“Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Ten, in a class of three hundred kids. Fucking heroin. I look at my eighth graders and I just worry about them so much—you never know what growing up is going to do to you, especially around here. AC, man, it gets into the way you think. You live somewhere where people come to get wasted and blow all their cash—you start to think that’s how the rest of the world is, that that’s what life is.”
Try being a girl here, I wanted to say,that will really fuck you up.But of course I didn’t. Mostly I was touched. His earnestness, that slow, surfery cadence to his voice. Brett took a long, thoughtful sip of his beer, and this time we both looked away.
“Well, I’ve got to run and meet some people, but hey, hope I see you around.” He slapped me on the back, and as he left I felt a twist of guilt and relief. I was so self-pitying, and yet, look at all of the people who Brett and I knew who had sunk into depths I couldn’t even imagine. When I blinked, I saw Steffanie’s gaunt cheeks. I signaled the bartender for a third drink and willed the room to go hazy, for all the din and clatter to get reduced to one low hum, waited for my mind to go blank. The less I noticed about what was around me, the less I felt.
When I paid my bill, I found Clara’s card in my wallet and stared at it as though it would help explain what she had said that afternoon. It was one of the last things I remembered before I blacked out—you are recovering from a broken heart, those crooked little crescent moons.
LUIS
HE SEES HER IN THEmorning, during his shift. She’s at the desk with the other girl, and her face is a face he knows, but he can’t say why. It’s the feeling of seeing someone in a photograph and then again, in another, wearing different clothes, their body in a new position, but still that thing that lights up about them, that says SAME SAME SAME. He watches her as he cleans the glass, when he walks past her on his way to lunch, when he comes back. He’s studied so many women’s faces, hands, teeth, hair, elbows, eyelashes. The shape of their jaws and the curves of their ears and the swish of their ponytails and the dots of freckles on their noses and cheeks and arms. He stores her away in his brain, her dark brown hair and her brown eyes the color of chocolate. Her pale skin and the arches of her eyebrows.
After he clocks out, he waits around for a chance to look at her up close, but she doesn’t come into the back hall, where all of the other women keep their things. He knows this will continue to bother him until he sorts it out, the itch of an understanding that’s being withheld. His fingers curl into a fist.
HE’S ONhis way home, to the boardinghouse, when he sees the men walking in his direction, on the opposite side of the street. The sightof their silhouettes gives him a squirming feeling in his guts, like he’s eaten something bad. He stops and wonders whether he should turn around and circle the block or try to slip into a store until they pass, but before he can decide, the man with the shaved head cuts his eyes right to where Luis stands. He taps the dark-haired one on the arm, and smiles, his teeth so big and white and square they shine at him with mean delight—save for one of the teeth, which glints coppery-gold. They cross toward him, their chains thumping against their chests, and Luis braces for what’s next. He could try to run, but last time they caught him, and it only made things worse. There’s a cop car parked in front of a bodega, windows down, but the cops just watch and never help. Gold Tooth runs into him hard, in the chest, so hard that his teeth crash against one another. The dark-haired one grabs his arm tight, the way you might do to a friend, then closes his grip until it shoots a pain into his shoulder. He jerks his arm away, shakes his head,no. It’s been like this for months now, ever since one of them caught Luis staring at a woman in a tight pink dress. She had reminded him of someone he knew once, a daughter of his grandmother’s friend, but there was no way to tell them that. The next thing he knew, the men were shoving him to the ground, kicking him in the ribs. That’s how it’s become around here—there are certain women who belong to men, women who are owned.
The cops come out of the bodega with paper cups of coffee, see the scuffle, smile, and shake their heads. One of the officers calls out to them, which makes the other one throw his head back and laugh. He tries again to pass, but Gold Tooth hooks a foot behind Luis’s knees, sends him crashing to the ground. Luis looks over at the cops, who stare at him, smiling. More rage surges through his limbs, and he extends a leg and kicks the bald man in the ankle. He knows to brace for it—bam—another slap upside the head. His jaw slides sideways. His temple throbs, and his whole spine feels bruised.
The men leave him on the sidewalk and one of the cops spits a chewed piece of gum out the window. Even with their eyes masked behind mirrored glasses, Luis can tell that they’re laughing at him, the corners of their mouths curling up. His heart flutters like a bird trapped in his chest.
He brushes the gravel out of his palms. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a needle in the gutter, a busted plastic lighter, a shimmering film of cellophane. He shudders, stands, brushes more gravel from the knees of his pants. He’s been thinking of ways to avoid the men and the cops who do nothing. But what he wants most is violence, to take a swing at those big, stupid grins, grind their faces into the ground, a swift kick to each of their guts. But he knows what would happen then: his hands twisted behind his back, the silver cuffs biting into his wrists. The rules are different for him. And it wouldn’t be his first arrest—in the spring he was caught in the parking garage of the old Taj Mahal. They must have thought he was up to something bad, but he was only curious. What it looked like empty of all those cars. It makes him feel better to think it, that they don’t know the half of it—if only they knew how often he is somewhere he isn’t supposed to go. If only they knew how frequently he made himself invisible, how closely he could watch.
As he limps home, he thinks about the way the whole city is dying around anyone who is left; slowly, though, like a large animal falling to its knees. All he can see are the ghosts of the places they used to go when he was a boy. The shop where his grandmother bought meat for the week, the one where his grandfather bought him his first bike. He can still remember when the boardwalk was lined with old hotels, beautiful redbrick and decorations that reminded him of frosting on a cake. His grandfather had brought him to the beach to watch as one of the bigger ones was destroyed. He and his grandfather pressed up against the plastic fence and watched the old hotel slide out from underitself, bloom into a cloud of rubble and dust. Other people around him covered their ears. He felt the crash of brick and walls and roof move up from the ground, through his bones, into his jaw. Five years after that he watched another one get smashed by a giant metal ball, but by then neither of his grandparents were alive to watch with him.
