Daydreams of Angels

THE STORY OF LITTLE O (A Portrait of the Marquis de Sade as a Young Girl)

She had always been little for her age. That’s why her grandfather Joe had started calling her Little O.

Joe would sit in the big armchair and Little O would climb up on top of him. It was the best place in the house to watch television from and they very much liked to share the spot. They sang along to the commercials. She loved when Joe sang while she was on his tummy. His belly would roll around and rumble and it made her feel as though she were on a life raft and the sea was stirring underneath her.

She liked when he would fill up the measuring cup of warm water and dump it on her head in the bathtub — like he was making a big pot of soup and she was the little dumpling inside of it.

When she would fall down and scrape her knee, Joe would blow on it. He used to give her a glass of milk anytime that she had a nightmare about there being a serial killer under the bed.

Joe was proud of her because she was so cute. He would put her in the grocery cart and all the people would stop him to say how beautiful she was. He loved it when people made a fuss over the baby. He would say she was his daughter. And wasn’t she?

Sometimes Little O imagined herself growing inside an egg. It must have been a very big egg, like an ostrich egg. And Joe had come along with a little spoon and tapped the egg and she had come out of it.

When she was very little, Little O thought that everybody had a Joe the way that she had a Joe. He would answer all of her important questions. There was this deep dark hole in Joe’s mind where all the answers to every question were. It was like when the shopkeeper goes to get something from the back, you have no idea how big it is. You can only imagine how enormous it must be to have every shoe size in the world back there.

What does a skeleton eat for dinner, Joe? What does a baby bat do if it is afraid of the dark, Joe? Are there mashed potatoes on the moon, Joe?

These were all things that Joe knew.

They had a stack of telephone books in the corner of the living room. She used a new one every year to sit on and eat breakfast. Each was filled with pressed flowers that they had picked up in the park that year.

Before long there were ten telephone books in the corner and Little O still lived with Joe in the ugly little apartment on the sixth floor of a building with no elevator. Joe had gotten more and more overweight. It was too hard for him to go up and down the stairs all by himself, so Little O would have to do all the errands.

She bought him nine child-sized hamburgers on Mondays, when they were forty-nine cents at the corner restaurant. They were each wrapped in silver aluminum paper like tiny gifts. He was always so happy to get those hamburgers that it would make Little O want to cry.

Little O would sit next to him on her knees on the couch and run the comb across his head. He very much liked the feeling of it across his scalp.

He knew he had saved her. He had fed her with a tiny spoon, out of tiny jars, even though she wasn’t his. He had changed all of her diapers. And so now she owed him things and had to take care of him forever. He did not have to worry about ever being alone again.

Little O never had any sense of decorum. She brought the garbage down wearing a pair of rubber boots and a really short nightgown. You could see her behind when she bent over. She didn’t care and she didn’t know why she should.

The mothers in the neighbourhood would have told Joe about how Little O was dressing inappropriately, but they didn’t want to talk to him. He had been gruff and argumentative years ago in the grocery store. They could only imagine how crazy he had gotten after spending a year cooped up in that apartment.

What else could you expect from a little girl who had been abandoned by her parents and raised by her welfare-case grandfather? they thought. They hoped she would stay away from their sons when she got older.

She brought in Joe’s welfare stub, which he had to sign every week, to the social worker. The social worker asked Little O if she was happy living with her grandfather, if she wouldn’t prefer to live with some other girls her age. The social worker did not say what would happen to Joe, so Little O said that she and Joe were fine. The social worker said that she was sure there was a big apartment in heaven waiting for Little O one day. And that she was such a good girl.

When she was eleven, Little O sat on Etienne Metivier’s couch, wearing a tie that belonged to his father around her neck. It made her feel fancy even though she was wearing a tank top with a number on it and jean shorts. She crossed her legs politely. He went and served her tea from a very elegant cup that his mother kept locked away so that no one except special guests could use it.

“Do you want to maybe go to the swimming pool later, sir?”

“That sounds like a good idea, sir.”

“Very well then, sir.”

It excited him that they were calling each other sir. He had no idea why. That’s why boys liked Little O. She knew things that they would like before they did.

She went over to Scott LeDuc’s house. He said that he had a whole basket filled with kittens under the kitchen table. She knew that he was watching her pet the kittens. He thought there was something so beautiful about the way she did it. When she whispered words to the kittens, it seemed strangely indecent.

