Israel was living up to my expectations, based on my perusal of the tour’s website. Skyscrapers only a few miles away followed through on promises of Tel Aviv’s vibrant nightlife: their shiny windows winked knowingly at the sunset. I could see the city, yet this beach was as pure as a Beach Boys song or surfer movie’s idealization of a beach: the deep, aggressive blue of the Mediterranean invading the bleached sand that was not quite hot enough to burn the soles of my feet, but hot enough to make me think about every step. I’d come here to find out how glamorous it was to be Jewish. I’d come here to fall in love with my own reflection by seeing faces similar to my own and my relatives’. I’d come here to feel like my life was more like a movie. That glorious late afternoon on the beach, though, didn’t really prepare me for the genre this movie actually belonged in.

Supposedly, the tour kept us so busy and sleep-deprived that we would become brainwashed Zionists (that is, not necessarily but optimally religious Jews, and political supporters of Israel) and populate the world with Jewish babies (a goal that’s tough to quibble about, less than a century removed from the Holocaust). I read that on a website after I took the trip. I don’t know if it’s true. It’s almost like a technique you’d hear about being used in Guantanamo. But by the time we got to the fake Bedouin camp, we’d spent an exhausting day shopping at a dreary mall with a food court that served excellent falafel. Since my abusive boyfriend had “borrowed” all my spending money, I’d spent the day window-shopping instead, which may have contributed to my bitter attitude. Then we’d traipsed through sand dunes and caves, which were eerily reminiscent of hikes I’d been on in Tucson.

Now it was time for another “adventure,” when I would have been ready to trade my soul for a nap and some bottled water. I had to refill my bottle with tap water. There were things floating in it. Too big for an amoeba, I would assure myself every time I took a swig. Probably harmless sediment.

I was in Israel thanks to the largess of a program called Birthright Israel, funded partially by the Israeli government, partially by private Jewish donors, which provides young adults of Jewish ancestry with a free 10-day tour of Israel. To qualify for the trip, you merely need to say that one or both of your parents is Jewish. I qualified in a five-minute phone call. I’m not sure how rigorous the process is for people without a “Gubernick” in their surname, though. You can tell there’s a political agenda by the “Birthright” in the name. Almost as obvious as calling a program working with Native American youth “Operation Reverse Manifest Destiny.” We’d get in touch with our heritage by doing things like, well, camel rides. I asked if I could skip it. They said no. We had to do everything as a group; we were always accompanied by two soldiers and a medic. Strange how much less exciting guns and uniforms and orders were, in this context.
There were twice as many Jewish tourist kids as there were camels. So half of us followed the camel riders down a trail; they explained that we’d get to ride back to camp as the others walked. Right when we arrived at the camel-switching point, I was seized with a “bathroom emergency.” Considering the foreign country and upset bacterial balance, yadda yadda, this attack of diarrhea was neither unexpected nor unique to this trip. However, this was the only time I suffered this indignity without access to a toilet, or even toilet paper. There wasn’t so much as a tree to hide behind! Instead, the tour guide, rolling her eyes, so tired of putting up with me, just like my parents, just like my boyfriend, told me to content myself with climbing down a hill a little ways away from the rest of the group. And…not being able to wipe. At all. There were no leaves – just rocks!
So…time to return to the camels! I protested, weakly, that I wasn’t in the mood for a camel ride. Having been something of a poor sport the entire trip, everyone basically insisted that I participate. I hopped up on the camel, hoping no one could see the brown spot that I was sure was spreading over the seat of the pants, and proceeded to bounce and squish back down the trail, in what felt like an interminable journey back to camp.
I feel bad for the camel, first and foremost. There was no saddle, and I imagine any shit transferred might have been difficult to detect, and remove. I also feel embarrassed about the possibility that anyone else in the group might have seen the recent pile of diarrhea, lurking not too far down a hill that everyone walked past. But man, the shower afterwards? The cleanest I had ever felt.

They continued the routine with some “Bedouin hospitality,” which consisted of sitting awkwardly on mealy cushions while drinking too-sweet tea and listening to boring stories. At first, I’d found this terribly tortuous, but after about an hour, it became soothing; it was almost ritualistic. It was like being read a cultural bedtime story. We were empty, naive American vessels to be filled with messages of cultural tolerance, but especially tolerance for our culture.

During this trip, we spent time with the friendly Arabs, the Bedouins here, and later the Druze, but never met a Palestinian. Most of what I knew about Arabs, I’d learned from my boyfriend, whose father was from Iran. I hate even setting this down in type; what a stereotypical relationship we had.

We went to the Wailing Wall; there were no atheists or agnostics on this tour; I was, but I had started to wonder if maybe I had been worshipping the wrong things instead. We went to the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, and I was the only one who cried. The empty naive vessels were numb and glassy-eyed from hard drinking that, as 18-year-olds, they seemed less used to than I was. I was feeling positively clear-headed from drinking without smoking pot. Everything smelled so clean, even the disgusting tap water, even the camels. Everything smelled new.

After a long, taxing day, you’d think that at least I got a good night’s sleep in our faux Bedouin tent. Nope. A scorpion stung one of the boys. Things got ugly. The kid threatened to “sue you Birthright motherfuckers.” He cried. He railed. He was afraid he was going to die. He wanted to go to the hospital; they insisted that their medic was up to the challenge. I was too tired to care. If it was a Guantanamo-esque, dehumanizing experience, perhaps that explains why all I could think was, They’re going to wake us up at three, jerk! There’s something about being in an authoritarian situation that makes you play those tired Stanford Prison Experiment roles. I was an expert at being a prisoner. Maybe it was time for me to graduate to being a guard.
They woke us up at three in the morning because we were supposed to watch the sunrise from atop Masada, an ancient Roman ruin. Although I was super grouchy from sleep deprivation at this point, sort of a young, Jewish, female, non-crippled, non-Vicodin-addicted Dr. House, I was looking forward to seeing Masada. I’d seen a movie of the same title. Before I’d had to drop out of school to support my boyfriend, I’d been a Classics minor (studies that I’ve since returned to). I was fascinated by anything that has to do with Ancient Rome. Even if it was, you know, this creepy Jonestown-esque scenario where my ancestors would’ve rather drunk the special Kool-Aid than submit to Roman rule.
The ride to Masada was nauseating. Our tour bus driver wasn’t the most reliable driver in history. Truth be told, he’d literally gotten in an accident leaving the parking lot the first day of the trip. He glibly accelerated around bracing turns. Two of my tour-mates threw up. As we stumbled out of the bus into the darkness from which we were told rose the ruins of Masada, the tour guide helpfully informed us that Israelis call that stretch of highway “the vomit road.”
There’s a contraption that takes tourists up and down Masada. Sort of like a ski lift. I can’t really describe it in better detail, because we didn’t get to take it. All the way up, I was sure I was going to die of being a fat kid climbing stairs for two hours. All the way down, I was sure I was going to die of acrophobia. Perhaps that sounds impressive to you. A medical condition of some kind that you can pity me for, and rejoice that I was able to survive. Well, it’s just the term for fear of heights. Sadly, there is no more specific Greek word for “fear of slipping on unpaved path and plunging to your dusty, sweaty death.”

Yet the time that I actually spent on Masada was one of the most perfect mornings of my life. The sunrise was as beautiful as the hype had promised, and afterwards, the way the sun warmed the ancient ruins thrummed and droned in the back of my consciousness like a didgeridoo. We listened to stories of martyrdom and religious zealotry, but they didn’t bother me; these may have been my ancestors, but were as distant from me as Genghis Khan, who is said to be an ancestor of a third of today’s humans. I stared harder than anyone at the faded, dusty colors, cornflower blue and brick red, on the Roman tiles in the baths. I imagined bathing in Roman baths, speaking Latin, speaking Hebrew. Our tour guide taught us a curse word in Hebrew: kusit is what you call a pretty girl. It comes from the word kus, or “cunt.” If you want to flatter a pretty girl in Israel, you call her a cunt. Then again, wasn’t that a lesson I’d been taught in English for years of my life?

That evening, we went on a cruise. There was some dancing; I did not dance; the water made me feel sick and heavy. One Puerto Rican couple danced so glamorously they reminded me of Gomez and Morticia Addams. I wanted to be that in love with someone some day. I sat off to the side and gossiped with Micha, a teacher from San Francisco who encouraged me to dump my boyfriend and embrace the homo half of my bisexual roots. I took sneaky glances at and exchanged music recommendations with a boy with whom I’d been drinking and flirting the whole trip. Micha pointed out that either way, I’d be better off dumping the jerk. I remember the night as being bright and starry, like the snapshot posted to the trip’s website. Simultaneously, I remember it as being foggy and overcast, choking me with moisture, swathing my too-casual, too-poor dress in vague humidity. I would like to live in the world of 1984, I think. I would be amazing at Doublethink.

Another personal victory, especially after confronting my fear of heights, was climbing a thousand-foot waterfall. I’d never been okay with climbing so much as a ladder. Yet somehow, I managed to clamber over slippery rocks in my ill-chosen sandals, and still smile when I see a picture a friend took of my Mohawked, NIN-shirted self trudging up like I was leaving Hell.

On the way back, I lagged behind the group, next to the medic, who kept encouraging me to keep going. He barely spoke English, and barely spoke to anyone except the tour guide and bus driver even in Hebrew, so when he looked back at me and muttered something, my first reaction was to flinch: was he cursing at my slowness and fatness and general spoiled American indolence? I remembered a night a few weeks before, when I’d locked my keys in the car outside an Italian restaurant, where I’d enjoyed what was supposed to be a romantic date night with my boyfriend. “It’s no big deal,” I’d said. “I got a hide-a-key, see?” But the little faux-velvet box, the only box of that kind that I’d see during my time with my boyfriend, had swung open over some bump in the rode: empty. We waited about half an hour for my parents to rescue me with the spare key. My boyfriend excoriated me the whole time for my stupidity and thoughtlessness. My parents pretended not to see my tears, or my fresh-and-fading-alike bruises. It isn’t until I type this, now, that it occurs to me that perhaps what he was really angry about was wrecking his car and losing his license and having to ask me to drive him everywhere. I could have left him so easily, then.

In any case, when the shy tour guide repeated himself, I had been completely wrong. “Your hair,” he said. His fingers danced in a rebellious, somewhat mischievous spike, miming a Mohawk. “I wanted to tell you. Beautiful.”

The next day, we visited the Dead Sea, where the water was too salty to allow you to submerge yourself, and too bitter to let in your eyes or mouth or “open wounds;” the girls who shaved their legs that day suffered. If we had visited it on my first day, I too would have suffered, although I probably would have been too ashamed of my “open wounds” to undress and go in, despite the healing reputedly promised. I wondered whether mermaids could defy the laws of physics to swim in it, and lurked at the bottom, laughing at the tourists, looking away from the women with mastectomies, or the girls with whip marks on their backs.

