hand, telling her she had chores to do anyway.

Camille then surprised her by hugging her tightly. "I can't guarantee I won't necessarily be busy, but you can come down and talk whenever you want. Okay?"

After Camille walked away, the silhouette of her hips moving exaggeratedly, Harley climbed back onto the wall and lay, her back stiff against the concrete blocks.

She shut her eyes there, listening to cars in the street, a faint garbage smell swelling in her nostrils. *

*

*

She didn't know how long she'd been laying there, but when she opened her eyes, the sky was black and the moon was above her. The night air left Harley’s arms pricked with goose bumps and skin chilled and clammy. She licked her lips to moisten them, swallowing the faint cigarette taste that lingered in her spit. Her mouth felt numb with smoke and rain and dry gin. Every hair stood softly all over her body. It must have been a raindrop that awoke her, for it was now beginning to drizzle. She caught pockets of mist in her hands. It was cold and it stung. Harley hopped off of the wall, falling in the slippery gravel, her knees digging sharply into the jagged rocks.

Drying her hands on the front of her pants, she pushed open the door and listened for the click of it’s close behind her.

Inside it was too hot and Harley felt her cheeks instantly flush with pink warmth. She shook like a wet dog and ruffled her damp hair. Walking through the foyer into the first room, she immediately began to strip the bed of its peach sheets.

The comforter already lay in a salmon heap at the foot of the bed and the top sheets were twisted and tousled. She ripped off the top sheets and the fitted sheet, sending the pillow tumbling to the ground.

She began to hum “Call Me” when she heard something move outside. A car was pulling into the alley. She heard it crunch on the pebbles that littered the asphalt, and 69

then make a short screech as it braked. A door opened then shut. Harley stopped, waiting to hear footsteps at the door. There was silence. She hunched down to the level of the bed. Lola had told her if police ever came for a bust, she shouldn’t hide, but just explain the situation. She couldn’t seem to help herself, though. The silence caused the blood to drum inside of her eyes and her knees were locked in their bent position. She couldn’t stand. All of a sudden, she heard a creaking, followed by a clicking noise.

Someone in the next room cleared their throat. Harley, breathing halted and mouth raw, crawled to the doorframe. She used the frame to pull herself slowly to her feet and peered into the foyer.

A man was closing the door behind him. Shit, Harley thought as she spun on her heels and stood on the other side of the wall; she hadn’t locked it. But the man didn’t look like a cop. Undercover, maybe? No, he looked too misplaced and bewildered to be a cop, undercover or not. So, he was a customer. Just as bad. Today was Sunday. They were closed on Sunday. This man didn’t know that. Her back was flat and trembling against the plaster wall. She heard the man clear his throat. It was okay, she thought, she would just tell him to come back another day. She swallowed, dropping the small bundle of bedding onto the carpet.

She walked slowly around the corner and the man jumped as her shadow emerged from around the doorframe. She jumped too, and then laughed at herself for jumping. He didn’t laugh back. His face was quite unamused and twitched nervously.

His features suggested that he couldn’t be much over 20; his face was soft, still round and rosy at the cheekbones. The trembling chin was the most defined, long and subtly cleft, cleanly shaven. “Is this the…” He trailed off as if he didn’t want to finish the sentence. But Harley knew what he was getting at.

“Yah,” she smiled a little. Just tell him we’re closed. We’re closed. She couldn’t bring herself to remove her eyes from the young man. He stood tall and gangly, not at all like the normal crowd of disgusting, chauvinistic, beer-bellied perverts that usually came in here. His clothes fit him closely, though not tightly, and he wore a washed out teal V-neck. The light brown waves of hair fell onto his forehead, some sections tucked behind his ears. She blinked, repeating her mantra. We’re closed. We’re closed. We’re closed.

70

“You’re open, right?” His eyelids fluttered as he spoke and he leaned forward a bit. He had the longest eyelashes Harley had ever seen. And they were so green. Nearly the color of celery. The whites of his eyes and the skin around them were red as if he had mistaken lip liner for eyeliner, which made Harley wonder if he was high. He did teeter a bit as he stood. Maybe he had just had a bit to drink, too. Just tell him no.

“Yes. Yes we are. Can I help you?” Harley wanted to hit herself hard across the face. What the hell was she doing?

“Well, are you—?” Was she? He meant one of the hookers. No, of course she wasn’t. Tell him so. Tell him to go away. He tilted his head to the side and almost began to lose his balance from this slight disruption of equilibrium. He put his hand on the wall to steady himself and bent his knees ever so slightly.

“Oh man, lemme help you there.” Harley caught the young man under his arm and led him to a chair in the foyer. She had never noticed the chair, or the others around it, before. It gave the small space the feeling of a dentist waiting room. Surely guys didn’t appreciate that view while they waited for a fuck. She’d have to inform Lola of that. His head lulled back slightly. He had definitely had a drink before coming here.

He didn’t seem too wet though. He couldn’t have walked. Whiffs of the scent of his skin and cologne wafted up to her as she stood above him and she nearly lost her balance as well. “Feeling any better?”

He didn’t answer her question, instead looking up at her and frowning. “So you’re not—?” His face contorted in such a way that it seemed as if he was trying to raise an eyebrow. His nose was scrunched slightly and Harley noticed a light peppering of freckles on the bridge of his nose and under his eyes.

“I’m not a what? Oh, oh, yah. No. Of course I am. What else would I be doing down here?” She chuckled nervously, widening her eyes at what had just come from her own mouth. She felt as if she might throw up. And yet she persisted. Swallowing back the thick saliva that was building up in her throat, she asked if Lola had told him to come down here.

“I don’t…I don’t…Lola?”

“Did you just come from upstairs and walk around the building? From the bar?

You know there’s a quicker way to get down here.” He looked at her quizzically. His 71

tender eyes batted and Harley noticed him licking his full, pink lips. God, those green eyes. “Miles just drove me here. Told me to go in. I didn’t,” he swallowed, “I didn’t go to any bar.”

His innocent nature fascinated and mystified her. He looked like one of the art students the pretty honors classes girls dated. The kind of boy Harley had always wanted but never got. He rocked his head playfully from side to side. Harley couldn’t understand how someone like him ended up in a brothel. He seemed boyish. Was there an age minimum here? She wanted him more than she ever thought possible. Knowing she had already dug a hole too deep to climb out of, she took a deep breath. “What do you, you know, want?”

The man nodded, as if to himself, fingering around the top of his pants where his right pocket was. He fumbled to get his finger into the pocket slit, but failed. He eventually gave up and stood, with some difficulty. “D’you need it before? Or can I pay after?” Despite his clumsiness, the man looked Harley directly in the eyes and spoke quite clearly. Harley didn’t know whether the customers usually paid before or after.

“After?” She didn’t mean for it to come out like a question. But before she could barely finish getting the word out, the man fell against her, pressing his moist lips against hers. She stumbled backwards, almost falling into a chair that sat against the opposite wall. She spun him around and sat him down on the chair, finding it surprisingly easy to kiss a complete stranger. A stranger who thought she was a prostitute, no less. She weaved her fingers through his thick hair and straddled his lap, feeling his sharp hip bones press against the sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs.

He pulled away jerkily, his eyes moving to and away from Harley’s face. He seemed strangely shaky and anxious.

“Are you supposed to kiss? I mean, do you usually kiss beforehand? I mean, is that what guys usually do?” Harley had no idea, but she was enjoying it far too much to stop. She nodded and then dug hungrily back in, pushing her full body weight against his torso. She pulled his shirt up over his head, knowing for sure she was doing this wrong. This is how she made out with boys at school, certainly not the way veteran hookers attend to their clientele. She didn’t know how to work the kinky angle. He took off her shirt.

72

They were laying on the floor soon, the synthetic commercial carpeting burning Harley’s back every time they turned so that she was on the bottom. There were rooms, beds, for this to happen. Not on the foyer floor. Harley arched her back and the man reached around her, beginning to unhook her bra. He had a pained look on his face as he took it off, almost as if it hurt him. Or as if something else were hurting him.

Something that Harley had nothing to do with.

They had only just begun and already Harley worried he was not having a good time. She kneeled, her legs on either side of his, and kissed down his torso, the patch of soft hair beneath his belly button tickling her lips. She had her hands on the zipper pull of his jeans, running her tongue lightly along the valleys of his pelvis and hipbones. She stopped to look up at him before she snapped open his pants. He wasn’t looking at her.