“That’s a sweet little pussy. That’s just a lovely little glass of milk. Oh look at your little wee blinking, twinkly little eyes. Oh what tiny little raspberries for paws. Oh God loves you so much. Aren’t you the prettiest thing that God ever did invent in his whole life? I want to keep you in my inside coat pocket for days and days and days. Until you are a little old lady cat. And listen to your mews! I am going to take you to have your mews recorded for a symphony orchestra. And we will tour Europe and drink milk out of teacups and take naps together and eat crème brûlée.”

And then she scrambled out from under the kitchen table, shook hands with him and was on her way. He didn’t even know what hit him. He sat right down on his ass on the kitchen tiles, no longer able to even look at the kittens. It was troubling to feel so much.

Little O noticed that boys noticed her. Although she didn’t know why they did. She didn’t have trouble attracting their attention the way some of the other girls did. When she would sense that a boy had fallen in love with her, there would be a peculiar feeling, a magical sort of lonely feeling. When you realized that someone was in love with you, you got to see yourself from the outside, just for a minute. You could finally have proof that you existed. You could look at yourself as though you were a fabled creature, like a unicorn.

She looked through Patrice’s notebook that was filled with spelling tests. His talent for spelling was legendary in her class. On top of each page was a small star.

She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have that many gold stars. The notebook was such a marvellous little universe of constellations. You couldn’t see the stars in the sky at night in the city. If you wanted to look at some stars, you had to befriend a boy like Patrice.

She let a boy named Jesse hit her hands with a wooden ruler. Then they went into his kitchen. He put ice cubes in a tube sock and then wrapped it around her hands. He kissed her on the cheek and apologized.

What did Little O look like? She was pale and had long, dirty-blond hair. She had big cheeks that made her head look too big for her skinny body. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the class, but she would grow up to be. Somehow the boys knew this.

When she was eleven and a half, Little O found out about a gang of little boys that called themselves the Black Sparrows. The group was made up of seven skinny boys who all happened to be cousins. After school, they met in an apartment building that was made of orange bricks. She crossed the train tracks to go meet them.

They all squeezed together on the chesterfield in the living room as Little O sat on a wooden dining-room chair, facing them. She said that she would like to join their gang. As an initiation ritual, she said she would have sex with all of them.

They sat there quietly, not knowing what to say. They were all too embarrassed to say anything. In fact they each secretly wanted to be thinking whatever it was that the others were thinking. It was the sort of thing that they had fantasized about before. But now that it was here before them, it seemed too strange.

Although they had all always found Little O to be very beautiful, they saw flaws in her appearance. They noticed that one of her stockings had slid down into her shoe and that there were permanent yellow stains in the armpits of her T-shirt. They noticed that she had a pimple on her cheek.

It turned six o’clock as they were all sitting there. The mother of two of the boys came into the living room and announced that supper was ready. They asked if it would be all right if they invited their little friend to have dinner with them. The mother looked at Little O and naturally she wanted to say no, but she said, “Fine.”

Sitting around the kitchen table, the boys were suddenly happy. They had never felt so comfortable with a girl their age before. They felt the way that you feel after you have slept with someone for the first time and here they are in your kitchen the next morning. Here they are suddenly sharing your life. One of the boys had a sudden urge to put his head on her lap and weep.

When she laughed, she snorted. Now it was as if everything ugly about her was beautiful.

The sky became pink as the sun set, like someone had poured a packet of pink Kool-Aid into a glass of water.

She told the boy that he should go and get her a bottle of beer from his fridge. She said that he should take a deep, deep gulp and then kiss her immediately afterwards.

She asked him if he would like to watch her cry. He shrugged. She sat there for a while, looking straight ahead. But she could not make herself cry.

She would go to do the laundry late at night when there weren’t any people there. When she opened the bags they always smelled so bad that everyone in the laundromat would turn to look at her. The owner of the laundromat would sometimes give Little O an extra quarter when she was missing enough change for her load. He told her he had never seen such a good kid who did so much for her grandfather. He told her that she was truly wonderful, as spotless as a clean sheet.

Little O was getting married in the alley. There were three brothers who lived on the third floor of the building who kept tossing garbage down on their heads — banana peels and stuff like that. All the kids that were attending the wedding turned their faces up to the heavens and yelled at them to stop ruining their fun.

The boy was wearing his Sunday clothes. Little O had a paper doily bobby-pinned to her hair and was wearing a long silky nightgown that went to the ground. She was carrying a bunch of bluebells in her hands, which she had plucked from the train tracks.

Most of the kids were there because they wanted to watch Little O and the boy kiss. Most of the kids were there because they wanted to watch them do something bad. They knew it was bad, but they couldn’t figure out how bad it was.