Then, the casinos rose up with their horrible red lights that blare through the night sky, their dark insides, their huge, gray slabs of concrete. They teemed with people for a time, but now the people haven’t come, not like before. Now the movie theater has closed, the letters dropped from its marquee. Forgotten playgrounds with rusted merry-go-rounds, swings that hang from one chain. There are fewer visitors, and more litter in the streets. He feels inside of him what it means to have grown up here. Another thing that has seeped into him and made him all wrong on the inside. It’s in his hands, his blood, in his bones.
The next morning he senses the soreness before he opens his eyes. He’s older now and feels things in ways he didn’t use to. The injuries linger, stay in his skin. There have always been the men and the cops like this in his life, people who will use the way his voice is trapped in him against him. People who think it means he’s stupid, that he moves through the world not just deaf and mute, but blind and numb. He goes into work feeling tired, battered, and bruised, his anger glowing in him like a hot coal. Once again he tries to puzzle out where he’s seen the girl before. It chafes at him, but he knows that doesn’t matter. He’ll get it right eventually.
For now he’ll only watch and wait.
CLARA
I TOOK THE BRACELET BECAUSEI could, but also because I wanted to make sure that girl Lily came to see me. I had a feeling about her, something about the way she looked at me, the way what I told her changed her posture, the way she flinched and then relaxed when I leaned close to touch her hand. I could use her. She could be our way in at the spa, if I played things right. She would probably be angry about the bracelet at first, but I was sure I could work on her, get her on our side. That guy she worked with noticed me take it—the janitor. I had seen him in town enough to know there was something off about him, too. Always skulking around on his own. I didn’t usually slip up like that, leave a witness, but I could spot someone with secrets and I figured he’d keep mine.
The next morning, Des clunked down the stairs, and I could tell she was going to see her dealer. She had her shirt tied up above her belly button, knotted at the narrowest part of her waist, and her hair was brushed to a glossy sheen.
“Do we have any readings scheduled for today?” I asked.
“I think you probably already know the answer to that. But hey, take those business cards and hand them out, drum up a bit of publicity. Only don’t do it in Bally’s. I think security has flaggedus over there.” Sooner or later I would lose track of all the places we weren’t allowed to go. “Why do you look so sullen? You don’t want to hand out the business cards? Fine by me. Besides, things are looking up for us. I think I’ve lined up your first date.”
I ignored her. I didn’t want to know anything about this date.
“I’ll hand out the cards,” I said, and grabbed the stack from the counter.
Des ruffled my hair. “This color looks so hot on you, babes.”
When she walked away, I felt again for the spiky hair at the base of my skull. I was still confused about the visions, but it felt good to have a secret, a piece of my life that she had no hand in.
I shoved the business cards in my purse but stopped in the arcade before handing them out. I played a round of Skee-Ball, rolling the scarred wooden balls up the ramp, arching them into the targets, stopping to listen to the dumb trill of the music that played when you hit the ten-thousand-point mark. The machine spit out a strip of pale pink tickets, which I carried to the counter in the back. The woman who worked there knew me, though she and I never talked much. She looked like she was in her sixties, with brown hair that was white at the temples and skin pale and doughy from all the time she spent inside.
Once, I’d had a vision as I stood in front of her, a quick flash: an old woman embroidering a design into a piece of cloth stretched taut in a hoop. A lot of the things I saw were violent, or sad, but sometimes they were straightforward. Sometimes what I saw was even comforting. I didn’t know how it worked, exactly—what bits of a life came to me, how certain memories sifted to the top and opened up to me. It was another thing I wanted my mother to teach me. How to see what I wanted to, and how to keep out or let go of what I didn’t want—or was afraid—to know. My “gift” still felt bigger than me, a force that moved through and around me like weather. Maybe one day it would make me feel powerful—if I could ever get it under control.
I pushed my tickets toward the woman, and she produced a bin of flimsy metal rings with plastic jewels at the center and a box of chocolate poker chips from the glass prize case. I pointed to the candy and she counted out four of them, paused, then reached in and added one more piece to the pile. I unwrapped one and let the chocolate melt slowly on my tongue. On my way out I tucked a business card into the screen of a Mortal Kombat console.
I held out cards to anyone I passed, chantingTarot cards palm reading, tarot cards palm readinguntil the words lost their meaning, my mouth just making the same shapes over and over again. I watched people take cards then drop them on the ground a few steps later. At first, I tried to look people in the eye, tried to show them something about myself: That I was, like Des said, the real deal. That they could trust me. That I wanted to help. Some people took them, thinking it was an offer for a free drink or free Italian ice, like the other shops handed out, and then crumpled the cards in their palms.
After an hour of walking I still had more than half of the cards to give away. I stopped in front of the darkened doors of the Taj Mahal, where signs warned against trespassing. Des and I had gone to the liquidation sale, before they closed their doors for good. Men loaded the chandeliers into moving trucks and workers pried light fixtures off the walls. In every room, tables were stacked with empty cocktail glasses and giant serving platters, shelves full of clothing irons and telephones, piles of Bibles shucked from the drawers of bedside tables, and towers of metal champagne buckets. In another room, a cluster of disco balls sparkled in a corner. An entire hallway was lined with mattresses from the hotel, most of them covered in stains. It made me realize how easily the casinos, places I thought were fixed and permanent, could be reduced to debris.