He had his chin up, as if he was staring at the ceiling, however his eyes were closed tightly. His arms lay at his side, hands clenched into firm fists.

She slipped her hands inside the top of his jeans and splayed the zipper. She slid the pants down around his knees and had to keep herself from laughing when she saw that he was wearing boxers with prints of smiling octopuses all over them. She was trembling all over, though she wasn’t sure if it was anxiety, disgust—of herself more than the man—or pure excitement. She leaned down so close she could feel her hot breath hitting the cloth of his boxers and bouncing back into her own face.

But, suddenly, he stood, knocking Harley, shocked and topless, backwards into a chair where she smacked her head hard against its leg. He pulled up his pants and zippered them. Still slightly wobbly on his feet, he reached down to pick up his shirt and ran to the door. He turned back around and looked at Harley before he pushed and pulled his way out into the damp night. His face was red and his eyes watery.

Harley thought she heard him mumbling some sort of muddled apology as she stood, rubbing her head. As swiftly and bafflingly as he had appeared, he was gone, vanished amid the hazy fog of streetlights and damp cement.

Had he been crying as he left? What the fuck?, Harley was thinking. Fuck. Fuck.

She tried catching her breath as she put her own bra and shirt back on. This time when she reached up to pat the lump on her head, she brought her fingers back moist with sticky blood. Everything was pounding.

73

There was a clock on the wall and it read 2:37. Lola would have the bar cleaned up by now, probably already be out of the shower and in bed. Possibly even asleep already. Harley locked the back door and walked up the steps to the bar, disregarding the unwashed piles of bedclothes still sitting in the basement. The lights were off, the counters were wiped, the blinds were drawn. Harley could hear Helen snoring above her. She began to walk up to the apartment, but suddenly felt light and dizzy. She fell backward, her back hitting hard on the landing between basement and second floor.

She lay there for a few moments, collecting herself and waiting to hear if the clamor caused Lola to stir in her rest. The snores continued. Harley used the railing to pull herself to her feet and wobbled over to the leather stool behind the bar.

She tried to sit straight up, keeping her back as stiff as a ski pole, but something rolling around inside of her head, some bal bearing that had shaken loose, kept causing her body to wilt to one side. The man’s face, the plump force of his lips, his small muscular body, kept swimming into her mind. She looked down at her body and could almost imagine seeing a subtle phosphorescent glow where his hands had been.

She was tingling and thumping and trying to push him from her thoughts. But even as she attempted clearing her mind, she caught herself tracing his tongues path on the inside of her cheeks.

Her head was being cleaved in half. She could feel her skull screaming, if that was possible. She leaned back and clumsily pulled a half-full bottle of Bacardi from the drink shelf. She unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the lip of the container. The warm rum numbed her mouth and she felt the steady thump of blood in her temples decelerate to a near stop. She didn’t lower the bottle until it was all but empty. Out of breath and becoming very hazy, she could just barely lift the almost drained Bacardi back onto its spot of the shelf. Then the entire room filled with clouds. There were no sounds of cars cruising the street outside. The bar shook and the walls tilted. Harley fell forward onto the counter, her body boiling, and slowly disappeared into dense, onyx fog. *

*

*

“Harley. Harley?” Helen was above her as she slowly separated her eyelids, 74

shutting them again when she felt the violent shards of fluorescent light burn her corneas. She groaned, moving her back, stiff from leaning over on a bar counter all night. She sat up, rubbing her neck and trying to ignore the hideous headache that throbbed inside her skull. Lola shook her head and went to the sick to wet a dishrag. “I don’t even think I’m going to ask what happened.” She wrung the cold water from the scrap of fabric and laid it gently on Harley’s forehead. Harley held it there as Lola walked away from her, hands on her hips, her neck still bobbing in confusion and frustration. The silence was deafening.

Lola let Harley nap in her bed that day, the soft mattress allowing her spine to unwind. The previous night was a rollercoaster of black haze and vivid memories, entire hours cut out of her brain to be lost in the barren plains of her unconscious. But Harley could remember him. In fact, she couldn’t get him out of her mind; the soft bone structure of his face, his upper thighs, the heat radiating from his chest, the alcohol and vanilla mint flavor of his breath. She didn’t get out of bed until the next afternoon.

Lola showed an excruciating amount of compassion, opting to sleep on the couch with a very congested and shedding Booger.

After seeing Camille’s flask, Harley went out to the corner hardware store and found one there. Camille was the big sister Harley never had. She was taking the place of both a Marissa-figure and a Monica-figure. It seemed that everything Camille did, Harley had to do too. The flask Harley bought was practically utility-sized, probably a solid 13-ouncer. Every morning, before Lola would wake up, she would sneak silently down into the bar, behind the counter. She'd fill the flask with something different every day, hoping to ensure Lola would never notice the missing alcohol from the bar.

Sure, at first it caused tiny pangs of guilt to sprout up all over her insides, but after a week of it, they disappeared. She blamed the alcohol, saying it numbed her. She'd drink from the flask all day with Camille, perfecting the art of blowing smoke rings, Camille making jokes about dick size, Harley telling stories about her family. Harley liked Camille because Camille never got bored. She especially liked stories about her dad.

Apparently she had a father in prison, too.

"Except mine's in for a lot worse than some soft insurance fraud sentence," she'd repeat, every time Harley'd mention his verdict. She never did quite mention 75

what exactly her father was in for, but Harley figured if she wanted to tell, she would have told already. Once, Harley mentioned Camille reminded her of her sister. "Tell me about her."

"She's twelve now. Well, nearly thirteen. Her birthday's in a couple weeks. She's just a real fireball, you know? I suppose I've always been the quiet rebel. Monica would make sure the world knew what she was rebelling against. Except, the thing is, she never did. She was too good to have to deal with Helen and me fighting all the time.

But still, she was too young to do all the chores Helen needed done. Just in the way, Helen told her. So she shipped her off to some summer school in Maryland. I don't even think she's paying for it. Just keeping her there until the headmaster realizes she hasn't sent a nickel since the down payment."

"I always wished I had a younger sister. I actually sort of miss family life."

"I miss normality."

Camille, smirking, threw her perfumed arm around Harley's neck. "Then you'd best fly this cuckoo's nest."

About two weeks after Harley's arrival, Lola had to fire the bartender for stealing from the cash register. She called Harley up from the basement where she had been learning to roll her own cigarette. Harley looked frustrated over her shoulder; Camille grasped the packet of Bali Shag and tossed it over on top of her stereo. "Later.

You'd better see what she wants."

Lola called for her again as she was walking up the Astroturf steps. "Coming!"

She pushed the wall-door open to see Lola with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a drink mixer in the other. Lola stared Harley down with a cocked eyebrow. Harley flinched. "You planning on throwing those at me or making a White Russian?"

"Oh good, you know some cocktail names."

"Well, I do go to a public high school." Lola half-frowned, but continued to look Harley up and down. She stepped out from behind the bar, setting the bottle and metal shaker down on the counter. "What?"

"You look older than seventeen." Harley had been told that before. Helen used to make her run down to the corner store every Tuesday and Thursday to buy five packs of cigarettes, and the Ethiopian guy who ran the counter never carded her. Not 76

even once. And another time, she tried getting into a Ratatat concert at a 21+ bar, just for kicks, to see if the bouncer would throw her out, but he let her right in. Sure, the trait had its perks, and her friends were always jealous of her for it, but Harley resented it. "Will you bartend for me? Just until I find a replacement for Roxanne."

Lola spent the afternoon until opening time teaching Harley how to work the beer tap and how to mix a cocktail, spouting out endless recipes that Harley only caught a handful of, and pointing out the different brands and assortments of alcohol.

When the first customers of the day, Honey included, ambled into their barstools, Lola watched Harley carefully dish out her first shots of whiskey and mix her first Hurricane. Harley saw Lola nod approvingly out of her peripherals, and her heart skipped as the prospect of being able to actually work first hand and make tips and have something useful to do besides scrub out ashes and change sweaty sheets.

Every now and again Harley would get a judgmental glance from a particularly perceptive patron, eyeing her face as if checking for age spots. She would turn away, pretending to mix a drink or blow her nose into a dishrag until their eyes were back on the television replaying hockey scores, or their own wretched little glass of liquid glee.