The boy’s name was Murray and Little O hated this name. She was chilly in only her nightgown. She felt as if the other children were nothing more than a mad, terrible little mob. They were like the exact sort of people that would turn up to see her execution if this were another time.

Little O wondered whether if in all her past lives she had been humiliated in public this way. It seemed entirely possible. Because the feeling seemed so familiar to her. It was as if she had been born to be humiliated. She wondered if other girls felt the same way.

The minister was a boy named Bertrand. He was wearing a tuxedo jacket from his clown costume from last Halloween. He had long bangs that he wore down over his face. He spent most of the time in public fiddling with his bangs. They were a great burden to him.

He gave a good speech though. Nobody knew the difference between really bad and really good, so they chose instead to think of it as magnificent.

“Here we are. We are together to mention the coming together forever of this man and this woman. Murray Estaban and Little O. They will always be together even when they are sick and they are old. They will have sex. They will be stuck being married by the power invested in God. You, Murray and Little O, may kiss and may the whole city of cities fall on your heads if you try not to be married.”

There was a man who had a heart attack in Little O’s building. Since he had no relatives, the landlord put his possessions into boxes and put them out on the street corner. Little O looked through all his things.

There were a lot of pots and pans and a box full of books. There was a big book called The Joy of Sex. She held it against her chest and brought it up to her apartment immediately. The couple in the drawings were her new secret best friends. She could look at them making love in ridiculous ways for hours.

She also found a sailor’s hat that day that made the mothers think she was maturing too quickly for her age. They wished some sort of authority would take the girl away.

The mercury in the thermometer went down like the ink in the teacher’s red pen as she wrote criticisms all over everyone’s homework.

She was walking home in her underwear and a blue parka with a sheepskin-lined collar. She had lost her skirt in a game of strip poker. Why hadn’t she thought to gamble away another article of clothing, like her gloves or her earmuffs?

She asked Luke if she could watch him pee. But he couldn’t go while she was watching.

When she was twelve, in Grade Seven, she was the only girl who wasn’t dressed up for picture day. She had a white button-up shirt with a tie that you pinned on. She had on a pair of jeans with big holes in the knees. Perhaps she was dressed up.

There had to be one child who was a sacrificial lamb, one who all the mothers looked down on in order to raise their own child up on a pedestal. And that was Little O. Mothers loved it whenever their children came home with news about the terrible situations that Little O had gotten into.

They pointed out to their husbands her terrible outfit in the school photo and said they would never let their kid have their picture taken like that.

Little O went with the grocery cart to return all of Joe’s empty Pepsi bottles. Because it put him in a cheery mood, Joe’s favourite thing was to drink Pepsi. The store owner handed Little O the change and let her choose a chocolate from the fishbowl on the counter. She always chose the mint one. When she bit in, it was like there was a piece of winter hiding in the middle. The owner felt guilty that that was all he could give her. He had never seen a child who went about her errands so effortlessly. He told his wife that Little O would be a saint in two hundred years. His wife rolled her eyes.

A group of girls sat on the swings in their skirts. They looked like bells ringing back and forth.

Little O never hung out with other girls. She didn’t know what had happened first. Had they started rejecting her or had she decided that they weren’t worth her time? There were times when the boys wanted nothing to do with her. There were times when they needed her to leave them alone.

She went into the second-hand store. She tried on a pile of underwear and some bras in one of the changing cabins. She felt happy. She was all alone with her reflection and she felt as if no one else in the world existed. She knew what the reflection was going to say. It was sweet and kind and said, “I love you.”

She didn’t want to go home because Joe was in a foul mood. She wandered around and decided to stop into the pet store. The boy who worked there was the son of the owner. That’s why he was able to be there by himself. He sometimes let her sit next to him behind the cash. It made her feel as if she was his wife.

She imagined him standing in front of the stove, heating up a can of pasta for the two of them to eat. They would laugh about who had the idea of making pasta into the shape of trucks. Their lips would get a pretty orange colour from the toxic tomato sauce.

You could hear the doves cooing in their cages. Little O thought they were making the sounds of babies crying. They made her think of her own future little baby that she would treat so well. She would be so good to her little girl: she would dress her in fancy baby clothes with frills and buy her those hard cookies that are impossible for anyone other than a baby to bite into.