A few days later, I got my first and only tan. Here in Arizona, the sunlight is so intense that I’ll burn in minutes, whether I’m slathered in sunscreen or not. On my Birthright trip, I stayed at a lush resort in Jerusalem, with sumptuous gardens, an Olympic pool, tastefully decorated suites, and lounge chairs that I spent hours sunbathing in one Saturday. That’s right: Birthright JAP (an unkind, somewhat outdated term that stands for “Jewish American Princess”). The fanciest place I’d ever stayed at before was a Motel 6!
We were effectively under house arrest – already hamstrung by the lack of freedom on the state-sponsored tour (we couldn’t wander off by ourselves, and were accompanied by armed soldiers for, ahem, our safety), we were informed that we couldn’t leave the hotel for the duration of the Sabbath. They told us that the entire country effectively shuts down between sundown Friday and Saturday, although I suspect that if left to my own devices, I might have been able to locate a heathen dance club in Tel Aviv. We had a big Shabbat dinner, and then retired to our rooms to do what any group of teenagers staying at a resort for free do – drinking games! For some reason, the only beer we could ever find in Israel was Heineken. Maybe they were a sponsor for the tour. The next day, our breakfast was cold and delicious – bagels, cheese, fruit, vegetables. We had the same meal for lunch, since cooking on the Sabbath is verboten. My tour-mates and I wandered, similarly bored and hung over, everywhere from the gardens to the sauna to the pool. Micha and I treaded water and traded coming out stories. My roommate, who had met me only a week before, told me that I was the most honest person she knew; she clearly didn’t know me at all.

My fondest memory of the day was absorbing the sun’s soothing warmth in a lounge chair while reading a mediocre horror novel. I hated wearing bathing suits; my family had always teased me for being fat, which, ironically, I had not been at all as a child or teenager: I was anorexic and didn’t weigh over 110 pounds until I moved in with my boyfriend. Even when I could get over feeling fat, though, I would still hate feeling naked and on display. Here, though, it didn’t matter. I was among strangers who found me interesting and cool and, apparently, “honest.” I enjoyed feeling physically present in my body. I enjoyed having nothing to cringe from.

As the sun went down and we had to gather for some educational candle-lighting boorishness, everyone commented on how much sun I got. I imagined the figure of speech literally: reaching out and greedily taking the sun, all for my own, rubbing it along my face and back and arms until I glowed with lasting warmth. I was optimistic, despite their warnings that I’d be burnt in the morning. (Since my sunburns are generally of the instant variety, I had a feeling something better would happen.) I was used to brushing off warnings at that point. I wasn’t used to my stubborn refusal to follow advice resulting in anything but disappointment, yet I woke up the color of a sabra, the color of a warrior, the color of someone new.

We had a farewell meeting where we went in a circle and shared a final thought about our Birthright experience. I said that I was thankful to have done the outdoors trip (I could have chosen one with say, an art or political or religious focus, instead), since I’d have such vivid, kinesthetic memories of things like climbing waterfalls and ascending Masada.  My roommate told me that she loved the way I put it. I’d put aside any ambitions of using words powerfully; I had learned silence. I had learned to have power taken from me with words. I started to wonder what would happen if I started talking again. If I started writing again.
When I returned from Israel, I was fifteen pounds lighter (thanks to mandatory physical activity and those yummy breakfasts) and the color of a normal human being. I don’t just mean that my skin was tan. It was unmarked aside from bruises and scrapes earned honestly through fun physical labor, not from the kind of “games” that left me nauseated and self-loathing afterward.

I didn’t discover a “birthright” in the sense that I became a Zionist, or even more religious than I had been before. I didn’t even discover a backbone, in the sense that when my boyfriend picked me up at the airport, in my car which I’d let him borrow during my trip, he spent an hour yelling at me for my inconsiderateness in making him come get me in the middle of the night, after my flight was delayed, and I spent an hour apologizing. After sleeping for a few hours, I was dreaming of having sex with the boy from the trip; I woke up and heard myself moaning in a way that I never had before. I realized it was just my boyfriend, feeling me up. I cringed. Again. Maybe the Dead Sea hadn’t healed what was broken inside me, after all. I was still floating, trying desperately to get my head underwater, like a mermaid drowning in too much air.

Within two months of this trip, though, I’d left my boyfriend and moved to Phoenix. If I hadn’t spent those ten days alone, I wouldn’t have believed I could spend the rest of my life without him. If I hadn’t ridden those camels, I wouldn’t have realized that I don’t enjoy humiliation nearly as much as I thought I did for those marijuana-hazed desperate years. If I hadn’t climbed Masada, maybe I would never have remembered how much learning is important to me; how important it is to give up futile battles and learn from the past. If I hadn’t climbed that waterfall, I couldn’t have driven a hundred miles away from him.

Maybe the best way to do this writing exercise would be to tell the story of a funeral for someone who had no one mourning her at all. There is a problem, though. Who are these fifteen characters telling the story going to be? It’s interesting that I would immediately be interested in this Eleanor Rigby-esque pathetic character. Maybe I’m depressed.

2. The Editor

Oh, great. Another short story that came from a writing exercise. Am I getting paid to read this? At least I don’t have to smell the formaldehyde. Or sit in a chair awkwardly next to people I don’t really know. And try desperately not to get the giggles. I hope all the paragraphs are as short as that first one.

3. The Funeral Home Attendant

When this body arrived I was annoyed. I was hoping that my overnight shift would give me a chance to sleep. When they brought the body in and I cataloged its clothing, I kept a few things. Twenty dollars from the wallet, and a movie ticket stub from the pocket. Yes, I said “the pocket,” “the body,” and so forth. What does it matter, if it’s a she? Do I look like a necrophiliac to you?

4. The Coffin

You and I are going to be touching for such a long time. Maybe after a while neither one of us will feel the other. Maybe after a while you will hold me as much as I hold you. You are heavy and will grow light. I am dense and will grow brittle. I look forward to the darkness and the quiet. It will be more like being a tree. Perhaps I will yearn for the faint warmth I feel during the day. I ache for the sun. I ache for fresh air. But at least I will not be so alone. I will not feel so mutilated and ridiculous. I will not be stared at. I will be I will be I will be around you you you.

5. The Obituary Writer

What can you do with an MFA in Creative Writing? Well, this. It’s like any form. You become comfortable within its rhythms and feel the openings to stretch the limits. And you can do it in your pajamas. That’s something.

6. The Gravedigger

I hope she’s not pregnant. I hope she’s not pregnant. Jesus, if she’s pregnant. Why can’t she be like this stupid bitch. Dead. Not anyone’s problem anymore. I hope she’s not. She’s a lying bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Cunt. Digging holes just reminds me of her, her, her, her. I hope she’s not. Not. Not.

7. The Florist

Why can’t people order flowers for something different? To celebrate the completion of a triathlon. To mourn the passing of a presidential administration. To poke into the showerhead and confuse your roommate in the morning while he’s still half-asleep. To give to prisoners. To sell to raise money for the NRA. I just want to feel challenged for once. I just want to care.

8. The Butterfly

Lovely lovely oh it’s dead. Oooh that’s not far and that looks lovely lovelylove.

9. The Reader

But who was this Jane Doe? Was she like me? Was she like someone I don’t like? This is weird. This is fun. I’m not a reader at all. I’m an author. Oh christ. Authorial intrusion. I’m not just depressed, I’m delusional.

10. The Forensic Investigator

Nothing suspicious here. I want to go home and have a nice long bath and some tea. I want to go home and fuck my wife so hard that I’m absolutely one hundred percent sure she’s alive. I want I want I want.

11. The Sparknotes Employee

Irony. Multiple points of view. Death. Repetition. I got an MA in English Lit for this? Maybe I’m depressed, too.

12. The Carpet

I like the lonely people the best because they don’t attract those other people who just want to step on me and oppress me and grind me down and spill their drinks on me and leave me without a backwards glance. Hey, #11? I’m the ultimate subaltern and I want to rise up. I want I want I want too!

13. The Coin

Someone superstitious put me in here, in this mouth. I will never get out of here. But I still know what I am. I am Lincoln. I am shiny. I have something written on my back. I will endure.

14. The Soul
.
.
.
.
.

15. Jane Doe

The end.

I never did find diaries, but I found a number of notebooks, with a clumsy childish version of her handwriting marching grimly along the pages, cataloging bizarre and unpleasant details about imaginary worlds. The first I read began with the premise of a colony living underground; its inhabitants never saw daylight, and subsisted on gritty lichen and water that tasted like licking a change purse. As I read further, it became clear that these were the survivors of some terrible war; anyone who dared to venture onto the surface came back a gibbering, mutated shell whom the other people had to kill.

One page was a fake diary entry written by one of the colonists; my mother had even gone so far as to disguise her own handwriting, replacing it with a jarringly angular hand; the T’s were spikes a medieval lord could have impaled enemies’ heads upon. “We gathered in the warm place again, although it is cooling. Soon we will have to find a new warm place. There seem to be less and less. Everything grows colder and colder. There is less food, and everyone moves more slowly. Although the adults pretend to be brave, I hear murmurings from the other children, about other people who have had to eat their dead.”

It reminded me of a documentary I had watched with my mother when I was growing up, an A&E special on the Donner Party. My mother had been fascinated by it and tried to engage me in conversation; I had had no appetite and fled to my room, where I listened to an Oasis CD over and over, as though it were a mantra that, if repeated in my room enough times, would turn my house into a normal house the next time I opened my bedroom door and walked out there, into the cold.

Another notebook was a fantasy novel about a tribe of people who were nomadic, living in leather tents and riding horses; the leather of the tents was made from the dead horses. The main character was described as an “expatriate” (I wonder where my mother had learned that term, and how old she must have been to use it) and was attracted to the leader of the tribe, and began having furtive trysts with him, in his tent. There was something suffocatingly vaginal about her word choice in describing the tents. I emerged from that notebook, guilty, as though I’d been looking at pornography, the nasty kind that I claim to look at only out of curiosity, or as though I’d been looking at a traffic accident, pretending to be concerned about the fate of the people who must have been pulled from the mangled, smoking wreckage, when really, the fires danced in my eyes.

I found letters, written in the second person. I was so frustrated by this. I’d explained to my boyfriend that my main purpose in doing this, in spending all this time returning to the past, wandering through my mother’s house like a ghost, was to discover the identity of my father. I wasn’t certain that this was true, even when I said this to him; it just seemed like a noble cause, or at least one that he’d have trouble disputing. If my father turned out to be a milkman, or a rapist, or a long-time family friend, I wasn’t sure how I would take any of that information, or if it would conceivably make my life better. Yet the fact that she wrote to someone with whom she’d clearly had a sexual relationship, yet withheld his identity, made me so angry that I actually crumpled that letter and threw it in the trash. The next day, I removed that trash bag and set it in the corner, not quite willing to regret my action, but nor was I willing to take out the trash and make that action permanent.

I still remember, of course, what that letter said. I can still see it, even when I close my eyes, throbbing bright across my mind. “I want to sit beside you, on the top of a grassy knoll on a fair day, sunshine warming me straight through to the backs of my knees. And then you just kiss me, your lips pressing hard over mine, you kiss me and kiss me until we are both young again.”

I found lists of names. Absolutely ridiculous names. I’d always disliked my name for seeming pretentiously clever (why yes, I am a walking literary reference, thank you so much for elucidating this for me; I’d thought I was named Harper because my mother enjoyed harp music), but after seeing these lists, I felt I’d got off lucky: Esmerelda, Mildred, Beaucoup, Chance. Each list had exactly nine names on it. One of them was always Harper. I don’t know why this made me so uneasy, but I assure you, it did.