While turning back around from one of these false distractions, a familiar head entered the bar. For a moment Harley thought perhaps it was a kid from school, maybe a young teacher perhaps? Then the identity hit her like a bucket of sand to the forehead. She ducked under the counter, avoiding any possible interaction with the man, the stranger, she had almost slept with.

Her ribs were crawling with colonies of fire ants and her face was suddenly hot and splotchy. She got down on all fours, crawling her way past the bar to the walldoor. Harley began to climb up the stairs to the apartment but stopped halfway up because her heart was pounding too fiercely in her chest. She waited, the seemingly distant voices of the bar-goers humming and shrieking behind the half-shut door. She could've sworn she could hear her man's voice talking to Helen, but it could've been anyone, any other man in the entire joint.

Sliding her rear slowly down the sharp stairs one step at a time, she kneeled behind the crack of the door and watched to see what he was doing. He saw the soft brown hair move toward the bar, squeezing through a maze of beer breath and 77

cleavage. He arrived at he counter. Harley saw his mouth moving as Lola came over to see what he wanted. Her face suddenly pinched in secrecy and confusion. Harley pushed the door open slightly further to see if she could hear what was being said.

Their mumbles were still inaudible. She saw Lola shaking her head, but then the guy rummaged around in his pocket and put something on the counter. Lifting his head, Lola handed him a napkin. His lips moved around the letters of a "thanks" and he scribbled something on the napkin. Then, he turned his back to leave and something inside Harley pushed her body into the door. It flung open and she fell against a flushed woman with purple hair. As he pushed open the door, he looked back into the bar and for a moment, Harley could’ve sworn her looked straight into her eyes. But he walked away, and she cursed her imagination as she dug her toes into the floor with every step she took back behind the bar.

Lola was stuffing the napkin into her pocket as Harley approached. "Where'd you go?" Lola asked inconspicuously when Harley arrived beside her.

"Hmm? Oh, bathroom. Just couldn't hold it."

Lola nodded unconvincingly. "Someone came, asking for you. Well, he more or less asked for you. He wanted to know if I could give the 'young girl from downstairs with the long brown hair' this." She pulled out a fifty from her pocket. The napkin that was with it fell to the ground, and Lola didn't notice. She handed the bill to Harley.

"You're going to try to explain later. Right now you're going to quench our good folks' thirst." Lola leaned forward to get a drink request from a particularly fat man, and Harley crouched down and picked up the napkin. She fingered the paper, reading what was written in pencil scribbles: forgot to give you this. sorry for running off. explain sometime. camden. *

*

*

Camden. Camden. Harley said the name over and over. Although she didn't understand the money, her heart still exploded like erratic alarms on a cuckoo clock when she reread the note. He'd explain sometime. He planned on seeing her again. But what was the money for? Obviously he still thought she was a hooker, but they didn't 78

even do the deed. He made sure of that with his sudden exodus.

Still, she had given up trying to not thing about him anymore. His body was imprinted on hers. Even as Lola yammered away, pacing the floor around the couch where Harley sat, Booger cutting off the circulation to her toes, the napkin folded in her fingers, Harley thought back to that night. "And I just said 'There's got to be some mistake. I don't have any girls downstairs with long brown hair,' at least not any young enough for him to call young. The kid was determined. Of course by the second time he described you I knew exactly who he was talking about."

Harley did her best to describe the situation, leaving out the exact initiation, and extracting some dirty details, for both their sakes. "He thought I was one of the girls. And he just…left." Lola fell onto the couch next to Harley; at first, she just nodded her head. Then a smile licked the corners of her magenta lips. Then she threw her head back, shaking with full-bellied laughter. Harley just didn't understand this woman.

Bartending with Lola allowed them to spend more quality time together.

Preparing the bar before opening time and even the slow hours were whiled away by Harley talking about Monica and her father, Lola offering her own family anecdotes, including many of Marissa, some from as early as Lola's golden years in the seventies.

Sometimes she'd ask Harley about her own life, but Harley didn't much like to talk about school or chores. "I still don't get how Martin, even in jail, would let things get this bad with his daughters."

"He doesn't know."

"Don't you ever visit him? Call him?"

"Helen doesn't like us to. And I can't drive there. Don't have a license."

"Then walk! You think you'd be willing to suffer a few calf-cramps for seeing your old man." Lola was right; Harley knew she was. The truth was she had never felt empowered enough to escape and run away to her dad. Never felt empowered enough to even stand up to Helen prior to her most recent breakdown. Now, Harley felt she could do anything.

Lola had gotten seven applicants for bartenders that week, and she hired two new ones. Harley was off the job, understandably, seeing as it was a definite risk letting her ever do it in the first place. The first night of the new employees, Harley went 79

upstairs early to try and get a full night's sleep in. However, Lola woke her when she came up after the close of the night. "You're little boyfriend was back." Harley's insides ached. The first night she was back upstairs was the night Camden made his return.

She groaned and flipped over on her pillow, pretending she was still too asleep to have heard what Lola said. All the while, she felt a tear make its way from the corner of her eye, down her nose, and onto her pillow. She was too upset to sleep so she spent the night in the laundry room in the basement, listening to the moans and shrieks and creaking box-springs, and sipping scotch from her flask like it was apple cider.

She thought it would’ve made a lot of sense if Camden had put his phone number on the napkin, but maybe he thought it was the guy who was supposed to get the girl's number. Or maybe, she realized with a start, he didn't write it because he didn't want to hear from her. Maybe the "explain later" was just to hold her over, keep her hoping until she was so over the entire incident after not hearing from him in so long, that it wouldn't even matter anymore.

But those questions were answered for her when she again saw him walk through the door the following night. Everything was suddenly as if her body were clogged with massive ear plugs, pressure erupting behind her eyes, in her nose and ears, her toes going numb. As much as she wanted to approach him, she instinctually turned her back to him. She shut her eyes and squeezed them tight. She couldn't seem to bring herself to turn around. When she finally did, she realized, to her relief, that he had not seen her. She finished scrubbing out the plastic ashtray, brushing hair out of her eyes with her pinky finger. Every few moments, she’d look over her shoulder to see Camden sitting at the bar, a frosted mug of some draught beer in front of him. So, obviously he was over 21. He sipped at the beer, the foam leaving white trails across his fleshy upper lip. Instead of wiping it on his sleeve like a normal guy, he used his bottom lip to suck it off, giving his face the impression of being rather chimpanzee-like.

Harley smiled and bit her own lip. His pupils were roaming the bar, and even from afar, she could pick up the reflections of the different colored alcohol bottles in his jade eyes.

Harley suddenly realized that while she was lost in the jungle of his eyes, their gazes met, and Camden was now smiling awkwardly, standing slightly at his stool.

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Harley walked over to him, almost not by choice, his smile drawing her body closer.

"I'm, uh, surprised you remembered what I look like."

Camden laughed. "That bad, eh?" His voice was much crisper now, deep, but with playful undertones. Not at all slurry. Harley nodded. He looked down at his drink.

"I actually remember everything. Especially the way I left. It was really rude and—" "Its fine, man, you don't have to apologize." Harley leaned over the bar.

"But I want to. It was completely wrong of me to even go in there in the first place. Can I at least explain everything to you so I feel like less of a complete ass hole?"

Harley noticed that while he was talking, his eyes kept drifting to neck of Harley's shirt.

She didn't make an effort to lean over any less. She figured they'd both already seen more of each other than that. "Come on out from there, pull up a stool. I'll buy you a drink."

"Oh, thanks but—" "I won't take no for an answer. We're both adults here. No crime in buying a pal a drink now, is there?" Harley contorted her face into a smile and shook her head.

Camden pulled out the stool next to him and Harley went to sit next to him. "What do you want? Beer? Smirnoff?"

"Rum and Coke." Camden smiled pleased and repeated the order to Lola. Lola looked over at Harley and shook her head, chuckling to herself as she made up the drink. Thank god Lola was such a loose lady. She handed Harley her drink. She sipped from it delicately, breathing the coolness of the ice out through her nose.

"You're refreshing. I'm used to the sleazy post-college girls who only want Cosmopolitans or other bullshit drinks like that. Rum and Coke has timeless class."

Harley nearly choked on an ice cube. She was undoubtedly in love.

"So are you going to sit here talking about drinks or are you going to give me an explanation?" Camden straightened in his seat and cleared his throat like he was about to give a scientific presentation. Harley smiled at him.