She gave the boy across the street a haircut. All the tufts of hair fell down around him, like some birds had been shot out of the sky and now were falling and falling. It looked terrible. And later in life, when women were yelling at him that he was a loser, that he wasn’t any good, that he didn’t do anything for anyone on earth and that he had never come close to making anyone happy, he would close his eyes and remember this haircut.

Because it was when he was having this haircut that he had been able to know for absolute certain what it was like to feel free of doubt.

Little O refused to be ashamed of the fact that she put her hand under the covers and touched herself. She imagined the security guard at the department store making her go into the backroom and have sex with him for stealing a pair of neon shoelaces.

She would not be one of the cowardly girls who said that it was only men who were dogs, that boys were perverts, that men couldn’t be faithful. Because these were wonderful attributes. They belonged to people who would not be judged by their imperfection, who knew that this was merely one small part of their identities.

The ones who weren’t afraid of others knowing that they were perverts were the ones that were going to rule the world. Little O would not be chaste.

Mrs. Thibault came home one afternoon and found Little O tied to the tree in her yard with a skipping rope.

“Will you please untie me?”

She untied Little O and she walked away without looking back. Mrs. Thibault wanted to ask her so many questions. She would have to spend the rest of her life wanting to ask Little O those questions. There were questions that she would never know the answers to.

Little O brought Joe’s awful black cat to the vet. It was always messy looking and out of sorts, like a kid that had just had a turtleneck pulled off its head. Her arms were covered in scratches and the scrawny cat hissed at everyone. The vet asked Little O why she didn’t go ahead and have the crazed animal put down. Little O said that it made Joe happy, and the vet saw that that was the most important thing for her. He gave her the flea medication for free and called her Mademoiselle Teresa.

Little O told Zachary that if he put money into the photo booth, she would take off all her clothes and let the camera take pictures of her in the nude. You could hear the machine gulp as it swallowed each quarter. He could see half her naked body beneath the curtain as the flash went on and off. He thought that he was going to faint.

Little O and Jack were doing their homework for art in the library together. He was obsessed with grey pencil crayons. He thought that real artists didn’t use bright colours. He showed her how he was colouring in a tree all grey.

Little O agreed with him that it looked much better that way. She would go along with every wrong little idea that a boy would have. She did this because she was encouraging them to follow their dreams, however idiotic those might be. She liked stroking their tiny egos. This is what women were supposed to do. They were supposed to believe in the dreams of their men as if they were God.

Jack suddenly loved Little O madly. It was the first time he was falling for this stupid pleasure.

Sometimes she wanted to live on a little planet where she was the only girl. On this planet, she would have seven husbands. They would be so demanding that she would have no time whatsoever for herself.

She would have seven beds to sleep in. Very much like Snow White and the seven dwarfs. She would have so many dishes to wash. She loved washing dishes in the evening.

She liked to read Tintin comic books. She imagined Tintin telling her that he loved her passionately. She pictured taking off her clothes on one side of the bed and Tintin taking his off on the other. She and Tintin would be dressed in underclothes and stand at the sink, brushing their teeth together. She imagined them both looking in the mirror — giggling at finding each other in the reflection together.

She let Tobias draw all over her arms and legs with a ballpoint pen. He drew everything that he knew how to draw until she was completely covered. He illustrated her with panthers and ninjas. She liked the way it felt. As if he was a doctor with a scalpel slicing through her anaesthetized body.

“There!” he said, when he was done. “Now no one will have you except for me. Now no man will look at you.”

He went into the pantry and gave her a can of No Name diet lime soda even though he knew that he wasn’t supposed to give these to his friends. She slurped from it while trying not to get the carbonated bubbles up her nose, making an awful lot of noise with that can.

She told him that he must be a millionaire because he had a chandelier in his living room. His family lived in a four-and-a-half in a big building and the chandelier came with the apartment. It was small and made out of brass and some of the light bulbs didn’t glow.

He wondered if it was true. Maybe he was rich and he didn’t even know it. Everybody was envious of him, but he just hadn’t noticed before. Little O told him that she didn’t love him for his money though; she loved him absolutely for himself.

The mother thought about how Little O was unsupervised all the time. She knew where her child was at any given time during the day. And there was Little O, sitting in their living room with nobody in the entire world having any idea whatsoever where she was. The world simply couldn’t work that way. It would all run amok. It was like a social experiment that was going to lead to bloodshed or total chaos. The mother looked at Little O as though she were Robespierre, with her skinny legs crossed on the couch.