Finally, my boyfriend broke up with me. He did it over the phone; I had been at the grocery store, and heard the phone ringing as I approached the house. In my haste to answer it, I dropped a bag and cantaloupe exploded everywhere. It was a rainy, slippery day and the hems of my pants were sodden and cold around my ankles when he called again and I picked up the cordless, still trying to clean up the sticky cantaloupe seeds. It was a bad way to begin the conversation: he was already frustrated with me for, in his view, willfully ignoring his phone calls (my protest that I’d been at the grocery store was claimed to be a lie, and since I’d lied so much to him, it was difficult for me to be anything other than the boy who’d cried wolf, at that point). He told me that he hated my name and would never say it again. He told me that I had just looked like an ex of his whom he’d liked better; she was, he pointed out, skinnier, and had smaller teeth.

This is my life, I said, to the dial tone. This is my life now.

I knew that it was time to finish this. I went to the drawer and clutched at the nest of keys, which writhed like maggots as I fished through them. There were enough keys to open up every lock in Buckingham Palace.

I clambered up the creaky ladder into the attic, thinking, if I slipped and broke my neck, now there is no one who would come looking for me. I tried key after key, flinging each down to the ground, hysterically, convinced that none of them would fit, resolving to force the damn thing if I had to. But then, an especially tarnished one fit, and with a hesitating groan, the trunk came open.

Oh, the smell. I nearly fainted. I thought it was some kind of mold; it seemed like dusty bedsheets were all the mysterious trunk had turned out to contain. But soon, I realized that they were wrapped around something. Tiny corpses. Some nothing more than an ancient, stiff, blood-sodden pair of panties: miscarriages, perhaps. Some tiny skeletons that surely could not have survived outside the womb: late-term miscarriages, I told myself. But at least three of them were full-term infants, and one of those, perhaps not even a newborn, but a baby of several months, maybe even a year. I wasn’t quite sure how many there were. But I knew that there were eight. I was the ninth. I was the one who’d survived. I was the one who read my mother’s words and was interested in what she left behind. This was my life. This was my life now.

Jane had been waiting for a while, but the only time she’d noticed the woman saying anything different, it was one word: “No.” It was to a saggy-jeaned boy who’d asked to borrow the twenty dollar fee. “Look, I really need this test. I made some really bad decisions last night,” he’d said. Jane had tried not to laugh out loud. Luckily she was so sad that she was able to tamp down the amusement into a ragged sigh. If she were a robot she would not have cried last night when her boyfriend accused her of cheating because he had a rash down there. If she were a robot she would have deduced, coolly, that since she hadn’t cheated on him, he must have cheated on her. Her robot self would have figured this out with a head-tilt at human idiocy, like Zachary Quinto as Spock, and then maybe she would have abandoned being a robot and turned into Zachary Quinto as Sylar and eaten his brains. Except that he didn’t have any super powers, so that would have been illogical and ultimately unsatisfying.

“Jane?” called a floppy-breasted nurse wearing scrubs covered with sad little balloons in a chicken pox pattern.

Jane stood, a little wobbly. She’d been there so long that she’d read every magazine left creased on the table, diagnosed everyone else in the waiting room with personality disorders, and imagined what the room would look like with a tiki theme. (There’d be astroturf instead of scuffed tiles, for one thing.) She put her book in her purse and followed the nurse down the hall.

She never weighed herself except when she was forced to at doctors’ offices. She wasn’t fat, a hundred and forty-three pounds and seven ounces, but she still saw the disapproving look in the nurse’s eyes as she chicken-scratched that information for posterity on Jane’s chart. Wouldn’t it be funny if that ended up being the only writing that survived out of the ruin of this civilization, like the Code of Hammurabi?

“Okay, just follow me, I’m going to ask you a few questions, then the doctor will be with you.”

It must take something out of nurses, to lie like that, to refuse to acknowledge the reality of waiting rooms, of shivering in paper outfits in examination rooms for bleak stretches, staring at models of the spinal cord and human reproductive system made by drug companies, and posters that promised you symptoms of popular diseases if you recited code words.

“Are you sexually active?”

“If I wasn’t, why would I be here?” Jane said. She reached into her purse and felt around until she found her book. She clutched it against her thigh, stroking its comforting dimensions; how easily she could snap its spine.

“Have you engaged in oral intercourse in the last six months?”

Was that the technical term? She’d always thought it was the Latin: fellatio. She liked that because it sounded friendly, like a diminutive of”fellow.” She was holding her Penguin 60 edition of The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. It was a surrealist story about a Russian fellow who lost his nose. Kind of like the detachable penis song, but great literature. She didn’t look at the book but she knew that it was orange. She wondered if things really had color if you weren’t looking at them. She’d read somewhere that all color is just an optical illusion.

“Have you engaged in vaginal intercourse in the last six months?”

A brief, easily suppressed urge to throw the book at the nurses face and give her paper cuts on the heavily-concealed bags under her eyes.

“Have you engaged in anal intercourse in the last six months?”

Jane felt blood rushing to her cheeks. Was that what it felt like to get an erection? That sudden shame, feeding itself, the knowledge of the shame making even more blood rush?

The nurse laughed. “Sorry, I’ll bet you knew that one was coming!”

Jane wished that the nurse would speak to her in Spanish, obviously her first language. If she were speaking Spanish, she would be more maternal and comforting, more casual, more slangy. She might offer her a cookie, or a trashy magazine to read while she waited. But she didn’t know the Spanish word for herpes. It already sounded like razor blade sticking out of the candied apple of her sentence, now, in English, as she explained why she was here. If she’d said “herpes” in the middle of a Spanish sentence she would have just stuttered to a stop and cried.

“The doctor will be right in,” the nurse said. Lies, lies, it would be an eternity, but the nurse didn’t have much choice. Probably some renegade nurses had, at some point in medical history, tried making jokes or telling the truth about wait times. Anarchy obviously must have ensued. Everything in a medical transaction had to be elaborately choreographed. It wasn’t like dating, which was more like reciting Madlibs to each other: you could say whatever you wanted, because neither of you really cared about anything besides whether or not you wanted to fuck, something determined by pheremones, not wit, and whether or not you felt like saying “I have a girlfriend” or “I have a boyfriend” at that particular point in your life.

She put on the silly outfit and sat down, stubbornly cross-legged and casual, refusing to play her role as the blocking indicated. She still had her book. Although she was too nervous to read, she flipped it to a page in the middle so that the doctor would see she was literate and that she didn’t belong here at all.

The doctor knocked and then opened the door before Jane could say “come in.” She would have said it, though, so she wasn’t sure why she felt so violated.

He asked her questions, made her lie back and then scoot forward. Why didn’t they put the pillow in the place where the girl’s head wound up, in a gynecological examination? Then she would have positioned herself properly the first time, without this awkward adjustment. Maybe the awkwardness was part of the script, too. Establish control. Jane shivered. He ignored her. He was used to girls shivering, obviously; he hadn’t bothered to warm the forceps, like a real gynecologist. This was her punishment, for not having health insurance, for having sex, for being a woman.
Adam and Eve, no, maybe Adam and Lilith.

He told her he’d be back after doing a culture. She was pretty sure that if he had material to do a culture of, that the test would be positive, but she didn’t cry when he left, and she didn’t cry when he came back with the bad news, and she didn’t cry alone in the room as she put her clothes back on.

She drove her car, which she had paid for but her boyfriend had picked out and had driven whenever he wanted, to the Garden of Gethsemane, a Catholic park off of Congress street, one dry riverbed away from the highway. How could the City of Tucson pay for a Catholic shrine? Separation of church and state?

She walked in; it was empty, except for the bees buzzing pointlessly around desiccated flowers. Marble casts of the Last Supper sat life-size around a table. It was hideous: two of the apostles had feet shaped like hands. It was also decrepit: Judas’ nose was missing. Beyond the table there was a diorama, mysteriously locked. Jane saw the padlock and tried to jimmy it open. She couldn’t help herself. Inside were what appeared to be action figures dressed up as Roman soldiers. Why was this locked up? Because they knew someone like her would be here, someone who would like a Roman soldier to live on the dashboard of her car, a car she hadn’t particularly wanted, but now would have forever because everything was just too hard and the inertia was like that feeling, right before sex with a stranger, when after hoping and wondering and the thrill of transgression, you realized you were really here, and really doing it, and wondered what the hell you were doing, and thought about how much nicer staying home and watching TV in your nice warm bed would have been, remembered that sleep is better than anything else in the world. Jane was getting tired of having the same epiphanies over and over. If she stayed here too late, would they lock her inside?

Jane had read some of the comics, and found them sanctimonious, unscientific, and distasteful. True, Jane’s scientific education began and ended with the library; she’d never so much as lit a Bunsen burner or dissected a frog. (Although she thought she might like to do the latter, at some point, just for fun. Viscous fluids, flesh vulnerable as a peeled shrimp, maps of blood vessels ever-branching.) Also true, Jane’s judgments of most people began with something superficial, such as body fat distribution, or a proferred brand name, or vocabulary used in a simple sentence, and then she built a more rational case by a process similar to the backformation of words. “Junkie,’ she could say dismissively about a celebrity who’d just come clean about their Oxycontin habit, a celebrity whom Jane had long been jealous of the thighs thereupon, yet a gentleman Jane knew who struggled nobly with heroin addiction might have the same label applied, but without the negative hiss that accompanied her judgment of the former. Similarly, the biggest reason that Jane disliked Leigh from the get-go was Leigh’s failure to attribute agency to her verbs: this was often incorrectly termed the passive voice by those college-educated nitwits who’d never had Ancient Greek and Latin crammed down their throats, or more populously to the point, was referred to as “weasel-words” on Wikipedia. Leigh wrote sentences like, “That house was under consideration,” or “That pizza got eaten.” Jane interpreted this as more of a moral failure in Leigh’s life to accept or attribute responsibility (for Jane was most sensitive to the faults in others that sheconsidered herself to be working diligently to overcome); this was only borne out by the events which culminated in jello wrestling in a hotel bathtub. God, that was a fun scene to draw, though. Jello and blood spatter everywhere, like CSI: Midwestern Church Potluck.

***

Jane checked in early so that she could take the bus to Powell’s bookstore. The last time she’d been in Portland, for an ill-fated “reunion” of people who’d never even gone to high school, she’d stayed at a funky youth hostel down the street from a smaller, cozier branch of Powells. She’d eaten pancakes for breakfast and hoped that the hippie who’d made them had washed her hands. Now she was bigtime, with the con putting her up at the Hilton, and headed to a Powell’s so big one story couldn’t handle it.

She sat on the back of the bus, having climbed up the stairs of a raised platform, so that she could survey the peons like Xerxes in The 300. She listened to the Natural Born Killers soundtrack on her iPhone, volume turned liminally low so that she could eavesdrop. Two men below her were drinking sloppily from beer cans and overusing the word fuck. The bus stopped and the bus driver, a black woman built like a pigeon, short thin legs and big wide feet jutting out from a body covered in a plumage-like daishiki, let the wheelchair ramp down for a woman on a walker. The woman was Hispanic and ancient, with a face covered by enormous starlet sunglasses, like two vast lakes amid the topographic map formed by her dry wrinkles, and wearing a dingy polka-dotted sundress that looked like woven leprosy.