"Well, first of all, I just got to tell you that I would never have ever gone into a place like that if I wasn't in the condition I was in that night, both emotionally and physically." He was gesturing a lot with his hands, and Harley guessed it was probably more out of nerves than of him trying to be an enthusiastic explainer. "You see, I've 81

been living with my friend Miles for a long time. Then our girlfriends moved in. I was with Sheila for almost four years. She broke it off earlier that day." She could hear his throat tightened and something inside her bubbled with unintentional jealousy. "It just completely fucked me up. I drank all morning and all afternoon. Miles had never seen me like that and he thought the best thing for me was to just get her out of my mind. So he took me to Blush and I was too unconscious to stop him." He smirked a little, and then put his chin down against his chest. Harley couldn't help herself. She reached down and touched his knee. He jumped a bit at the contact, but didn't mover her fingers away.

"I'm really sorry about that. Four years is a long time," Harley managed through lightly gritted teeth. "But you know, you still haven't given me an explanation for why you ran off."

"Right. Well, uh, I was completely aware of what I was doing, but the more intense it got, the more it made me think of Sheila. It was too much too soon. I mean, I'm sure you do it all the time so it's not too fast for you, but—" "I have a bit of a confession." Now was obviously not a good time to tell him, but better now than never. She wanted him to know that it was only for him. She would have only done that for him. "I'm not…" Spit it out, girl, spit it out. "I really shouldn't be drinking this. I'm not 21."

"How old are you?"

She couldn't bring herself to make the S sound. "Nineteen."

He paused then chuckled nervously. "Six year age gap. I'm going to need another drink." He waved his hand and Lola brought them both another round. He stared too long at the second rum and coke before taking up his own drink. He's 25, holy shit. Harley had guessed he was maybe 21, 22 tops. Never 25. She slurped her rum tensely. He looked uncertainly at Harley as she took a sip of her cocktail, then looked at Lola. "Is she allowed to—?" He trailed off, motioning to Lola.

"She's my great aunt."

He creased his brow, studying Harley's face. "Now that I really look at you, you do look awfully young." He took her chin gently in his two fingers. He moved her face around and brushed some of her hair from her eyes. She felt as though she might faint.

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Suddenly he let go, and her jelly jaw dropped. She quickly regained some level of respect as he spoke again. "You know, I have a bit of a confession too. I've haven't been with too many girls, and never a pro—a…someone like you." Harley bit her lip. He didn't notice. "I was going to stop and leave pretty much before it even started. I had my mind made up, no matter how screwed up it was. But I stayed anyway. For a while at least."

"Why'd you stay?" She finished off the rest of her rum and coke, feeling her inhibitions slowly slide away as the warm alcohol flooded into her blood stream. His hair was tousled and his cheeks were rosy. She wanted him again.

"You were so beautiful. For a moment or two, you actually did make me forget about Sheila. And that scared me. So I gathered myself together as much I could and walked home." Harley almost forgot how to breathe for a few seconds. The air couldn't seem to find its way out of the lungs.

"You walked home in the rain? At night? As drunk as you were?" He nodded, never once removing his gaze from her eyes. She reached over and grabbed his beer, drinking a large gulp and licking the foam away from her lips so that they shone wet and soft in the dim bar light. "I have another confession. This one's a little worse than the other one. Might want to order another round." After a moment, he did.

"So, what's this mighty secret?" he asked, the glass of beer held firmly in his two hands.

Harley took a deep breath, pulling the fifty out of her pocket and setting it on his lap. "I'm not a prostitute. I'm the laundry girl."

He set the glass down, tilting his head, his eyebrows laying dangerously close to the tops of his eyes. He also took a deep breath. "Then why—" "I don’t really know. It’s out of character for me.” He put down his beer and learned forward, long eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones. “I think it was more that after I saw you, I couldn't not do something about it." And again, as suddenly as it had happened the last time, his lips were against hers. He seemed to have more control of his muscles this time, and he pulled her face close to his. After a moment, he sat back up. Harley couldn't have imagined a better way for her confession to be received.

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*

*

*

Camille's room reeked of cigarettes and weed and the Tennessee whiskey she swiped from the bar. Harley hadn't realized that her every afternoon since not being needed for full-time bartending had been spent in Camille's drug cave. Lola still saw her as the sweet working girl who pays extra rent. Harley still saw her as the first real friend she'd had in a long time. Camden didn't like her from the first time Harley introduced the two of them.

The girl's laughter rang above even the radio. "Shit, so do you love him? Like, really, really love?"

"There's such a difference between liking someone and loving someone, you know? Like, I love my dad, but I don't like him for leaving me alone with Helen, even though I know it wasn't his fault. I don't love or like Helen at all. I love and like my sister. I love and like you."

"I think just liking someone may be better than just loving someone."

"Exactly. You see? I loved Camden from the first moment I saw him, but now that I'm learning to like him too, I love him a hundred times more." Harley tossed her roach into the bucket Camille used for an ashtray.

"And you're really dating? Isn't he like, ten years older than you?"

"Eight. And he only thinks it's six. He comes to see me in the bar every night."

For that week since the meeting at the bar, Camden had taken Harley from Blush every night at seven and they would walk around the park, taking off their shoes and running barefoot through the playground. His favorite thing to do was to make Harley hang upside down from the monkey bars and kiss her. "Just like Spiderman, only backwards," he'd say. She'd call him a dork and he'd tickle her, catching her as she tumbled from her bat-like perch, her sides collapsing with laughter. He'd hold her and slide like that down the biggest slide, their warm cheeks touching, Harley's long hair static clinging to the plastic of the cheap equipment. But every night ended the same.

Camden would tell Harley how much he worried about her. That he cared for her and he didn't want her to get in trouble.

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"I know I drink too, but I'm four years over the legal age. And I don't smoke. I don't like that you smoke, Harley." Harley would kiss him to shut him up, and it always seemed as if he'd then forget his train of thought, for they'd lay on the padded playground floor, a tangle of addiction and lies and what they both thought was some sort of love.

Camille threw back her head and swallowed two enormous green capsules with a swig of whiskey. "What are those?"

"Energy pills. It’s a Saturday. This is my busiest night. Want some?" Harley shrugged. Camille handed her two and Harley pushed them to the back of her throat with her pointer finger then washed them down the hatch with the alcohol. Camille then downed another small handful of pills. "Birth control." After another few swigs from the bottle, she pulled another yellow bottle from under her bed and unscrewed the lid, taking one from the bottle and resting it on her tongue. "And this," she began, her twitching tongue still sticking out of her mouth, "Is my nightly Vike."

"Vicodin?" Camille pinched a pill between her fingers and handed it to Harley.

She downed it.

"Is it safe to take those together?"

"The pills, sure." Camille paused for a second, looking at the ash bucket, its pile of grey dust and burnt stubs of paper cylinders. "The pills with the George Dickel and dope, who knows. Anyway, sure I'm immune by now." Something went off inside of Harley, the sort of conscience alarm that buzzed every time she realized that she had just done something incredibly stupid. She was already drunk, she was already stoned; she had to go mixing her drugs. Her dad heart stopped one night for mixing the oxycodone the doctors gave him after a back surgery with his nightly Coors. Monica cried all night thinking she had killed him because she had brought him his beer that night. Harley had to call the ambulance. In the grotto-dark space behind her eyes, she could see the red and blue blurs of the police, the ringing of the siren spinning in her eardrum like a dentist drill. Harley choked. "Hey, boo, why don't you run upstairs and grab us a glass of ginger ale. I'm parched."

Harley stood and began to walk up the Astroturf stairs, her head becoming very foggy. She could hear Camille saying something behind her, but she couldn’t make out 85

the words. Her head was tumbling through a dark green mist, bouncing up each stair.

All she could think about was Camden. She knew Camden would be livid.

Harley reached the top of the stairs, pushing the door open with the top of her head. It opened to what seemed like a hundred pairs of heavy feet and shins.

Something in her legs collapsed and she crawled on her hands and knees out into the bar crowd, pushing through the legs until she came across a nauseatingly familiar pair of cream peep-toe pumps. Her spinning eyes scanned the feet, moving from the toes to the ankle, then continued up the pantyhosed calf to the blue skirt to the flesh sweater to the overly made-up and puckering face of Helen.