When asked if she needed anything, Little O would always ask the social worker for something for Joe. He needed a walker to help him get from the couch back to bed. She knew that Little O couldn’t help but be anything but selfless. The social worker put together a bag of things for Little O all the same one day. She gave her a pair of used ice skates and an empty notebook with a photograph of a horse on it. Little O smiled and said, “You shouldn’t have.” The social worker almost began to weep.

They were selling aluminum balloons that had roses on them. Little O had terrible taste. She always went for that sort of thing.

Little O was sitting and peeling a hard-boiled egg on the steps of her building. The boy in Apartment 12 came and sat down next to her. She told him that her grandfather was from a little village outside of Poland and that if a little boy and a little girl sat across the table from one another and ate hard-boiled eggs, then they would be married.

The little children were all coming from a festival in the park. They had butterflies and cat faces painted on. They lived in a completely different world than she did.

His mother had a huge pitcher of water filled with slices of lemon in the fridge. It weighed about as much as a bathtub at the bottom of the ocean.

They went and looked at the strange and beautiful and mysterious things that his mother kept at the bottom of her underwear drawer. There was a pack of playing cards with naked men wearing construction helmets and firemen hats. There was a lozenge container full of pot. There was a package of specialty condoms.

It was strange that adults all had sex. It was strange how appalled they were about the idea of young people having sex. Why that of all things?

Joe would never actually be able to go in for a parent — teacher interview and they had no telephone. So Little O photocopied the report card and gave herself all As. The whole night he talked about how she had inherited her smarts from him and that he had raised her right. He had tears in his eyes. Joe put his arms around her. Her face was damp with his tears.

Little O and Guy were sucking on jawbreakers. Their tongues were changing colours inside their heads.

She went to the zoo to feed the elephant peanuts. When its trunk gently touched her hand, it always turned her on.

Many of the animals were fed from baby bottles. She thought there was something wrong about that. They couldn’t have liked being treated like babies. She didn’t think that there was anything worse on earth than being treated like a baby and having food shoved down your throat all the time. It was rubbing the fact that they weren’t free in their faces.

One of the zookeepers knew her. He told her that when she was eighteen, she would come to the zoo and he would make love to her. Would she like that? he asked. Yes, she said.

She went and sat on a stool at the Chinese restaurant that was on the first floor of her building. The stools were covered with red vinyl and little tiny gold stars. The placemats had drawings of fancy goldfish on them. The place was filled with the late-night crowd. She sat there in her pyjamas and watched the television that was above the cash. The owner always gave her free soup and fortune cookies.

A man came in after a hockey game and lit up a sparkler. He waved it over his head in the restaurant. Everyone laughed. Little O put her hands over her head as if it had just started to rain.

She wanted to know if she could come over and they would read Slaughterhouse-Five together.

She put a balloon under her T-shirt. Taking his hand and placing it on her belly, she asked him whether or not he could feel the baby kicking.

His mother watched them out the window. Of course she was going to end up being pregnant young, the mother thought. There was no way around it. She did not want her son involved in that. Little O would ruin the future prospects of whichever boy got her pregnant.

The mother couldn’t believe that she was having those kinds of thoughts. She blamed Little O also for putting such terrible thoughts into her head. She really hadn’t known that she was that type of person until Little O came along into her front yard.

There was supposedly a little boy who lived in that apartment building who could sing Elton John songs really well.

He was wearing a pair of penny loafers. There was a penny in one of them. The other one seemed to have disappeared.

She took all her clothes off and weighed herself on a scale in her bathroom. She liked that she was skinny. She didn’t know why she was proud of the fact that she was thin, except that it was the type of thing that girls were supposed to feel accomplished about. The other girls would point out in an admiring way how skinny she was.

Little O had to put Joe’s socks on for him and then take them off. Sometimes Joe was afraid to tell Little O how much he needed her. Because he thought that if he did, she would pack her suitcase with clothes and climb out the window and run away. So he yelled at her out of desperation. The logic of love is often incredibly faulty. Love has a lot of trouble making sense out of anything.

Joe screamed at Little O that she had gotten the groceries all wrong. He told Little O that she never did anything for him. He said that she was a useless little girl and that other girls helped their parents out around the house.

Little O knew that Joe didn’t really mean it, but it made her cry all the same. She went down to the stoop to cry all by herself. The tears streamed down both of her cheeks as though her eyes were broken faucets. A neighbour stopped to look at her on his way up the stairs. He had never seen eyes so blue. It was as though he were witnessing a miracle.

She climbed into the bathtub. The water rose up around her. She pretended that she was the moon making the tide rise.

She climbed up his fire escape. The cats in the windows raised their eyebrows in surprise as they saw her go.

