The Last Days of California

FRIDAY

I awoke to a knock on the adjoining door, interrupting a good dream. It was right there, right where I could remember it if I tried, but there was another, more persistent knock, and I got out of bed.

My mother was standing there, eating a Fiber One bar. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes,” she said, “your father wants to make it to California today.”

“There’s no way we can make it to California today,” I said, though I didn’t know if we could or not. She took another bite. I hated to watch her eat—she enjoyed herself too much and made a lot of noise. “I want one of those.”

“It’s the last one,” she said. She pointed it at me and I took it and bit off a hunk. It was thick and chewy and seemed like too much trouble once I had it in my mouth.

She closed her door and I closed mine. She turned her lock so I turned mine.

I got back in bed and tried to remember my dream, but there was nothing, not an image or a feeling or anything. I listened to my parents’ voices through the wall. It made me realize how infrequently they said more than a few words to each other, how they spoke mostly to convey information. I wanted someone I could tell everything to, someone who would spend a lot of time talking with me about nothing.

I went over to the window and looked out at the parking lot. Gabe’s van was gone. He was hammering nails into a roof somewhere, or drinking black coffee like a grown man. I transferred his number to my phone and got in the shower. Something was wrong with the plumbing, the pipes making a high-pitched whine—up an octave and back down and then up again. The hot water went out and I stepped to the side to wait for it to return.

“I’m not wearing King Jesus today,” Elise said when I came out.

“Who cares?”

“They’ll care.”

“I doubt they’ll say anything,” I said.

“Of course they’ll say something, why wouldn’t they say something?”

I sat on her bed and poked her through the spread. “They might have bigger fish to fry.”

“What kind of fish?”

“They’ve been talking for half an hour,” I said.

“They never talk.”

“I know, that’s what I’m saying.”

We were quiet, listening, but one of them turned on the TV—probably our mother.

Elise went to the bathroom and I watched a movie I’d seen before, Brad Pitt playing one of the white trash characters he liked so much—too thin with a dirty beard, dirty hair, and dirty clothes, but he still didn’t look trashy. I turned it off and knelt beside the bed. “Hello, God. It’s me.” I couldn’t think of anything to say after that and then I started wondering if everyone said it’s me. To be me for someone, you had to be close to them—not their number one, perhaps, number one could just start talking, but close enough. Was it an attempt to feel closer to Him, claiming to be me? I squeezed my eyes shut. “I haven’t been very good. I’ve had a lot of doubts.” I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, tried to look pained. He could see through all of it. “I’m not sure I believe in you anymore. I’m not sure if I’m talking to myself, if I’ve always just been talking to myself.” Birds chirping, I thought. Nothing. But then I was thinking about the rapture and being lifted into the clouds with all of the other chosen ones. I didn’t want to die on earth or up in the clouds. I wanted God, if He did exist, to stay where He was, just like He always had. And I wanted my life to be different and better, but I wanted to be the one responsible for changing it.

I kept thinking, confusing myself, and then I stopped and listed all of the things I was sorry for—weakness of character, rebelliousness, being disrespectful to my parents, touching Gabe and letting him touch me. Wanting to be loved too much. But my desires weren’t that unreasonable, and why was my body made to want things it shouldn’t want? And then I had to start over, asking forgiveness and trying my best to want what I was seeking.

Elise came out of the bathroom. “What are you doing down there?” she asked.

“What’s it look like?”

She shook her head.

“I can pray if I want,” I said.

“Of course you can—pray away. Say one for me, too.” She struggled to open a package of single-serve coffee. Once she got the little plastic container out, she had trouble sliding it into the slot, and it hit me—she would never amount to anything. But this wasn’t true. She was smart and beautiful and people loved her. She would be a star. I would always be watching her.

I began to sweat the moment I stepped outside. I glanced over at Gabe’s room and imagined his friends asleep, sprawled out on the floor. His van was still gone. One day it would be back but I wouldn’t be around to see it.

We put our bags and suitcases in the trunk and our father got back on I-10. We didn’t say anything about the real America—we preferred the interstate, where there were gas stations at more regular intervals and we didn’t expect to see anything of interest. As soon as he started driving, though, I was reminded that it didn’t matter whether we were on the interstate or the highway; the towns were small and far apart and there wasn’t anything between them.