Harley watched Helen’s head turn downwards toward her. She watched her face contort into a disgusted grimace, and in a reflex of shock, kick off her shoes into Harley's face. The martini glass in her wax-smooth hands tumbled to the floor and shattered inches from Harley’s nose. Helen pulled Harley to her feet.

All at once, Helen began to scream at her uncontrollably, drunken heads bobbing from their resting position rose to watch the racquet. Harley watched Helens lips move, seemingly in slow motion. "And you just had it out to prove me wrong, didn’t you, you little cretin. I told myself ‘24 hours tops.’ 24-hours my ass! You didn't come back, goddamn it!" She said something about Harley's father, which caught her off guard. "And this is where you've been staying. Look at you. Trash." Helen gritted her teeth and looked around. "All of this, trash."

Lola came out from behind the bar, pulling the rag off from over her shoulder and tossing it into the sink. Her face was "Is there a problem?—Helen?"

"Step off it, Lillian." Helen seemed to contain just as much hatred in her eyes as Lola did. Lola noticed Harley, suddenly rushing to her side and slapping lightly at her face. “High as a kite and alcohol on the breath. So this is what’s become of my stepdaughter? This is what’s become of the little angel Martin talk so highly of. Oh if only he knew. And he will know.” Harley launched herself with all of her strength at Helen, Lola somehow managed to keep her back far enough that she couldn't quite reach her face with her clawing nails. “My, my. Temper, too? I knew from the day I married your father you girls were no good. I knew it was in the family’s best interest to separate the lot of you.”

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“The family? The family? The one you destroyed? You knew nothing! You still don’t know me. And how do you think I feel? You are the woman who was supposed to be my mother and instead you threw Monica away and made sure my dad couldn’t do anything about it!” Magma tears exploded from Harley’s eyes and her tongue seemed to unlock. "I hate you. Goddamn it, I hate you! You ruined my life. You ruined his life!

You took my sister away from me. I wish you were dead!" Harley broke in Lola's arms, sobbing uncontrollably, her head still a washing machine. "How could he marry you?

How did he love you? I want you, mom. Why’d you have to leave me, mom?" She said this quietly, but she knew Helen heard. Lola nodded, not quite smiling, but not stopping Harley either. Embarrassment rose in Helen’s cheeks like molten steel.

Shaking, Harley broke from Lola's loose grasp and she walked away from Helen. “Don’t expect me to take you back. You’re still trash. You too, Lillian. Trash.”

Lola threw a punch directly at Helen’s nose and Helen screamed. A few people rushed from the bar. Others stayed, excitement painting their faces as if they were at a boxing match. Camille burst through the door, her exposed stomach quivering with bated breath.

“What’s going on up here?” She grabbed Harley around the waist, pulling her close to her body.

“Camille, you take Harley and get back downstairs.” Lola motioned towards the door and Helen looked up from her hand that she had been holding her nose with. She breathed in through blood-clogged nostrils and smiled wickedly at Camille.

“Well, I see nothing around here’s changed at all.” She kicked the martini glass shards at Lola’s legs. “What happened to respectful careers, Lillian? What happened to ‘I’m above this?’ Oh,” Blood was dripping onto her already red lips, “This is just too good.” Helen pulled her cell phone from her clutch and flipped it open, carefully pressing three little numbers. “Hello, officer? I’m calling to report suspicious activity on 514 Tenth Street. Basement. I recommend you send a few of your men to check it out.”

Lola spun to face Camille and Harley with terrified eyes. Camille nodded, dragging Harley backwards into the basement. Harley saw Lola again punch Helen in the face before the scene disappeared behind the rising mountain of Astroturf stairs.

“Girls! Red-Alert! Get yourselves out now!” Camille set Harley on the floor and 87

went around, banging on doors and shouting into the foyer. Woman ran in naked chaos from all areas, a few very confused and pantless men stumbling out after them.

“Camille?” Harley feebly choked, “What’s going on?”

“It’s a bust. That woman just called the pigs on us. This means prison if we don’t leave now.” She turned and grabbed one of the hookers who was trying to throw her dirty bedclothes into the wash room. “Forget evidence and mess. Just leave while you can.”

Flashes of skin and fabric swam in front of Harley’s eyes in kaleidoscopic blurs.

She lost Camille for a moment, and tried to shout for her but her throat was closing up.

Every square inch of her body was being compacted by jagged boulders. She was falling faster than she could fathom. She felt like she was ready to throw up. Someone grabbed her from behind.

“Seriously, girl, we have to get out of here. Pronto.” Camille ran in front of her into her room, bundling up a small package of belongings in her comforter and kissing her posters. Harley began to fall backwards, dipping her head against her neck, trying hard to swallow the lumps that were growing in her throat. She coughed and sputtered. Camille turned around. “Are the pills coming back up? Sometimes they do that then get stuck. Here, take another shot.” Harley shook her head, holding her throat with both hands. Camille’s eyebrows dropped. She threw the bundle onto the floor, CDs and shot glasses rolling out of the loose wrap. “C’mon, bitch. It’s placebo.”

Camille hit her on the back the way a mother burps a baby. Harley writhed from Camille’s grasp and stumbled toward the stairs. Just as she disappeared into the shadows of the stairwell, she heard the basement door slam open, police shouting in unnecessarily loud voices to come out and get on the floor.

Harley didn’t even turn around. The thumping in her skull was too severe to check on Camille. Something was yelled after her, but she ignored it and pushed her way back into the bar. Not a soul occupied the bar, except a rather rugged looking homeless man with one arm who slept in the booth to the far corner. Helen and Lola were nowhere in sight. Unable to control her breathing, Harley panted, clutching her chest as she ran out into the street. Everything was as if she were looking at it from behind high-prescription lenses. Electrifying pulses shook her limbs and her eyes were 88

so dry and hot it was as if a hatch of Phoenixes had died and was reborn from ashes in her pupils. Silence stung her eardrums. Her feet were 10-ton weights clodding confusedly on the cement of the sidewalk, which glistened so in the late-night dew that Harley imagined diamonds blooming like crocuses from it's stony pores. The tears in her terrified and dilated eyes stung. She stepped off of the curb.

Her head felt light and heavy all at the same time. Her body seemed to be radiating heat all over like her skin had been smeared with wasabi mustard. She felt as if she couldn't hold up her own body weight, so she collapsed onto her knees. The asphalt bit at the skin on her legs and tore away at them. Harley screamed but no noise came out; she couldn't open her mouth or her eyes. She couldn't control her breathing and everything seemed both blindingly bright and dark as pitch. The night sky was starless and the vastness of the empty black space frightened her. Helen's and Camden's voices began to repeat in her brain, and she couldn't shake them out; it was a broken record, and the nightmarish slurs of high pitched and low pitched, Monica's sobs, her father's coughs, disappointment and anger and frustration like shrill piano music were whisking into a pulpy batter inside her mind.

Headlights approached; two yellow fireflies against the infinite raven horizon.

She heard carousel music. She opened her lips, saliva stretching from top to bottom in silkworm strands of white. She lay and rolled across the double yellow lines, her breath trapped somewhere inside of her throat. There was white noise. The car swerved and sped past. She army crawled to the curb, resting her open mouth on the icy concrete.

She lifted her head.

The shadows of a couple walking hand in hand painted the concrete of the sidewalk. She watched the sway of their unified hands. She counted their steps. She stood. And as she made her way onto her feet, she noticed for the first time that the couple was Camden and a beautiful red-haired girl with green eye shadow.

"Harley?" Camden quickly released the woman's hand, running over and putting his hands on Harley's cheeks. "Harley, can you hear me?"

Harley groaned, her chest feeling as if it were collapsing under the pressure of a thousand hippopotami. "Who. The. Fuck. Is. She?" she managed, every word seeming to come out minutes apart. She held out her hand, then as if considering it and realizing 89

it was a bad idea, pulled it back and held it to her chest.

"This is Sheila, Harley. We were just talking about—" Harley fell to the ground, her head smacking hard on the cement. Sheila shrieked then kneeled beside her. "Is she alright?" Camden was kneeling too, trying to lift Harley by her shoulders to get her back up. She was dead weight, crumpled and lying like a rag doll at their feet.

"No, I don't think so. Jesus, Harley, why do you have to hurt yourself like this?"