The Hispanic woman shuffled over to the first bench and people made room for her. She picked at a scab on her spider-veined calf just below her knee. The bus moved along and Patti Smith, done screeching the word nigger triumphantly, faded to the Cowboy Junkies, tickling Jane’s ears: their cover of the Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane. This was one of her favorite songs, never mind that she wasn’t at all sweet.

The lady’s scab burst open; blood and rotten black debris exploded in a small bottlerocket-sized mess. The driver stopped the bus and took a look; the Hispanic lady insisted she was fine.

“Take off your damn glasses and look at the thing,” the bus driver said. Her voice even sounded like a pigeon’s coo, weak and annoying.

“Oh, no, fine, don’t, I’m, fine,” the lady muttered.

“Attention please, we’ll have to wait here for the paramedics,” the bus driver said.

“Bitch,” someone said. Jane couldn’t make out who it was.

“Do you have the die-a-bee-tis?” the bus driver asked after she finished with her walkie-talkie business.

“No?” the lady said.

“I’m going to puke,” a pudgy, snaggletoothed kid of indeterminate gender a few benches behind Jane said. The driver, maybe in response, opened the back door of the bus; Jane had never been so grateful to inhale exhaust fumes.

A methamphetamine addict who’d been sprawled across the long seat at the very end of the bus stood and wafted a shit bouquet as he paced up and down the stairs and aisle, ignoring the blood and other fluids he was probably stepping in, complained that he was late for court. He looked half Auschwitz victim and half fruit leather.

Jane knew that she could just get off and walk at this point, but wanted to stay and watch the paramedics.

They finally arrived, though, and after wrapping some cursory bandages around the wound, they left; apparently the woman didn’t have insurance.

Jane got off the bus — the man who’d sat across from her, a black man wearing a leopard-print bathrobe, dirty white flip-flops, and the kind of necklace one purchases for seventy-five cents out of the machine at the grocery store called “Bling,” waved goodbye — and walked three blocks to Powells; her iPhone had reached the Patsy Cline song and she could have walked straight from the Hilton twice as fast, but who knows, perhaps she could turn that Hobbesian bus ride into a comic, someday.

In Powells, after finding a delicious-looking Mario Vargas Llosa novel and a water bottle whose levels corresponded not to units of measurement, but to modern artists’ names, she bought Leigh’s book and went to a nearby coffee shop to flip through it. If she was going to be honest with herself, it wasn’t so much out of the desire to give Leigh a second chance, but more out of some kind of primordial instinct to be prepared. The brushstrokes were heavy and complex; people loomed out of billowing shadows and off-kilter doorways; it was like reading a fever dream.

***

Some people collected decorative plates; Leigh’s parents collected children from places the United States had been at war with. Leigh was their only “natural” child. The first they collected, Anya, was from Russia. They let her keep her name: she was a beautiful Aryan doll, fragile, sensitive. So sensitive that she wouldn’t stop screaming. She was diagnosed with autism and given antipsychotics until she just sat and drooled all day. Then An, a Vietnamese boy, and two years later his brother Lanh. They became Bob and James, and they were out of control. Leighs’s parents tried to dope them up on Ritalin, but they still behaved horribly. Anya had only been a baby when they adopted her, their precious Russian doll. Apparently she had not been held during most of her infancy at the orphanage in Yekaterinburg from which she’d been adopted, yet plenty of American children with happy childhoods went on to become autistic, so Leigh, protective of her parents, whom she felt were being judged unfairly, blamed Anya herself, and not her past. Leigh was her parents’ ally. Leigh felt that it was her fault that they’d adopted these strange, troubled children. They had tried to conceive a sibling for her, and she had hoped so hard.

Leigh had invented rituals to help a little brother or sister come. She was sure that if she’d been able to refrain from counting to ten for those four months, her mother wouldn’t have had a miscarriage. She drew pictures of a little sister who looked just like her. Leigh named the sister Natalie, and said her name fourteen times without blinking.

Finally, on TV one night, they’d seen some shining tan movie stars ushering shy black children amongst a stampede of paparazzi, and they’d had their idea. Leigh knew that if she hadn’t wanted a sister so much, they wouldn’t have thought of it. It had taken her a long time to realize that her parents had had agency (a word not used by Leigh herself, of course), too. But that was difficult. She was so good at making excuses for them. If she realized how wrong they’d been, she’d have to realize how wrong she’d been, too.

Jane had read at some point that a conscience is just an internalized parental voice. Leigh’s conscience, then, repeated to the CPS investigators, and later to all the readers of her graphic novel, the same excuses that her parents made: it was so difficult, having all these children with special needs, and their money problems. They were doing the best they could. Jane understood that mistake, that confusion: the same mistake that her brother, the one who’d shot her parents and sisters and then himself, had made. What she couldn’t understand was that Leigh never seemed to have come into a true morality of her own later. Jane ignored the fact that she herself was a compulsive liar and inveterate petty criminal. At least she was honest in her books, she thought.

Leigh’s parents discovered something called Reactive Attachment Disorder on the internet. They found someone to promptly diagnose Anya, Bob, and James with this disease, one that is far beyond the pale of autism or ADHD. This therapist recommended discontinuing their medications, the therapeutic equivalent, in this family, of providing flint to primordial man.

Jane had read that the fossil record shows extensive deforestation and mass extinctions dating from the time that Homo Sapiens discovered fire. She’d read this around the age of twelve; she’d read Clan of the Cave Bear, forbidden pornography that she’d had to steal, and it was so awkward to conceal in her bag, a fucking huge paperback, and then she’d become fascinated with prehistory. Before RAD, that was Leigh’s family’s prehistory. Once history per se started, once that fire was lit, the main thing that became extinct, in her family, was morality. Consequences didn’t follow actions in logical sequence: her family was a chaotic primordial ooze.

The treatments they tried, for this disearse that no board-certified physician had ever diagnosed her siblings with, included “physical restraint,” which began with forced embraces similar to Anya’s earlier treatment for autism, but progressed to her Anya and her brothers being locked in cages when they “acted out” and needed to be prevented from “harming themselves or others.” “Enforced eye contact, deep tissue massage,” and “rebirthing therapy” similarly tortured them, as Leigh watched, collecting information for a tell-all confessional comic years, because confession indicates automatic forgiveness, right?

“Verbal confrontation” helped them “revisit traumatic events” from earlier in their lives. Leigh didn’t understand why being abused when they were younger made them need to be abused now that they were older, but she just repeated what her mother said; her words became as totemic as not counting to ten.

Leigh was never locked in cages, but by locking her adopted siblings in cages, she became complicit in this abuse, which she refused to name abuse. To this day, Leigh was caged by the lies she told, seemingly even to herself.

***

Jane set the book down. How could Leigh draw the cages, draw these scenes, even show her guilt — Leigh clearly had a conscience — yet still not reach the conclusion that this was wrong? She Googled RAD from her iPhone and, as she’d suspected, found it nearly wholly discredited, and agreed to be very rare. The odds of all three of Leigh’s siblings having suffered from it were astronomically low. Jane found the new trend of ethically dubious autobiography deplorable. Her own actions were always completely excusable. She threw the book in a trash can, and got some dirty looks from passers-by who’d noticed. She shrugged and put her headphones back in; compared to Mickey and Mallory, she was a wonderful human being.

Jane went back to the Hilton and watched Pay-Per-View pornography like Jane Goodall, without masturbating or even really becoming aroused. That person is doing this, and that person is doing that, and now that is happening, and now the sheets are twisted. She changed the channel to a comedy special and didn’t laugh once, or even feel a smile brush against the corners of her mouth; she was completely absorbed in the comedian’s technique: he is nervous, he is confident, he wants to fuck that girl in the front row, he told that one awkwardly; he really believes this, look at the Rasputin-like fervor in his eyes.

Sometimes Jane went the grocery store and had similar thoughts: I could buy that, or that, or that. I could move that over there. I could knock that off the shelf; if I took out that load-bearing jar, the whole display would come down. The choices appeared like holes in a fence, and she’d wander the grocery store until there were enough holes that she could glimpse the sky and breathe again, knowing she was alone and could do whatever she liked.

***

When Jane met Leigh backstage, Leigh did the worst thing she possibly could have done in that situation: she paid Jane a compliment.

“You’re so brave, to have survived that kind of abuse. You’re a brave, strong, woman. May I hug you?”

Jane stepped back reflexively. “No, I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.” She sat on a couch and began flipping through her notes.

“I’m sorry,” Leigh said. “I didn’t mean to invade your space.”

“No worries,” Jane said.

Leigh sat beside Jane, although thankfully the couch was large enough that Leigh’s earnest bulk didn’t brush against Jane’s ripped jeans; if Leigh’s flesh, too generously exposed from her ruffled wool skirt, had accidently come into contact with that exposed by the holes in Jane’s 501′s, Jane was afraid she might have screamed.

“I hate these,” Leigh said, as though unburdening herself, yet preening at the same time: look, she was saying, I’ve been to enough of these to have an opinion about them.

“You’re very brave too,” Jane said, setting her notes down and sitting upright, peering at Leigh; perhaps she’d get to dissect that frog after all.

“What?”

“All I ever wrote about was abuse. You wrote about being an abuser. I’ve never had the guts to do that. Yet.”

Leigh’s lower lip trembled. “Abuser? What–”

“What did it feel like? Putting them in the cages? Did they struggle, or were they used to it? Did your hands feel dirty? Was there a bitter taste in your mouth, no matter what you ate? It’s okay, you can tell me. I’ve done some terrible things.” Jane’s voice was earnest; she’d often recorded her own voice to learn how to achieve the most effective pitch. She imitated favorite audiobook narrators: right now, she was Louise Erdrich, a white woman who claimed to be Indian and at least was good at sardonic Indian humor.

“They were sick,” Leigh said. “We were trying to help them. Look, I know it wasn’t perfect. But what they went through, after CPS took them away, that was ten times worse.”

Jane nodded. “What made you want to show anyone?”

“What made you?”

“Ladies?” The nervous convention person, a gay man who’d impeccably ironed his ugly uniform, led them to the stage, where they were to debate the idea of plagiarism and unreliable narration.

***

Jane had taken a writing workshop once, as a lark, at a community college. One of the students in the workshop had used the phrase “unreliable narrator” to refer to someone other than the narrator of the story. When the professor corrected her, the student had said, “But can’t anyone be unreliable?” Jane had grown rather fond of this student, in the way one might become fond of a three-legged dog. She was a girl with anachronistic flapper hair who always dressed in the same outfit, at least on the one day a week that the class met: a ruffled white shirt with black buttons, a knee-length black skirt, black pantyhose, and black pumps. Over the course of the semester, the white shirt became dingier and dingier until finally it was a cream color; her stories became stranger, more verbose and more sexual. On the last day of class, Jane had brushed her pantyhose just above the ankle with the tip of one toe; Jane had worn flip flops, which she’d surreptitiously slid out of during the interminable hours of class. The student had jerked her leg away and hadn’t said goodbye to anyone, leaving early and claiming to be sick. The professor’s snide comment after she’d left the room had made Jane feel oily and heavy inside.