I checked to see how much gas we had: less than a quarter of a tank.

“What are you doing?” my father asked. “Put your seatbelt on.”

“Seeing how much gas we have.”

“We have plenty.”

Driving was boring. Everything was boring. It was hard to believe that so much money had been spent to build roads where so few people traveled.

“What’s the caravan up to?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Elise said, opening a magazine.

At the next town, our father stopped at one of the gas station/houses, a single car at the pump. He parked on the other side and I looked over at the man, banging on the inside hood of his car with a hammer. Our father only liked to stop at Shell stations and Texacos—big, overly lit places with too many cars in the lot—so this had to be stressing him out. He got out and the man stopped banging.

“It’s like straight out of a horror movie,” Elise said.

“We’re not having enough fun for this to be a horror movie,” I said.

“You’re right—we’d need a Jeep and some loud music and a couple of douche-baggy guys. And you’d have to be hotter.”

“Don’t be mean.”

“I’m kidding,” she said. “You’re plenty hot. We’d just need to put you in something trashy, and a pair of Spanx.”

“Y’all need to be nice to each other,” our mother said.

“We’re all we’ve got,” Elise said.

Whenever we fought, our mother reminded us that one day they’d be dead and it would just be the two of us. It made me wish they’d had more children.

Our father came back and handed me a key. We took turns using the bathroom, which was nicer than I’d expected. There was even a candle on the toilet.

Inside the store, I selected a package of strawberry coconut cakes. I liked them because they were so pink and round. I took them up to the counter where Elise and my mother were waiting with an assortment of snacks and drinks.

“You live out here all by yourself?” Elise asked the guy behind the counter. He was clean and neat, normal-seeming. Our mother took out her wallet and moved my sister aside.

“Uh-huh,” the man said.

“What do you do out here?” she asked.

“Work, hunt, fish,” he said without looking at her.

“Do you hunt turkey?” she asked. He nodded. “Quail?” He nodded. “Dove?” He nodded. “Pigeon?”

“No pigeon,” he said, scrunching up his face. He handed our mother the bag and walked to the back of the store.

“Where’s your shirt?” our father asked Elise when we were back in the car.

“It smelled bad,” she said.

“Your mother just washed them.”

“That was the day before and it’s like a hundred and eight degrees,” she said, adding that cleanliness was next to Godliness.

“Well, enjoy your day off,” he said, reminding her that he had paid twenty dollars for them.

“Each,” I said, digging my cakes out of the bag. I opened the plastic, slid the tray out.

“Let’s talk,” Elise said.

“Oh, now you want to talk. I’m sorry. I’m busy.”

“You’re not busy.”

“I don’t like to talk about the stuff you like to talk about.”

“What do I like to talk about?”

“Politics and stuff.”

“I wasn’t going to talk about politics,” she said. “Forget it.” She put her earbuds in. I looked at my cakes and thought of Gabe. Would he like me more if I was skinnier? I wanted him to touch me and feel bones beneath my skin. Boys liked it when you were starving, like you had starved yourself for them.

Our father hit something and a tire blew—flopping and bumping as he directed the car onto the shoulder. We got out and walked around it, the front passenger’s side tire nearly gone. Our mother took the manual out of the glove box and handed it to our father. Then she went to the trunk and took bottles of water out of the cooler, passed them around. I had to pee but I twisted off a cap and took a drink.

“Do we have Triple A?” Elise asked.

“It expired two months ago,” our mother said, placing the back of her hand on her forehead like she was taking her temperature.

“We don’t need Triple A,” our father said. He shielded his eyes and looked into the distance. Then he went to the trunk and started pulling things out, laying them on the pavement one by one like he had never seen any of it before. “Come on over here and help me,” he said.

“I have to use the bathroom,” I said.

“You have the worst bladder,” Elise said. “You have to pee every hour.”

“I drink a lot of liquids.”

“Go find a tree,” my mother said. In the sun, I could see just how thin her hair had gotten, how much of her scalp shone through.

“Worst. Bladder. Ever,” Elise said.

I looked around—there weren’t any trees—and then I realized that this was why the sky was so much bigger in Texas. In Alabama, pine trees lined the roads, skinny sickly pines pressed close together.