There was a falter to Camden's voice that showed he was crying. "Sheila, call the fucking cops. Now! Get an ambulance." Camden was shaking Harley, slapping her cheek. Her head lulled back for a moment, eyelids fluttering open.

"Cam?" "Yah, babe?" He was nodding furiously, holding her face in his hands, tears welling in his eyes.

"I…hate you." She didn't know who this comment was directed at; was it Camden, herself, or Sheila. Goddamn Sheila. Harley's insides were exploding; fireworks were bursting in her intestines. She could barely see straight and she now was beginning to shiver. Everything was shaking.

"Camden. Camden?" she croaked to a pair of green converses. She opened her mouth to say his name again, craving the consonants on her tongue. But as her lips parted, she threw up all over his green converses. She lifted her head to look into his face, but as she did, her vision slipped, and all there was besides the blackness was Sheila's screams, Camden's hand on her forehead, and the acid stink of her vomit. *

*

*

“So when do you think you’re going to talk to me, eh?” Lola’s face hovered above her, surrounded by a halo of blinding white on all sides. It smelled like a funeral, and Harley groaned, rubbing her eye with the back of her hand to find that there was an IV stuck in it.

“Where’s Camden?”

Lola brushed hair back from Harley’s eyes with her fingers and kissed her forehead. “He was here earlier. Kid didn’t get any sleep so I told him to run off and get 90

some shuteye before coming back. He was so torn up, Har. Practically had to shove him out the door.” Lola smiled sheepishly. “And of course that’d be the first thing you say.

Not ‘where the hell am I?’ or even a ‘Gee, Lola, thanks for socking that bitch in the nose for me’.”

“Gee, Lola, thanks for socking that bitch in the nose for me. Now, where the hell am I?” Lola stood up and gestured around the cotton-white hospital room like a burntout Vanna White.

“Room 832, love. Third floor.” She looked satisfied when Harley smiled at her.

She sat back down on the hospital bed beside Harley and sighed.

“You know, I guess it was okay that you asked about Camden first. He’s the one that brought you here. He saved you life you know.”

“Saved my life?”

“You had your stomach pumped. They say you overdosed on a drug cocktail of pain meds, uppers, narcotics and ethyl alcohol.” Bits and pieces of the nigh came back to her, hazy and unpleasant. She remembered the energy pills and the Vicodin and the drinks and the weed. God. She knew it was dumb. She knew it was dumb as she was doing it. But Camille did it too, and— “Is Camille okay?”

“Heh, well, she’ll be spending a little time down in the hoosegow. But she’ll be all right. She’s a trooper. Probably wouldn’t be bad for her, an experience like this.”

“What about—“ “Everyone else got out just fine.” Lola bobbed her head back and forth, a little frown tugging at her lips. She bit them and then stammered, “Well, except for me.” She lifted her leg and pulled up the hem of her pants, exposing a thick house arrest anklet.

“Oh Lola!”

“Three years. 18 months with credit for good behavior. They weren’t going to let me have time to sort stuff out with you and the bar. But me, being the persuasive woman I am, convinced them I’m honest and wouldn’t be going anywhere. It’s not like they’re not watching me, anyway.” She shook her anklet foot.

“What are you going to do with the bar?”

“Well, without the basement business, there’s no way I can keep up enough 91

money to pay the rent for the place. So, I’m selling it.”

“And your apartment too?”

Lola fluffed up the pillow behind Harley’s aching head. “Figure I won’t really be needing a place for a while anyway. I’ll find somewhere to go when I get out.”

"Oh man."

"You don't need to worry about me, dear. You focus all your worry on yourself.

At least you already did a good job of giving the rest of us a scare." She rubbed Harley's back and handed her a glass of lukewarm water from a bedside table. "I tried bringing you in a mug of oolong but I spilled it on my way up from the cafeteria. You should be so glad you're not staying here to long. The less meals you have to eat from here, the better."

Harley giggled and sat up slowly, her back aching from leaning against the wall for so long. Her stomach flipped when her torso was vertical again. She moaned.

"Do you need a doctor?"

"Nah," Harley said, "Don't like doctors. They think they know everything and use dirty words like medication."

Expecting her statement to bring a wry smile, she was disappointed to see Lola frown. "You realize you've practically been self medicating on shit for the past month and a half? What can they do that you haven’t already done to yourself?"

"It's not the same."

"Yah, no, you're right, what you were doing was much better." Lola made a sarcastic face and sighed heavily. "I just don't get it. I don't get why you would do this to yourself. I grew up in the sixties, for Christ sake and even I didn't do drugs. Much."

"That's not the problem." Harley stretched her legs.

"What's not the problem?"

"The drugs."

"Then, I don't get it." Lola began, "What is?"

"Really, Lola? Did I seem like a happy, untroubled youth when I walked in your bar that day, however long ago it was? My problem is everything that happened between my mother's death and meeting you again. At least with you I could ignore my real issues for a while. Not that it did me any good."

92

They sat for a long while, silence crackling like fields of electricity through the room. She didn’t understand Lola and Helen. She didn’t understand Camden. She didn’t understand herself. It was as if Lola were reading her mind. She laid beside Harley in the hospital bed and turned on her side.

“I’ll tell you what I know you’re dying to know if you tell me what you know I’m dying to know.”

It took Harley a second to sort out the statement. She nodded after she had it all untangled. Lola began: “Helen and your dad met in my bar.” Harley’s mouth fell open. “I know, I know. I almost feel responsible. But the three of us were buds for a while. It was at a time when I was seriously considering giving up the brothel. It was a lot of work and, yes, risky as hell. I went to Helen for advice and she flipped shit. Told her then fiancé, your old man, that he shouldn’t associate with me. Called me all sorts of things. Turned my brotherin-law on me. You can never forgive a person for something like that.”

Harley shut her eyes. “Seems Helen’s done a lot of unforgiveable things.”

“Yah, she has. Speaking of which, it’s your turn.”

“She wrecked our car one morning. It wasn’t even icy or dark. I didn’t know what was happening at that point. That was a year ago. It was only a couple of months ago I realized she staged an accident. Found out some way to get easy insurance money. I mean, we hadn’t been very well off since the wedding, and I guess when she was filling shit out for the insurance company, she lied again and told them the car had less miles on it than it did. That part seems harmless, right? But they found out.

They caught her. And the damn car was in his name. So he's the one that had to go. He signed because he trusted her. He actually fucking loved and trusted her and now he’s in prison and she is here. Free.”

“She wrecked your dad’s car to get some petty cash?”

“Basically. I don’t even think she cared that she got her husband put in jail. All she wanted was the money.” Lola shook her head, twisting her lips into a frown of disbelief and disgust. “The woman is nuts, Lola. She’ll do anything to get what she wants. She wanted money, she crashed the car. She wanted a quiet home, she abandoned her husband’s youngest daughter. She only kept me around so she could 93

force me to clean up around the house and sort out the bills.”

“Your not a slave, you’re her stepdaughter.”

“Don’t waste your breath on me. Tell it to—Helen?”

Harley saw someone standing in the doorway with sweat pants and a cream velour jacket. Helen took a step further into the room, her gaze magnetized to the toes of her spotless tennis shoes. Lola stood, her arms laying defensively across her chest, but Harley waved her hand to tell Lola it was okay. “What are you doing?”

“I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“No really. Why are you here?”

“That’s really why I’m here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Lola walked toward the door, motioning to Harley that she would be out in the hallway. “If you need me.”

Helen grabbed the back of the chair that sat directly beside Harley’s bed and pulled it a safe distance back before setting her purse down and taking a seat. “Feeling alright?” she said.

“Not really.” She watched Helen, puzzled, as she took up the glass of water from the table beside her, wetting her cracked and sticky lips. “So what do you want this time? Have dishes that need washed? Laundry that needs done? You know, I did the laundry for Lola, I’m much more competent—” “Look Harley, are you done yet? Cause I want to say something to you and I’m this close to just leaving.”

After Helen pinched her fingers together and finally made eye contact, Harley realized she wasn’t lying. “I’m done.”

“Good.” Helen said. She fiddled around with a tissue that she pulled from her purse, practically shredding it with her fingers before lifting it to her face and dabbing at her nose. "Spring allergies." Harley nodded, awkward silence humming in her eardrums. "I talked to Martin."

"Dad? About what?"