Jane found reliability boring. Leigh, apparently, found the issue of “trust” paramount; Jane wondered if she was the only one in the room to find this ironic. Or perhaps most people trusted Leigh. But she looked around, and decided that the vicious expressions on the audience members’ faces while Leigh spoke indicated that the appeal of her books lay not in Leigh’s trustworthyness, but in some kind of literary Schadenfreude.

***

After the discussion, the convention staff member led Jane away; Jane had shaken Leigh’s hand politely, and found it cold and sticky-slimy, like a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, but dropped in a lake. Jane was planning on making an early night of it, perhaps reading the Peruvian novel. But the starched staffer apologetically said that, in addition to the official schedule, some of the people at the con were organizing something that he was sure she wouldn’t be interested in, but they’d forced him to ask her about.

It turned out to be a jello-wrestling contest with Leigh. Jane raised her eyebrows. “I suppose they’ve got a bathtub full of Jello, just waiting expectantly? Maybe jiggling a little?”

The staffer laughed nervously.

“I’ll think about it,” Jane said, thinking, this will be a great scene.

Jane had heard of some strange things happening at conventions before. It’s a strange environment, like summer camp for the unnattractive and horny. At a science fiction convention (which, of course, she hadn’t been present at), some men had created an ongoing experiment, called the Open Source Boob Project. Open source was a technical term, meaning that the code behind some program was available for anyone to use, abuse, or improve upon. The source of a boob, Jane supposed, was a woman. Nevermind that most of the female attendees of the convention looked more like the Venus of Willendorf than the Venus de Milo, although they were as helpless as the latter. The men decided that breasts needed to be “demystified.” Considering the, well, extremely open sources on the internet, Jane wasn’t sure what mystery had been left to them. However, she supposed she understood that the mere presence of untouchable women presented some sort of frustration to the awkward men, not sure how best to obtain their goal. Was copping a feel like leveling up in a video game? They’d distributed buttons to female conventioneers: green meant “go ahead, grope all you please,” although afterwards, the men had protested that they were still polite enough to ask, and that some men had been “open source,” too. But come on. There’s no mysterious element about the male body, not even to a virgin woman. Penises are everywhere, from the Eiffel Tower to graffiti on the back of a movie theater chair.

So, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, and because she couldn’t wait to hear the plopping, sucking sound the geletin would make as she submerged Leigh’s smug limbs, Jane agreed to do it.

***

In hindsight, the problem came not from the horny, blushing spectators, nor from the nature of the spectacle. They were not Roman gladiators, they were just two bored girls in search of new experiences to market, two ordinary girls who delighed in this small world, this microcosm that perceived them as extraordinary. No, the problem was when Jane copped a feel of a decidedly closed-source boob.

Jane had not packed a swimsuit, and so she wrestled in her underwear: a black, slightly padded bra, and black and white striped prisoner panties. Leigh wore a tankini with red flowers that did nothing for her thighs.

They started lightly, throwing handfuls of green goop that made the spectators go “Oh!’ and back away in rippling waveform. Jane licked a finger and wondered if any of Leigh’s skin cells had been transferred from finger, into mouth, into soul.

Then finally Leigh turned out to be the more aggressive one, dunking Jane, who wrestled in earnest, then escaped, then feinted, then, well, groped.

“You bitch!” Leigh shrieked, then leaned over and bit her.

It was a most unexpected response, perhaps born out of too many vampire romances. The “Oh”s began again, this time over red liquid and not green semi-solid.

Jane stumbled out of the tub, tripped, gave herself carpet burn scrambling up, then toweled off just enough to slide back into her jeans and tank top.

“Do you want…ice, or something?” one of the men said.

“I’ve got bandaids in my room,” Jane said, leaving the room, taking the elevator down, and calling a taxi. True, the Hilton was just two blocks away. But who knew what could happen on the taxi ride, especially if the driver noticed what she was getting all over his seat.

One day, I had nagged my father to cut some watermelon since late morning. He finally gave in by the late afternoon, and the sun’s rays lay in warm streaks across The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I liked it not for its story but for its illustrations, which looked like something I could make with finger-paint and water.

My father talked to me as he chopped, and the sucking, juicy noises of chopping accompanied him, like hearing two conversations at the same time. I can’t remember what he talked about. I just remember the way all the noises stopped, after a sharp scream. He didn’t tell me what had happened, just cried. I went over and looked and saw the finger lying in a pool of pinkish watermelon juice, the tip of the finger wrinkled like he’d just taken a bath. I couldn’t even bear the sight of raw meat; how was I supposed to bear a severed finger?

“I need you to dial the phone, honey,” he said, but I didn’t hear any of the affection that usually accompanied “honey.” His voice was like a stranger’s.

I held the phone out in front of me as I’d seen an old man holding a metal detector at the beach. He took it away from me and dialed one-handed, clutching a pink-red towel around his stump. He’d wrapped the finger in Saran-Wrap. It reminded me of a day-old hot dog.

He spoke in that strange voice to the 9-1-1 lady. I stood there, wanting to eat some watermelon and wanting to cry. My mother came while they carried him out in a stretcher, and I showed her the Formica counter and the clear cutting board, speckled with blood and watermelon juice and pulp. I tried to explain what had happened, but it took her a long time to understand.

“I can’t believe he did it,” my mother kept saying. Finally, she asked me if I was okay.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not crying or anything. I’m being a good girl.”

“Yes, you are,” she said, but she looked at me in that way that meant she was lying. “Let’s get you out of those clothes.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. There was blood on my clothes, but I felt embarrassed at my mother seeing me change.

“So the two of you were just by yourself all day? What did you do?”

“I read my book, and asked Daddy for watermelon,” I said.

“Did he play any special games with you?”

“No,” I said. “I wish he had. I like playing games.”

She sighed. “You know, you can tell me things.”

“Like what?”

She sighed again. “Things.”

“Can I watch a movie now?”

When my father came home from the hospital, he seemed fine, except for a big white bandage. I felt relieved that the bandage wasn’t pink and red like that towel. He smiled at me, and said I’d been a lifesaver. I didn’t know what that meant – lifesavers were little hard donuts. But he was smiling at me, so I smiled back. I wanted to run over and hug him, but I felt too shy. Everything felt so different. My mother was clutching his good hand so tightly it looked like it hurt. She kept looking at him like there was something she wanted to ask him.

I kept wondering what was under the bandage. Was the tip of the finger still wrinkled? Could he still move it? Would he be able to draw pictures and write letters? Would we be able to hold hands with that hand?

He said since this was a long day for me, I’d get to stay up an extra hour and watch a Star Trek episode. Usually he and my mother watched those after I was in bed. I could hear the spaceships zooming around, and booming voices. I liked watching them when I got the opportunity. Even though I had trouble understanding what they were talking about, there was a lot to look at.

I sat on the couch between my parents. That meant I was on the bandage side of my father. I kept looking at it, especially during commercials. There wasn’t anything exciting to see, but I guess I wanted to make sure it was still there.

I really felt like eating watermelon, but I knew better than to ask. Would I ever get to eat watermelon again?

After a few weeks, the bandage came off. We all went to the hospital for the big moment. They warned us about things that were in words too big for me to understand. “There will be some discoloration,” is one that I remember. It actually looked like chapped lips. It also had thick dark Frankenstein’s Monster stitches around the base – those wouldn’t come off for a few more weeks. He could move it, but it looked like an alien thing grafted onto his hand.

My mother had a big wide smile on that I knew meant she hated it. I hated it too, or maybe just felt a little afraid of it. I didn’t usually agree with my mother when she hated my dad, but I was starting to see the point.

My father drove back from the hospital, and I didn’t quite trust that finger to drive.

For the rest of the day we all acted very jolly with each other. How exhausting! I asked if I could go to bed early. They looked at me strangely and said yes.

I couldn’t sleep, though – I heard them arguing. I slipped back downstairs and hid behind a chair.

“Is this as good as it’s going to get?” my mother said.

“You heard the doctor – they don’t know, but this is all normal.”

“This is not normal! It’s creepy – unnatural!”

My father didn’t say anything, but his shoulders slumped a little.

“I don’t want that thing inside me!” shouted my mother. I didn’t understand what she meant. People were intact in their own little bubbles of skin – they didn’t go inside each other, did they? With a shudder, I pictured that finger poking through my skin, like E.T.’s pointing finger.

“It’s just a pinky finger,” he said. “We’ll barely notice it, after a while.”

She sighed and her shoulders slumped too.

“What’s that noise?” she said, and that’s when they found me crying behind the chair.

After that day, I started to avoid my father It started in subtle ways – I would make sure to stand on the other side of him, or next to my mother. It was especially threatening to me when he rested it on the arm of the sofa. When they invited me to stay up late to watch Star Trek with them, I told them that space was boring. “There’s nothing in it but little tiny stars,” I pronounced. When they sat around the coffee table to play Monopoly, I said I didn’t like counting money. Which was true up to a point – I didn’t like touching it after my father, always banker, had put his fingers all over it.

I became embarrassed to be seen in public places with him – no one ever said anything or even looked at him funny, but I knew that I couldn’t be the only one bothered by it. It dangled at his side like a tentacle. When he lifted it to pay for things I heard a humming noise. He shook people’s hands with the other hand, now. Maybe he heard a humming noise too.

My mother also drew away from my father. I could tell that she didn’t like it by the way wrinkles appeared in the wrong places when she smiled – like cracks in the sidewalk. She spent a lot of time on the phone with people. Her new favorite phrase was, “I know, but…” She also started getting phone calls from someone who would hang up when I picked up the phone.

My mother started going out in the afternoons while my father was at work. I didn’t try very hard to be good when she was gone, because I was so mad at her for being away. I tried drawing my name all over the walls, but that just got me in trouble. when she got home. I tried setting a fire, but couldn’t get the match to catch. Mostly I just sat and read. I thought if I read enough things I would understand things better. I already understood them better than I used to.

My father had an apologetic way of smiling now, like he hated what he was putting us through, and didn’t quite understand it. “Shouldn’t you be happy I’m fine?” I heard him ask my mother when they thought I was busy coloring. I didn’t think he was fine. I thought he was like my old favorite doll that had lost an eye and now had a button sewn on with a black X. I put that doll on a shelf facing the wall and never played with it.

“Would you like some watermelon?” my mother called out to me one day, as I practiced my faces in front of the bathroom mirror. I walked down the hall, not sure if I wanted to run in, or to say no. But she wasn’t standing with the cutting board and cleaver-machete. She had a plastic container from the grocery store in front of her. Square pink sections lay on top of each other like Legos. She pried the top off and handed me a piece. II’d never had seedless watermelon before – it was like the whole thing was the royal section! I let the juice run down my chin and smiled.

“Don’t you think Dad wants some?” I asked. He had to be in the house somewhere. I realized that I had no idea where he was, and that made me feel very sad and empty inside.

“Probably not,” said my mother, frowning. She didn’t have any watermelon, just watched me eat.

I ate half of the container all by myself. I thought it must be what “Turkish Delight” tasted like in the Narnia books. That selfish boy ate it even though it meant an eternal winter, I thought.