They decided to have phone sex. She went down to the lobby and dialed up. He could hear the echo of the lobby as she talked. She stopped for a moment because someone came in. It was Mrs. Foucault from Apartment 7. By the time she was done asking Little O what she was doing there, he had lost his erection.

He had his plastic wristband from the amusement park on his wrist from eight months before. Holding up the scissors from the kitchen, she said that it was time to let her cut it off. The scissors made the sound of a guillotine’s blade descending. He felt completely naked after she snipped.

The winter wind blew the last orange leaf off the tree just like it was blowing out the flame of a candle.

Little O and Joe put on paper crowns at Christmas time. She had a yellow one and he had a purple one. They watched the show about Rudolph. She ate her fruitcake out of a soup bowl with a spoon. It had started snowing outside.

The big red pompom on her knit hat looked like she had an apple balanced up there and she was waiting to be shot by William Tell.

She didn’t know how she felt when a dodge ball hit her hard.

The man in Apartment 6 used to open his door and look every time she passed. It was that kind of building.

He had a calculator on his wristwatch that he was wearing over a tattoo of a tiger that was half scratched off. They were sharing an armrest and his wrist was coming awfully close to hers.

She was reading a paperback book called Calories. It gave you the amount of calories that an apple or a piece of pumpkin pie might have. She was tearing through it as if it was an engaging spy novel.

His mother called him Bird affectionately.

There were naked girls all over the city. They were in bathtubs. They had just been made love to. They were in tiny changing rooms with dresses all over the floor around them, like cherry trees that had dropped their blossoms.

Her smooth white stockings made her look like candy canes whose red stripes had been licked off.

She rode this ten-speed bicycle that was too big for her. Sometimes she fell over when she was trying to get off it. It had belonged to Joe when he was much younger. He said that it was a top-of-the-line bicycle that Olympic cyclists in France used.

She was trying to blow bubbles out of a bubble wand with some dish soap. The bubbles kept popping automatically. She had wanted to bring things of wonder into this world.

When she was thirteen, she put on a pink velvet dress to go to a bar mitzvah. She had a card with a Star of David and fourteen dollars in it.

There was a long table with little boys in suit jackets eating hot dogs. One boy had a burgundy and yellow striped turtleneck under his band jacket. He had a single mom.

There were paper napkins with Hebrew letters written on them. There was a band dressed in black tuxedos that glittered. She hoped that they would play “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. That song always made her want to cry, even though she had no idea what it was about.

She sat on the pee-stained couch at the Salvation Army and read Harlequin novels. Sometimes there were horror novels. She would put a bookmark in the book and put it back on the shelf and hope that no one would buy it.

She liked paper dolls when they were in nothing but their underwear. She didn’t know why you were supposed to put those awkward dresses on them.

She said that she wished she could meet a man who was as sexy as Felix the Cat.

She liked when boys wore their grandfathers’ hats. It was as if an old man had wished to be young and got his wish.

The nurse had to show Little O how to help Joe with the oxygen mask. The nurse told Little O that it was a tragedy that she had to live this way. But she didn’t do anything about it.

Little O stood under the forty-watt bulb in the lobby. The landlord was too cheap to pay for a one hundred — watt one. It made the lobby look dim and golden. The nurse reflected that the girl looked like an angel in an oil painting that she had seen in a museum. The nurse couldn’t stop herself from kissing Little O on the forehead and said that she was an angel.

When she started Grade Ten, there was a new boy in her class. They made each other laugh in chemistry lab. They liked all of the same television shows. They both thought it might be kind of interesting to be movie stars when they grew up. They both liked crossword puzzles. They agreed to disagree about music.

She went out with his family to the chicken restaurant. It had a blue neon rooster that blinked on and off in the window. There was wood panelling on the walls and fairy lights along the edges of the ceiling.

They had paper napkins with red flowers on them. They had alcohol wipes that smelled of lemon for you to clean your hands off with when you were done.

There was a jukebox, and the mother gave them a quarter to put in it to choose their song. After dinner there was a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating in the big glass of Coca-Cola, like it was waiting for the Titanic to hit it.

Little O didn’t feel as if there was anything wrong with her. She wasn’t tiny. She wasn’t poor. She didn’t live in a dirty apartment with a grandfather who made her sad.

The boy and his family had mistaken her for a regular girl. And if she could fool these people, then she could fool the entire world. And then it occurred to her that maybe they weren’t mistaken at all. Maybe she just happened to be a very ordinary little girl.