Helen shrugged to throw up a nonchalant façade, but Harley’s spidey-senses tingled. "You mostly,” Helen said. “He near died when I told him about it all. At least, he 94

sounded pretty upset over the phone."

"You didn't even tell him face to face?"

"I hate going in there, Harley. You know that. You don’t even like going.”

Harley knew this was true. She had only went to visit him in the prison once, and she vowed after that trip that she would never find herself there again. Something about the Plexiglas and wire, the orange, the clanking metal of doors. The loneliness in the prisoner’s faces. Often, the regret. Harley hated regret. It was a sentiment she found herself swimming in all too frequently.

“But we won’t have to worry about that much longer.”

“I don’t like you being indirect with me when it concerns my family.”

“They’re moving him into a half-way house,” she said. “Today.”

Harley’s heart pranced around inside her ribcage like a sack of jumping beans.

A halfway house meant he was residential. That there weren't any guards or bars.

That she could go visit him. Most importantly, that he could come home soon. “How? Why? I didn't think halfway houses were for insurance frauds.”

“They usually aren't. I'm thinking it was a space issue. But either way, he's out of jail. He got lucky. Can’t say as much for you, unfortunately.”

The jumping beans suddenly all went dormant.

“He was that upset?”

“How would you react if you just found out your daughter had been missing for almost two months, has been living in a bar in the middle of downtown, has been getting friendly with whores, and is now in a hospital bed recovering from having plastic tubes vacuum out all the drugs she’s been on?” Helen said this with a surprisingly light and sarcastic air. “I’d say he has good reason to be a little more than upset.”

“You told him all of that.”

“Everything of it that I knew at the time. Still don’t know the whole story.”

“Not sure you want to.”

“I don’t. Don’t care much either way. That’s not the point.” Helen shifted in her chair. "I told him some other things too."

"The car?" Harley watched Helen lift her purse from the ground again, this time 95

taking out her pack of Marlboros and a lighter. “Helen, it’s a hospital. I’ll tell.” She poised her hand threateningly over a red button beside the bed.

Helen glared, throwing the cigarette she had pulled from the box against the wall, and shoving the box and lighter forcefully back into the purse. “Yes, the car, but he already knew about that.”

“What about Monica?”

While nodding lightly, she licked her lips and spat out words that sent spasms through Harley’s heart. "We're getting a divorce."

“Because of the Monica thing?”

“Among others. It was a mutual decision.”

“Can’t deny I’m glad.”

Of any insult Harley had ever spat at Helen—and there had been plenty— something in this statement made her face fall. “You’ve never liked me. Not from the start.”

“You never liked me, either.”

“You never gave me reason to.”

“Isn’t being a stepdaughter reason enough?”

Helen frowned. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Harley knew this argument could last for weeks, if they let it. She wasn’t about to. “You got my dad put away. You sent my sister away. You didn’t care when I left myself. You can’t tell me I’ve destroyed your life in that same way.”

“You’ve spent every moment since the first time you saw me sizing me up against your mother and I’ve done everything in my power to be as different from her as possible. To be my own person. Not a mother, not even a wife.” Helen stood from the chair and picked up her purse. She walked over to the cigarette she threw against a wall, picking it up and placing it fiercely between her lips. “I know I’m not taking Marissa’s place, so stop thinking I’m trying to, and I think when you do that, you’ll see I’m not half as bad as you make me out to be.”

Lola peeked her head into the room just as Helen reached the doorway. Harley shouted, “Helen—“ and, for a moment she turned around.

Removing the cigarette from her pursed lips, she said, “If you decide to ever 96

come home, I’ll be there waiting. “ *

*

*

Harley played with the ratty edges of the woven placemat, the folding chair cold and hard on her rear. Her hair hung in greasy strands in front of her eyes. A small plate of cold lo-mein got even colder, sitting untouched, in front of her. The kitchen sink faucet dripped regularly, even more regular that Harley's own pulse. She was startled when Lola sat down beside her, stealing Harley’s chopsticks and slurping up a noodle.

“I’m all packed up to leave,” she said, noodle still dangling from her lips. She lifted a near-empty tote bag to the table and Harley saw in it a toothbrush, two romance novels, a planner fringed with torn pages, photographs, and post-it notes, and at the bottom of the bag, a few pairs of plain cotton underwear. She unconsciously contrasted it to her duffle she had arrived at Blush with that afternoon that seemed forever ago. Seeing the pathetic suitcase brought a new sense of reality to Harley.

“Please don’t go, Lola.”

“Big Brother says I have to.” She lifted her leg and tapped her clunky anklet with a chopstick.

Harley pushed her plate of food away from her. Lola reached forward and put her arms around Harley’s neck. She petted her hair and let Harley nuzzle her nose into the area below her ear, sticky tears dampening her earlobe. Harley ignored the near60-year-old bralessness, focusing on the calming cucumber anti-aging cream smell of her neck.

"Why hasn’t he come to visit me since I’ve been out, Lola? I mean, I don’t even know if I want him anymore. Especially if he wants…if he wants her. I just, I need someone.”

“You need Camden? Are you sure it’s Camden you need?”

“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment, running all possible options through her mind. She didn’t need Helen, and she was out of her life anyway. She didn’t need Camille, for although she loved her company, she knew the girl was the cause of 97

everything that had most recently went wrong in her life. “No. I need dad. I need him home so I can have a real life again. He’s innocent and I want him back.”

“He’ll be home soon.”

“But he’s only one part of the picture now. I need you. But they’re coming to take you away in, what, and hour?" Harley scrunched her nose, trying to stop the tears that were putting pressure behind her eyes. "And I have a little sister that's unreachable, three states away, that needs her family."

Lola watched Harley intently through her speech, her age-speckled eyes dampening. "No one should have to go thought what you're going through, sugar." She mopped at her face with the fabric of her sleeve, then lifted it to Harley, teling her to blow her nose. Helen never would have offered her sleeve as a tissue to anyone.

"Most of all," Harley sniffled, "I miss her." All at once, she began to bawl. She bawled harder and more freely than she ever remembered. Its was as if any tears she had been hoarding somewhere in her tear ducts, from Marissa’s funeral to now, were suddenly forcing their way out in massive splashes. She realized now that she didn't talk about her mother as much as she should. No even about the big issues let alone the little details that Harley seemed to remember most: the milky smell of her neck, they way she parted her hair on the side to make the roots less noticeable, her homemade butterscotch cookies.

Someone over both of their shoulder’s cleared his throat and Harley looked up, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.

Lola snorted. “First Helen, now him. I’m going to start believing in God if all this appearing-after-we-talk-about-them business keeps up.”

Camden stood in the doorway. He started to walk forward cautiously, not sure if he was wanted. As Harley began to stand up, he took this as his queue and rushed in, throwing his arms around her neck and kissing her temples. She gently pushed him off.

"I don't know how much I really feel like seeing you right now."

"Well I need to see you, so you're going to deal. I thought you were dead for Christ sake, cut me slack, Har." "You don't deserve to be cut anything."

"Harley, you don't understand."

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She took a step backwards, away from Camden. "I understand that you were holding hands with Sheila when I saw you guys. And don't try to play me for ignorance.

I know what I saw no matter how fucked up I was."

"She came back to Mile's and my apartment to get some stuff and I was going to walk her to the bus station. You have to listen to me, Harley. I don't love her anymore. You made absolute sure of that." He smiled at her. She didn't smile back. "We were just talking about you when you…when we saw you on the curb. I was telling her about your smile."

"How dare you. You're mocking me."

"Mocking you? Jesus, Har, how am I—" "Camden," She felt like spiting him. Spiting him harder than he spited her.

"There's something I need to tell you that I should've told you right off the bat." Harley licked her lips, trying to convince her mouth that it was capable of saying what she was about to say. "I'm seventeen."

"What?"

"I'm not nineteen, I'm seventeen."

“I know.” He hesitated for only a moment before taking a step toward her, his hands outstretched.

“You know? How the fuck do you know?” She slapped his hands away.

"It doesn't matter, I'll wait until you're eighteen if I have—“ "Jesus, Cam, didn't you hear what I said?" She stepped even further back now, backing herself against a wall, squeezing her fists so tightly that she felt her knuckles might burst through the cracked and clammy skin. "I’m seven-fucking-teen! I’m seventeen and your 25 and that’s a big goddamn difference!” Her small chest was heaving with broken inhalations.