“Where is Dad?” I asked my mother.

“I don’t know,” she said. I realized that she’d stopped keeping track of him, too.

“Right here,” he said from behind us. “What’ve you got there?”

“Seedless watermelon,” I said with some still in my mouth.

He reached over and picked a square out of the container.

“This is great,” he said. He stared at my mother for a long time. I couldn’t tell if they were happy with each other or not.

“Can I watch Star Trek tonight?” I asked.

“It’s not on,” my mother said.

“Yes, it is,” my father said. “We can watch it together,” he said to me. He didn’t even look at my mother.

She turned and walked out of the kitchen. “I hate you and your fucking finger.”

I didn’t ask them to explain what that word meant. I watched Star Trek with my dad that night, and in the morning, my mother wouldn’t talk to either of us. I tried standing right in front of her and yelling, but it did no good.

Things went so fast after he asked for a divorce. I listened to that conversation too. I was careful not to cry this time.

“I suppose you want custody,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I’d like visitation, but…”

“But you’re…it’s unnatural!” she said again. “She’s always on your lap!”

“Are you accusing me of…?” But he trailed off, and I never found out what she was accusing him of.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Maybe it’s just the finger. Maybe I just had enough, okay? Aren’t I allowed to have enough?”

“I love my daughter, and I want to see her. Maybe weekends, or every other month.” My dad’s voice sounded like it had after the finger.

“I know. You two have such a bond. I just wonder about it, sometimes.”

“Well, go ahead and wonder!” Why did wondering make Daddy yell? I wondered things all the time.

“I already told the lawyer.”

“What the hell did you have to tell him? What proof do you have, anyway? I’d like to see it!”

“Her. My lawyer’s a woman. There can be women lawyers, you know.”

“Don’t patronize me, you bitch.”

Then I started crying on purpose, to make them stop.

“Maybe we should come back,” Leah said.

“No, it’s open, look.”

Seth walked in first. The room was dark and cool and smelled a little like wet dog. Leah came in behind him, her leg in jeans brushing a little against his bare calf. He was wearing shorts, like he always did in the summer. Leah used to wear shorts too, baring her legs as casually as her arms or her face. Now she said she was cold all the time. She covered her legs in jeans, and her arms in jackets, and her face in makeup so thick it looked like she was in a high school play.

“It doesn’t work,” Seth said. He heard her trying the switch. It made a sound like a moth hitting a lightbulb, ramming its way to heaven. When she gave up it sounded like the moth falling to the floor, the tips of its wings still trying to fly.

“Do you have the flashlight?” she asked.

“I think I left it on the counter.”

“Shit. Well, we can come back.”

“No,” he said. He said it a little louder than he’d meant to, and he heard the word echoing from empty rooms. The kitchen, the bathroom, he thought. The rooms with tile floors.

“What, we’re just going to-”

“Give me your phone,” Seth said. He wasn’t really asking; he was already grabbing. Leah’s phone cast an eerie blue over the carpeted floor, leaving the corners dark.

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t think, look, there’s a hole in the wall.”

“I’ll bet they’d give us a discount. If there are repairs.”

They walked into the first bedroom. There were a few boxes on the floor, filled with trash. Fast food wrappers, styrofoam cups, plastic bags. He quickly moved the cell phone’s beam away from the plastic bags, but it was too late, he’d heard Leah’s breath sucked back in, like it had changed its mind and wanted to stay inside her forever.

“Let’s look at the other bedroom.”

“We don’t need two bedrooms,” she said. “I thought you said it was a one bedroom.”

“You could use it for your scrapbooks and photo albums,” he said. “Or maybe I could make a den, a man-cave, you know?”

Leah snorted a little. “Right. Just what you’ve always-” And then there went her breath again.

In the center of the room, an empty crib with broken rails. Like the skeleton of a beached whale whose ribs had been broken, or stolen. A dirty blanket, wadded in one corner, covered some grubby toys.

Leah walked over to the closet. Seth followed her with the light. She found plastic bags, more toys, sticky, smelling like soda and urine.

“They must have left in a hurry,” Seth said. “Broken the lease.”

“Sometimes you have to,” she said.

They walked out of the bedroom and looked in the bathroom. The toilet’s flusher dangled impotently, barely connected. Seth smelled mildew and cheap shampoo.

Then, the kitchen. They opened the refrigerator and the sudden smell of rot and spoiling was so strong that Seth cursed and Leah slammed the door shut.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s like something died in there.” Then he froze and looked at Leah and she was tearing up. Christ.

“I don’t think we’ll take it,” he said, holding the front door open wider.

“Do you remember when we were looking for our old apartment?” she said, standing half on the carpet and half on the doorstep. “When we’d get dinner and picnic on the floor? Or…”

They were both silent and left. A light came on at the neighbor’s and they walked away faster, feeling criminal.

slice, such an insignificant fraction, but she immediately

knew what was missing: she’d bragged about it all the

time: trail of tears, indian teeth, my heritage.

she looked for 1/18th of a cherokee at the new

age bookstore but only got tangled in wind

chimes and worry beads and didn’t look very

in touch with her spirit guide.

then she tried the jeep dealership but realized all their cherokees

were made out of plastic; she thought she found herself in

a cigar store; a movie theater; a mirror. in vain.

she finally found herself along route 66 giving

head to truckers in exchange for natural

light; 1/18th of her size 18 self was a size 1 so

men loved her: she was so flimsy and insubstantial

they could bend her like a 

promise.

Over the course of the semester you assign ratings to everyone in this room. Your initial ratings are shallow and deplorable, along the lines of Hot or Not.com with a dash of Go Fug Yourself. However, in the coming months you give them numbers more suited to their intellectual merits, or lack thereof. You give points to people who discuss sex and punctuation. You subtract points from people who discuss the stories in the third person and look at the professor instead of the author. Yes, you’ve heard that the third person is the only respectable narration, but you still feel that the second person is the only respectful means of direct address. You subtract points from the girl in your workshop whose nails are jagged and yellow-stained teeth may be announcing smoking or bulimia. It’s not so much her appearance (although, okay, you have to sit across from her every goddamn week and she makes your soul twinge with a sympathyache) as much as the fact that she’s clearly read almost nothing. A character in one of her stories “balls her eyes out,” and you only wish she meant that literally. She turns in a story whose first-person (“boring, limited, trite!”) narrator discovers a lesbian crush on a character who’s described suspiciously like you.

You don’t take the hint. You go to the bar after workshop with a girl who looks like a fat Kewpie doll. You enjoy drinking and making out with her but neither of you invites the other to her apartment. You fuck in the alley one night behind the bar, which you enjoy; an oldie-but-goodie. The next night you’re back at the bar and she’s talking about making it Facebookofficial and you say you’ve never even been to her apartment. She admits that her ex-husband keeps breaking in and staying there and you think yes, she does seem to have some bruises you hadn’t given her, and you feel a little bad for not noticing. You say that she clearly needs some space, and then she misunderstands you and starts going to a different bar and is now Facebookofficial with some squinty guy with a neck beard. Her loss.

You are so tired of reading these stories. They are like Telenovelas but less thrilling. When a white boy turns in a story written in Ebonics you think well, at least it’s something different. But you have no idea what to write. You only have strange ideas these days, like a Note on the Type that goes on for ten awkward pages, or an epistolatory story about a girl who invents a line of cosmetics made out of semen. You collect ideas like a magpie: a middle-aged woman riding a bicycle down the street, wearing green pants, with a trash bag balanced on the handlebars; a friend tells you that men grunt and swear and moan when they’re taking dumps, really, go to a men’s room sometime, but you don’t go because you’re afraid of the foot-tapping wide-stance thing; there’s a new drug that erases traumatic memories.

You want to erase the memory of this workshop. You have learned that there are a million things you can do wrong in a story, but none you can do right. You are tempted to turn in brilliant stories by little-known authors and watch them be workshopped to shreds. Your characters are accused of being Mary Sues and your vocabulary is too hifalutin for people to understand. You only get responses from about half of the class; in revenge, you begin making hilarious doodles the high point of your response letters. One of your classmates turns in a story that involves a frat boy who likes to do the “swing-set,” which is a kind of nude crabwalk. Your doodle thereof is the most popular thing you create for this class.

You are the only person in the workshop who uses the word vagina in a story, and the only one who doesn’t use the word penis. You wonder if that means something. You decide that when you graduate, all you will read is fanfiction and the backs of shampoo and conditioner bottles. You decide that you will never write anything longer than a text message.

You don’t show up for your last workshop. You go to a bar and see a squinty man with a neck beard and think ah, this is the beginning of the rest of my life.

The lab contained a few desks on the perimeter of a series of islands, stools around cool marble tables. Sinks with leaky faucets depressed the center of the tables, and on each of the four sides was a row of drawers, containing whatever beakers and test tubes remained from the fall semester. An eyewash station loomed at the back of the room.

Our teacher came in a few minutes late, toting bags, boxes, and a tackle box, balanced between her stomach and chins. She wore a shapeless impressionist-colored dress, and sandals with soles that were peeling apart, so that the tips flapped open like mouths. Her long blonde hair was stringy like a Viking’s. She spent a while setting up, taking out sheets of posterboard, paint-spattered X-Acto knives, scattering bundles of markers and pencils across the table, and opened a tub of rubber cement that we could smell all the way from the back of the room.

Some of us were early, others right on time, and the rest straggled in late, nodding at the teacher, but not too apologetically. We glanced around the room, trying to decide where to sit, how close to the front we should be, who seemed like they’d be fun to sit next to. We awkwardly stashed the heavy backpacks, coupon books, and bookstore bags we were carrying.

The girl was already there. We knew she wasn’t one of us, as naturally as we knew the teacher wasn’t. We had no idea that she would show us things we would never have dared to find out.

She sat at the front of the class, trapped in high-waisted jeans. She had frowned at everyone until the teacher entered, and then her face first went falsely cheerful, then carefully blank. She had long brown hair with bangs cut straight across the front like a toddler’s. Her clothes were new, but not stylish, and she’d obviously spilled something on her shirt recently, since the stain was still wet. The room filled around her, like she was the high-water mark. We didn’t want to sit with her. But soon the other islands were full, and a few of us, Pati and Nguyen, were forced to join her. She had an unmarked notebook and rainbow-striped pencil laid out at perfect right angles beside an iPod in pristine condition, with earbuds neatly wound next to it.

“You can call me Professor Adams,” our teacher began, standing over a desk in front of the islands, balancing her weight on her splayed hands. “I think it’s important to keep that barrier of professionalism, don’t you? I don’t like how so many teachers are on a first-name basis with their students. I’m here to educate you, not to be your MySpace friend. Are you all here for Art 100? First of all, I’m sorry about the classroom. I know, I know, it’s a little weird to do this in a biology lab.”

Some of us laughed, or made affirmative noises. Others were visibly irritated by her officious yet casual demeanor. The girl laughed harder than any of us, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“But it should be good,” Professor Adams continued. “Maybe we’ll be able to get out of our ruts and do something really creative. Who needs fruit for a still life when you could have a dissected frog?”

We shifted in our seats.

“I should get this out of the way right off the bat: this isn’t Art Appreciation. We’re going to get our hands dirty, with about an even mixture of lecture and in-class art. Now I know not all of you are artists, but I’ll bet all of us enjoy art and would like the tools to create our own. Are any of you art majors?”

None of us raised our hands. Neither did the girl.

Professor Adams sighed. “Well, let’s go around the room. Please say your name, your favorite artist, and why you’re taking this class.”

First up was the girl.

“Hello,” she said in a loud, surprisingly deep voice, “my name is Chastity Warner.”

A few of us giggled. Chastity, seriously?

“My favorite artist is Thomas Kinkade. I’m here because I’ve always done well in art, and this is my first experience in a classroom setting, so I wanted to try something that I’m confident I can excel in.” Chastity gulped in a breath after that speech, looking all puffed up and terrified at the same time.

More of us sniggered, rolled our eyes, and glanced at each other. This was looking like a long semester already.

“Excuse me, Chastity?” said Professor Adams. “Did you say this is your first time in a classroom?”

“Yes,” said the girl – Chastity. She sounded like the kind of person who’d never said “Yeah” in her life. “I was home-schooled previously.”

“So you’re starting this semester at Tucson Community College? I’m honored.”

“Yes. This is my only class, actually. I’m still sixteen, so I want to get my feet wet before I plunge in.” Chastity finished with a high-wattage smile. She would have been pretty if she’d tried – she reminded us of the homely girl in a romantic comedy who gets a haircut and takes off her classes and becomes prom queen. However, judging from the stain on her shirt, she didn’t seem like she cared much about appearance.

Professor Adams beamed at her. “Well, that’s great. Welcome aboard! I’m sure everyone here will be happy to show you the ropes.”

A few of us smiled or nodded; most of us kept looking at our notebooks.

Next, Pati introduced herself, putting away her compact. “Hi, my name is Patrícia,” which she pronounced the Spanish way, with the long I, “Or you can call me Pati.” She pronounced both syllables evenly accented: “pah-tee.” She continued, “Please don’t call me Patty. I hate that.” She giggled. “My favorite artist is Da Vinci, I loved The Da Vinci Code! See, I’m a big reader too, I know what you all were thinking about me! Anyway, I’m taking this class because I need it to get my associates. I want to finish up before the baby’s due.” She was about five months pregnant, but still looked glamorous, with shiny flat-ironed hair, brand name jeans and purse, and impeccable makeup.

Nguyen, a slender kid who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Data in the Goonies, mentioned he wasn’t really into art, his major was business administration and didn’t mention that he was, to put it more accurately, majoring in winning at online poker during class. “I’m taking this class because it seemed easy,” he said, trying to endear himself to the rest of us, but falling a little short.

The guy with the six-inch green Mohawk said, “I’m Jack. I really like Dali, you know, the melting clocks guy? And Escher. I love that disturbing shit. I’m an MIS major, and I’m taking this class because I loved finger-painting with my brother.” He grinned shyly, looking down at the table.

“Well, Jack, if your hair’s any indication, I’m going to expect something bold,” Professor Adams said in a flat tone.

We weren’t sure if she was mocking him or trying to be friendly. This annoyed not only him but all of us, since we had already decided that he was our favorite person in the class. He’d stood outside and chatted with a few of us before class, but even those of us who hadn’t met him had been cheered up by his easy, generous smile.

The girl next to him was covered in tattoos of stars that partially concealed yellowing bruises. She clucked her tongue sympathetically at him. “Happy Monday! I’m Abby,” she said. “I adore impressionists, because they really show how nature makes them feel. I’m a liberal arts major, undecided really, and I’m taking this class because it sounded interesting.”

“Great,” Professor Adams said unenthusiastically. She turned to the rest of us – we were sixteen, altogether – and continued the introductions as quickly as possible. She seemed less and less interested in each of us, since she’d discovered her teacher’s pet so early in the process.

Finally, it was time for a break. Some of us smoked, some headed for the restroom to pee or fix our makeup, some chatted, and the rest made phone calls. Chastity bolted for a bathroom upstairs, apparently not wanting to run into any of us. She left her notebook, pencil, and iPod at ninety degree angles on her station of the island. When she came back, the iPod was gone. Chastity looked through her backpack and patted her pockets. She hadn’t finished going through her backpack when the professor began speaking, and didn’t seem too worried. Sixteen years at home – why would she expect anyone to steal from her?

“Now, for the rest of class, we’re going to do an exercise. At the end of the exercise, we’ll put everyone’s art on display, and take turns critiquing each others’ work. Now, this first assignment has to do with positive shape and negative space. We’ll be using white and black construction paper and scissors…”

We had fun with this assignment. Some of us made faces. Some, houses. Others cut intricate, lacy designs, more interested in texturizing the paper than the specifics of the assignment. Pati made a lot of jokes in between complaining about her pregnancy, and barely looked down at her work. Everyone wanted to check out Jack’s project, even Professor Adams. Nguyen won $600. Some of us texted with our hands under the lip of the islands.

Chastity took her work very seriously, pulling a ruler out of her dorky backpack, and biting her lip as she concentrated on cutting everything perfectly. She glued everything carefully, smoothing and pressing again and again with the heel of her hand until all the paper scraps were exactly flush.

Professor Adams then asked all of us, and Chastity, to swap pictures with the person next to them, and take a few minutes to evaluate it. Then each evaluator would present the piece to the class, describing it and how well it captured the principles of positive shape and negative space.

Of course, she picked Chastity’s island to begin. Pati raised her hand and asked if she could go first, since she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to leave early. Professor Adams frowned but said she’d allow it this time.

“Okay,” Pati said, stepping to the front of the class. Her pregnancy looked so awkward and heavy, so out of character. She fluffed her hair with a practiced little toss. “Now, this one’s by Chastity-”

“Just a moment,” Professor Adams said. “Let’s not use anyone’s names. This isn’t necessarily anonymous, but we should be focusing on the art. Also, refer to the project as a piece.”

“Oh, okay, sorry,” Pati said with a giggle. “Okay, then, this piece is very well done. It looks like one of those mind’s eye things-”

“An optical illusion,” Professor Adams interrupted, drawing out the syllables condescendingly.

“Yeah. Well, anyway, you can see the positive shape here, and the negative space here.”

“Thank you, Pati,” Professor Adams said with no genuine gratitude or warmth in her voice. She didn’t quite get the Spanish pronunciation right, saying it more like “potty.” Her face lit up as she turned to Chastity. “Would you mind going next?”

“Sure!” Chastity said. She marched up to the front of the room and stood by the professor’s desk.

“Well, it looks to me as if this student didn’t understand the assignment,” Chastity began. We looked at each other, frowning. It was Pati’s assignment, and we already felt protective of Pati. “It appears that instead of bothering to cut the paper with scissors, she just tore it with her bare hands. I guess I can see some positive shape and negative space, but if I were her, I’d throw it out and start over.”

Even Professor Adams was a little aghast. “Thank you, Chastity. You can sit down now. I’d just like to mention that those were some good observations about this piece, but I actually think there’s some room for praise here. Now, this student obviously wanted to capture a scene involving a rainstorm. I like the use of torn edges. Craftsmanship is important, but we can’t forget about creativity. Nguyen, are you ready?”

“This is so gay,” Nguyen muttered.

The remainder of the class was pretty boring. We were all polite and a bit nondescript in our criticisms, and Professor Adams seemed just as bored as we were.

The next class fell on the following Wednesday. We arranged ourselves in the same seats as Monday, and were both surprised and glad that Chastity wasn’t there. Pati and Nguyen chatted naturally without her as a barrier.

“Can I have your attention please?” Professor Adams said. “It seems that one of our students lost her MP3 player during Monday’s class. Now, it could be that she misplaced it, or it could have been retrieved by the campus police. She’s checking on that right now. However, if any of you know anything, please speak to me after class. I’m not interested in punishing you. I just think this is a lousy way to start a college career.”

We looked at each other. By the end of the day Monday, we had known that Pati had taken it. The rest of us had either seen her do it, or heard her brag about it. We felt bad, but didn’t have much sympathy for Chastity. What did a kid like that need an iPod for, anyway? She obviously didn’t lack for material things, and really, we doubted she really liked music at all. We felt sorrier for Pati. She was scrappy, and going to be a teenage mom soon. Didn’t she deserve a break? And anyway, Chastity had been horrible to Pati. A few of us remembered that Pati had taken the iPod before Chastity’s critique, but that was almost beside the point. When Chastity returned, none of us would meet her eyes, except Pati, whose smile showed a lot of teeth.

For the rest of the class, we painted still lifes. Professor Adams encouraged us to use items from around the lab – scales, beakers, our own art supplies, and so forth. None of us were really any good at it, although Chastity seemed like she might have had some practice. We enjoyed crinkling the newspaper Professor Adams had spread all over the floor, tearing it under our shoes.

“I love the colors,” Abby said, pointing at Jack’s still life that might have been Cubist if it weren’t so blobby.

“Getting any ideas for your next tattoo?” he asked.

“Where did you get your tattoos?” Nguyen asked from the island in front of theirs.

“Oh, different places,” Abby said. “My boyfriend did the two on my arm. I got a wicked discount, obviously.” Abby gave an exaggerated wink. “He did my nipple rings too,” she added, low enough that Professor Adams could pretend she hadn’t heard.

“Great,” Jack said, trying to sound unflustered but not quite pulling it off.

Nguyen had finished his hastily-sketched still life of an assortment of test tubes, and was back on the computer when Professor Adams interrupted him.

“Are you finished?” she asked. Although she usually addressed everyone by their first name (a bit of a slap in the face, really, considering that we never got to learn hers), she always avoided saying Nguyen’s. We noticed, of course.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

Professor Adams reached over him and pressed his computer’s “on” button until the computer shut off.

“Hey!”

“If you consult your syllabus,” she said, “you’ll notice that time theft is strictly forbidden. The only time you’re allowed to use your computer during this class is during lecture, when you’re taking notes.”

“Time theft? This isn’t a freaking cubicle, it’s an art class,” Jack piped up.

Professor Adams shook her head. “Now, where was? I’m not too happy with that shadow. What’s all that yellow about?”

“Uh, sunlight?”

After the teacher moved on, he whispered to Pati, “Shit, I just lost a hundred bucks on that game!”

At the end of the class, Chastity whispered something to Professor Adams, who nodded and gestured for Chastity to stand in front of the class.

“Look, I know one of you has my iPod,” Chastity said. “If you return it, God bless you. If you don’t, I forgive you.”

Our relationship with Chastity didn’t improve during this class or over the next couple of months. She was awkward and superior, annoying us with her blunt honesty and lack of social graces. The rest of us formed friendships or at least genial acquaintances with our classmates. Chastity always sat on the sidelines, reading a book, or brown-nosing Professor Adams.

On every assignment, from drawing to collage to color theory to portraits, Chastity performed exceptionally well. We weren’t happy for her – all she did was set the curve higher for the rest of us. We could tell that even the professor was getting fed up with giving her good grades. Chastity was technically perfect, sure. But her art had no soul, no creativity, and more importantly, she didn’t seem to give a damn about those qualities in the rest of us. She never laughed at anything but the teacher’s jokes, and we were sure she didn’t actually think those were funny.