“I know.” He exhaled deeply, shutting his eyes. His lip twitched and a vein in his neck was throbbing. "Lola told me when I came to the hospital. I just…I just wanted to see if you would tell me yourself."

“Well why haven’t you come to see me all week? I’ve been out since Monday, you know!”

“I’ve been…busy.”

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“Busy? Busy doing what? Busy fucking Shiela? Busy making up excuses as to why you’re you can’t be with my any more?”

“Sheila’s gone, Har. She’s long gone. Since Tuesday. California. And why would I be making excuses of my own when I’ve been trying to ignore the one you’ve already given me? So what if you’re seventeen? You’re a stronger person that half the thirtyyear-olds I know. And you’ll be eighteen soon. An adult. We’ll start over. Rent an apartment. Get a rabbit.”

He kissed her forehead.

She hit him on the cheek, four pink welts slowly appearing across the stretch of skin beside his mouth. "You’re sitting here talking about the future. And for what? Why do you still want me? I'm a fucking failure. I'm a waste of flesh. I don't deserve to be loved." Camden retracted for a moment, shaking his head.

"If you don't deserve to be loved, no one does."

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you ought to have the best life ever. You merit mansions, swimming pools, family feasts around a maple dinner table. But here you are stuck with this crumby, broken thing, trying to be strong for everyone else. I want to help you in any way I can.”

“You can’t do anything to help.”

“I think I already have.” Harley looked at Camden with curious, sleep-deprived eyes. “I Google searched summer boarding schools in Maryland. There was only one. So I called.” He reached a hand deep into the crammed front pocket of his pants and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Harley felt her stomach pump full of helium; her organs were rising in her throat. Holding out the paper, he said, “Here’s the withdrawal confirmation slip that says we can pick your sister up as early as Sunday.”

Harley breathed in the mucus in her nose from the crying, her sobs in series of short inhales that shook her chest. She forgot about the anger she had for Camden, if only for a moment. They held each other for a while, Harley's nasal passages making obscene noises, Camden not caring, wiping the sweaty hair from her face and touching his lips to it. "Do you forgive me?”

Pausing for only enough to make Camden’s eyebrows pinch together in a 100

pleading gesture, she lifted her head and said, “Enough.” She smiled at him for the first time. He smiled back until his head cocked to the side, recalling something, perhaps.

“Oh. Har? I was wondering. Why did you tell me you hated me that night?" She thought back for a moment, at first not finding to possible to remember anything from that night. Then the words snagged on her mental fishing line and she remembered what had been going on in her head.

"I…wasn't talking to you."

"Then who were you—" "Me. I was talking to me.” Her words were slow and deliberate. “But,” she continued with a delicate smirk, “I think my prospects are brightening now." *

*

*

Harley felt a strange sense of completeness, as if everything in life had suddenly come full circle, as she moved some of the last bottles of Wild Turkey from the bar to the storage cupboard, her grey duffle again sitting on the table near the entrance of Blush. The cell phone Lola had left upstairs was pressed between Harley’s ear and shoulder as she transferred the bottles and glasses.

"Well, I'm glad the food is better there." She laughed into the receiver. "Really?

—He said that to you?—Oh dad, leave it up to you to find a job while in jail.—Yes, I'm fine. You only already asked me that about a thousand times.—I told you. I'm okay with going back there. Its only for a while.—" Camden pushed through the door, car keys jingling as he spun them around his pointer. Harley held her finger up to her lips and pointed to the phone. Mouthing "sorry", Camden crept exaggeratedly over to the first booth and sat on the table.

"Okay dad, I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to go.—I know, I miss you too.

So much.—Love you too.—Okay, now I really have to go!" Camden chuckled as Harley made exasperated faces at the ceiling. "Love you. Got to go. I'll come visit you later this week, okay?—Okay. Love you.—Love you three. Now goodbye." She looked up at Camden. "God, that man. If I didn't miss him so excruciatingly, I might have been tempted to hang up. That phone call was almost two hours! My ear hurts."

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"Can't blame him for loving you so much. Now, you ready to go pick up your sister?"

"I've been ready since she first left," she said, putting the cellular down on the bar counter and making another trip to the cupboard. "Unfortunately, I have some last-minute house-keeping to take care of. Don't want to leave the place a pigsty."

Camden went behind the bar to help Harley. The silence was broken only by the clanking of glass bottles bumping against each other and the jingle of Camden's keys that he had attached to his belt loop. "Damn, its pretty lonely here without Lola, isn't it?"

"Worse than lonely. It's like death. I've already had to turn away four people this morning. I hate letting people down. Honey, especially."

The woman that Harley would watch with curiosity when she first came to Blush, the one who stayed all day and threw back whisky shots like apple juice, the one that she made up depressing stories for, had come into the bar that morning at opening and sat at the counter. She refused to leave at first, demanding a shot glass.

Harley eventually had to sit on the stool beside her and coax her down by telling her the entire story of why the bar was closed, in detail. They ended up spending an hour together in front of the bar, and Honey revealed stories of her own. She did not, in fact, waste her adolescence on beer and sex, and actually, she lived a happy childhood in Maine and grew to be quite successful in the perfume business. She started coming to Blush while her latest eau de parfum—a subtle lavender fragrance with hints of jasmine and almond—was being passed, and she found it to be the only place she could sit back and unwind. The only place she could people-watch in peace. Being that her nameless creation was supposed to have a calming aroma, she called the cologne Blush. Her top seller. Unfortunately, things crashed from there. Both Blushes were her only constants in life. Harley couldn’t deny her disappointment that her hand-spun explanations of shelf-stocking in drug stores and tragic romances had been wrong, but she couldn't have picked a better person to have learned about before she had to go.

"Honey?"

"Oh, she's just this woman that comes every single day and stays from opening until almost seven. It's just the saddest thing."

102

"Gee. Lola sure knew how to pick the careers. Madam, babysitter of all Toledoalcoholics—" "But she was happy doing it," Harley said, closing the door to the cupboard. She looked around and then looked up at Camden. "I think that's it."

"So you're ready to go?" Harley nodded and hugged Camden.

Her face buried in the soft cotton of his tee-shirt, she sighed. "I can't believe that after all of this, I'm going back to Helen."

"I know. All that legal guardian bullshit. I told you, if you needed to, you could come live with me."

Harley pulled away and shook her head. "Face it. I'm a minor. And then with my little sister being around? Camden, I already told—" "I'm just saying. I know there's really no way out of going back to Helen. But, think about it like this. It's only until your dad comes home."

"But until then, we're just back to where we were."

"You know that's not true. You told me yourself you're a completely different person." She, undoubtedly, had changed. Maybe after the things said in the hospital room, things with Helen wouldn't even be as terrible. Still, it wasn't what Harley had been hoping for.

"Thanks for doing this for me, Cam." Waving his hand, he said, "What's a little tri-state, gas-draining, sister-rescue mission between friends?" Camden squinched up his nose as he made this thoroughly sarcastic claim.

"So, that's what we are? Friends?"

"At least for now. That's what you wanted, isn't it?"

"I guess."

"Until you're eighteen."

Booger sat mewing in his carrying cage beside Harley's duffle bag. Camden grunted as he lifted the obese creature. "Of all the things Lola had to leave behind."

Booger hissed as his balance was thrown off by the swinging of his box. Harley brought her duffle out, following Camden, and swung it into the trunk of his car. Booger was placed carefully in the back seat. To comfort him, she stuck two fingers between the 103

metal bars and stroked the cat's squashed nose. He nipped lovingly at them.

Running back into the bar one last time, Harley breathed in the Palmolive musk and savored it as if it was the most delicate bouquet. Before leaving, Harley switched off the flickering neon sign in the front window. She wouldn't want to waste electricity.

With all of the light switches down, the bar was flooded with a lonely darkness that she had never seen before, not even on the nights she'd go upstairs to the apartment late and stop in at the closed counter to refill her flask or restack the ashtrays. The lights were turned out then, but this was a different kind of darkness. This was the kind of darkness that knew it wouldn't be lit by fluorescent bulbs the next day for opening hour.

Harley turned her back to the street and looked up into the purple glass tubes that spelled Blush. She saw her distorted reflection in the tubing, the way it stretched out her face to be oblong like a violet hotdog. It made her laugh. Closing the door, Harley pushed the key into the lock and twisted it, with steady fingers, until she heard it click.

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