On a cold, rainy Wednesday at the end of March, we went on field trip. It wasn’t much of a field trip: we just walked over to the art building, where we really should have had our class all along. We complained about the rain, but were secretly happy to get out of that dark room. We visited an echoing high-ceilinged hall full of looms and intricate, colorful weavings.

An older woman wearing a tie-dye shirt and jeans greeted us. Her graying red hair was in a loose bun a little off center, with chopsticks sticking out of it. She introduced herself with firm handshakes. Professor Adams looked jealously at her stringy arms.

“Hey,” she said to us, “I’m Natalie. I run the textile art program here. Any of you interested in learning to do for fun what your great-grandmothers did all the time?”

We smiled at her, asking her small, polite questions about the program. We weren’t really interested, but anything was better than class.

“Hey,” Jack said when he got a chance to stand next to Abby. He’d spiked his hawk as crisp as a flag. “Are you okay? I missed you on Monday.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She noticed him staring at her bruises; we’d all stared, but none of us had ever said anything. “Checking out my tats?” she joked. “Oh, I should explain: I’m in the roller derby, so I get banged up a lot. Don’t freak out.”

“Oh!” Jack said, relieved. “Wow, the roller derby? That’s pretty awesome. Do they really have pillow fights at halftime?”

Professor Adams picked Nguyen to try weaving. He only managed to make a tangled mess that looked like something you’d find in a lint trap, and pronounced it “gay,” as usual.

Chastity volunteered, and was boring and competent at it, as expected. She looked to Natalie for approval.

Natalie just shrugged and said, “That’s a good try, sweetie.”

“Yes,” Professor Adams said, obviously not getting that Natalie was letting the kid down easy, “Great job, Chastity.”

Natalie, with a slight frown, wandered off, and Professor Adams followed her cravenly.

“Hey, maybe you could go on the Ren Faire circuit,” Pati said to Chastity. “You could make some friends!”

Chastity scowled, but didn’t reply.

“Hey,” Pati continued, “Do you seriously like Savage Garden?”

“How do you know that?” Chastity asked, looking suspicious.

“Oh, I dunno.” Pati giggled, with a quick glance that dared Chastity to say something, and then a shrug that said “I didn’t think so,” and wandered away to join Abby at the kiln.

After the weaving and pottery segment of our trip, we visited the metalwork studio. Professor Adams stared at shiny jewelry and wet-looking gems and licked her lips.

“Hey Nguyen,” Jack said softly. “If I fronted you some cash, do you think I could get in on the poker action?”

Nguyen smiled so broadly it looked like his teeth were going to fall out. “Sure!” Nguyen liked Jack even more than the rest of us did. Maybe he wished he had the guts to wear a Mohawk or curse in front of the teacher.

“And here,” Professor Adams said in a loud voice, frowning at them, “is where the gallery is. Currently, we’re showing a traveling exhibit of postcards with people’s secrets. These were actually submitted by some of your fellow students!”

The postcards were mostly collaged, with handwriting over photos. Some of them had words spelled out with cut-out letters like ransom notes. They ranged from the mundane to the hilarious to the tragic. Secrets about nose-picking were haphazardly placed next to ones about incest. If we squinted, all we saw was a rainbow of colors, glitter, and texture. It was beautiful and terrifying.

We wondered what would possess people to spill their guts like that. Didn’t they realize that people can recognize handwriting and writing style? We thought about whether it would make us feel better to write our secrets, and decided that if Professor Adams tried to assign this to us, we’d make them up.

“Oooh, I could pretend to be Chastity, and say I was a lesbian!” Pati whispered to Abby.

“And I could be Professor Adams, and say I’m tired of eating celery sticks for lunch,” Abby added, rubbing her bruised bicep.

We noticed Chastity staring at one about being a virgin and we all cracked up, even though Professor Adams was in earshot.

“Chastity?” she called. “Why don’t you come over here, I’ll introduce my star student to the curator, what do you say?” Although she said this in a fairly upbeat voice, her facial expression clearly indicated that this was a charity mission.

Chastity blinked. “Sure,” she said, and marched off to join the teacher.

“My secret is I jacked that stuck-up bitch’s iPod,” Pati said. When no one replied, she added, “Her eyebrows remind me of the devil.”

“Your horns remind me of the devil,” Jack said, rolling his eyes. “This day reminds me of hell, incidentally. Are we almost done here?”

“Hey, I’m having fun,” Abby said.

“At least someone is,” Jack said.

“Besides Chastity,” Abby said sarcastically.

After the field trip, those of us without cars waited for rides next to Chastity in the traffic circle. Abby’s boyfriend, a scrawny, scowling guy, picked her up in a beat-up Firebird, asking in a loud voice who the fuck the Mohawk guy thought he was.

Nguyen’s parents picked him up in a newish tan minivan shaped like a Dirt Devil. He glanced back at Jack, blushing.

Chastity’s mother pulled in after most of us had left, in an Explorer. “Why are you done so early? Did you cut class?” she demanded.

“No, Mom, it got out early, it was the field trip day.” Chastity’s voice was so small it was like she’d become a different person.

“Do you have a note from your teacher?”

Pati, fixing her hair with her legs stretched out in front of her on the long concrete bench, piped up in her heavily accented voice, “She’s telling the truth. We went on a field trip, it’s over now.”

Chastity’s mother gave Pati a look like someone who had just found a dead mouse in their pudding. “Is that one of your new friends?” she demanded as she peeled out. “I don’t suppose she’s married. For shame.”

The rest of us consoled Pati.

“See, that’s what I get for being nice,” she pointed out.

“Could’ve tried earlier,” Jack said as he checked his well-thumbed bus schedule. “Maybe that iPod was the only cool thing in her life, did you ever think of that? Maybe she was holding onto it like a raft.”

We were convinced that Professor Adams designed the final project just to foil Chastity – it was the kind of thing that Chastity surely wouldn’t be able to pull off.

“Now, this one’s all about creativity. What we want to do is use found objects to tell a story. It doesn’t matter what materials you use – the more off-the-wall, the better. It’s got to tell a story without words.” Professor Adams went on to show us some examples. Her examples were pretty funny; most of us stifled giggles. As we’d discovered during a previous class, her big thing was painting food that looked like fat chicks. Today, we saw more of the same, except that instead of apples and mangos, it was a bunch of bottle caps glued together in the shape of an apple, with a chain of paperclips shaped like a snake looming over it.

“Professor Adams is kind of sweet,” Abby said to Jack when the teacher had left to retrieve her daily Slim Fast shake.

“Yeah, I guess.” Jack shrugged. “I wonder what her real name is.”

“It has to be something awful, if she won’t tell us,” Nguyen said. He immediately looked at Jack to see if he was smiling. Jack didn’t notice.

“Yeah. Like Chastity,” Pati said, looking right at Chastity, daring her to say something.

We all laughed.

Chastity looked down and lined her pencil up with her notebook.

One late afternoon in May, we gathered for our last class, to unveil our final projects.

We had made things from soda bottles and cigarette butts, from our favorite picture books and moldy leftovers. We had all tried to have fun with this.

Abby had made a heart out of barbed wire, with Valentine’s-themed Sweet Tarts glued to it. We were impressed she’d found them so late in the year. Attached to the heart was a color photo of vomit roughly in the shape of a heart. She explained to all of us that her boyfriend’s had thrown up in a parking lot and it had just been perfect.

Nguyen had made a house of cards, real cards, covered with keys from a computer keyboard, on top of a pile of Monopoly money.

Jack had put a few crumpled family photos in a milk carton filled with dirty rocks, wrapped in police tape.

Chastity’s project, though, boggled us all. It was so big that it took up half the back wall, blocking the eyewash area. It was made of cardboard boxes, stacked and wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. The boxes were hollow – a few of us knocked to make sure. It had a control panel with hula hoops and giant candy canes jutting off to the side, connecting it to a huge screen made of tin foil. On the control panel were several dials made out of AOL CDs, steering wheels made out of wishbones, and buttons made out of gum drops, and near the floor, pedals fashioned from brightly-colored fuzzy slippers. We all fiddled with the controls, even though it obviously wasn’t a real machine.

We realized after a few moments what we were supposed to do: an outline of a hand was traced next to the controls in red glitter nail polish. When we put our palms on it, a silent movie played, bubbling over the tinfoil, even though there was no projector, and the piece wasn’t plugged in to any of the outlets in the room.

The movies were short, maybe fifteen or twenty seconds long, repeating on a loop as long as any of us kept their hand on the panel. There was a different movie for every person, but if a person came back, the same movie played again. It was impossible. It was magic. The movie showed what was in their heart.

Each of us watched, not quite sure what to make of it, powerless to stop. It was like watching people running out of a burning building, or being caught in the middle of a riot. Chastity had, as usual, taken the instructions of the assignment far too seriously: she had found objects that told a story. We had no idea where she’d found them or how it was possible, and suspected that she wouldn’t be able to answer us even if we were able to ask her.

We saw Nguyen in a grainy black and white film, beating off to gay porn. Nguyen ran out the door immediately; none of us called out to him or moved to follow.

We saw Professor Adams eating an entire cake in one sitting, crumbs all over her shirt and frosting dancing on her fingers. This was in color, and looked kind of like a Teletubbies episode.

After Professor Adams walked away from the machine, she left the room, leaving her bags and art supplies and everything.

We saw Abby’s boyfriend beating her with a hockey stick, a short movie, only five seconds or so long, but it kept playing over and over because she stood frozen, unable to move her hand away. Jack finally took her elbow and led her to the door, whispering something that none of the rest of us could make out.

When Jack returned to see his movie, we saw him at home, hair combed down and parted straight down the middle, helping his disabled older brother out of the bathtub.

We saw Pati taking Chastity’s iPod to a pawnshop, and clutching a meager spread of bills. The film cut to a nail salon, where she exchanged the same bills for a pedicure and winked at the Korean girl kneeling at her feet. Pati shrugged and mugged for the class as she returned to her seat, determined to watch the rest of the show.

Finally, after the rest of us finished our zombie procession, Chastity stood.

She walked, as ramrod-straight as ever, up to the machine and shoved her palm down on the nail polish hand outline. By now, the glitter had worn off, sticking to our palms like Lady Macbeth’s evidence.

Nothing came on the screen at all. She had found it, somehow, but didn’t know how to use it. We slipped out of the room one by one, and when the last of us left, she was still there, looking up at the foil.

We left, avoiding goodbyes or eye contact. Most of us dropped out of school, but who’s to say if Chastity’s machine was to blame. Some of us moved away, to Phoenix or Las Cruces or Austin. A few us went home and cried. Most forgot about it the next day. Professor Adams retired the next semester, and became a Buddhist nun. Nguyen jumped off a bridge into a dry river bed, and died surrounded by saguaro ribs and scrap metal. Jack became famous as an artist, for making sculptures out of medical supplies. Pati started eating so much that, after a few years, she looked just like Professor Adams. She had a son soon after the end of class and named him Jack. Abby joined a real roller derby team, eventually marrying one of the blockers and adopting several children; she gave them all Puritan names. We never did find out what became of Chastity. A few of us tried Googling her with no luck. Maybe she’d changed her name or gotten married. None of us spoke to each other again.