The few scrub bushes were pretty far away. I started walking toward them. The grass grew taller and taller and I thought about snakes, coiled and hissing, ready to strike. I wondered whether I could make bad stuff happen by imagining it. I knew at any moment I’d see a snake and it would bite me and I’d yell really loud and everyone would come running. It would be poisonous, of course, and they’d tell me I was going to be fine, that help was on its way, and I’d make them promise a million times and I’d believe them and then I’d die before I knew what was happening.

I stopped short of the bushes and squatted. Nothing lasts forever, I thought. But I’m here now. I am here right now and I am peeing in a field. I could have peed for longer but I jiggled and pulled up my shorts and began walking back, lifting my feet high and continuing the search for snakes.

“I have to go, too,” Elise said, “but I’m gonna hold it.”

I sat next to her on the side of the road and watched her tie her shirt into a knot so her stomach showed. My father didn’t ask me to help him. He was still arranging his tools on the pavement and had already managed to rip his pants even though he hadn’t done anything. I started thinking about his faults, which were many, and which he seemed totally unaware of. I wondered what my faults were, what people thought they were.

“Aren’t you getting gravel in your hands?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “You just worry about yourself.”

“Fine, be a bitch.”

“They’re slowing down,” Elise said, as a white pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder. “And they’re stopping. Now they’re getting out.”

I looked around—there were no other cars in sight.

Three men got out of the truck, an older man and two younger ones. The older man smiled the kind of smile that’s meant to make you feel comfortable, so it doesn’t. He was tall and clean-shaven, wearing jeans and cowboy boots. I was afraid but reminded myself that I’d be afraid of any men that pulled over to help us, so my fear wasn’t an indicator of anything. My fear was all out of whack because I was always afraid. My mother said I’d been an easy child: a quick delivery, I’d practically fallen out. I’d slept well and held out my arms to strangers, had begun to potty train myself at eleven months. I didn’t remember this easy child. Surely this was my truest self, this person I had been in the beginning.

“Y’all got some car trouble?” the older man asked. His belt buckle was a real, actual snake’s head. I elbowed Elise and she untied her shirt.

“It’s a snake,” I said.

“What is?”

“His belt buckle.”

“We had a blowout,” our father said, walking toward them with his hand outstretched.

“No problem,” the man said. “We got it.”

Our father protested mildly before thanking them and moving off to the side. He stood next to our mother and we were lined up like the characters in a Flannery O’Connor story I’d read in school. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” That was the only line I remembered. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” I didn’t know what it was about that sentence that stood out to me, why I remembered it.

As the men worked, Elise and I shared earbuds, listening to the same songs as beads of sweat welled up from improbable places on my body. Sweat ran down my sides, trickled down my legs and arms.

“I like this,” I said. “Who is it?”

“Katy Perry. You don’t know who Katy Perry is?”

“Yeah, I know her.”

“Name another song,” she said, staring at one of the younger guys. She scratched her shoulder and touched her hair, trying to get his attention.

The older man let out a hacking cough and I jumped, my heart speeding up; any unexpected noise could startle me. My mother said it was because I read Stephen King novels before bed. She always had simple explanations like this, which made it hard for me to consider her advice. My favorite was Duma Key. I also liked It and The Tommyknockers. The books frightened me but it didn’t make me not want to read them. This seemed to imply something defective in my character. It was like the other things I did to make my life harder—eating too much when I knew I’d get a stomachache, drinking water when I had to pee and there was nowhere to use the bathroom.

The men moved fast, like they’d done this a hundred times, but then there was some problem getting the donut on and they stood around looking at it, forming a tight little circle so we couldn’t see what was going on. It wouldn’t take much for them to steal our money and our car, to kill us. Or they could simply change our tire and get us back on the road, our faith in humanity restored. Both options seemed equally likely. I imagined them discussing how it was going to go down, which one of them would make the transition from nice guy to killer.

Elise pinched my leg, and my mother and father, standing above us, waited for the judgment. I imagined them asking us to turn around. Elise and I would stand, slowly, so slowly, and my father would take my hand and then we would all take each other’s hands. We would remember in this moment how much we loved one another, how we would do anything to spare even one of us. But then the tire was in the trunk and the spare was on and my mother was offering them bottles of water. My father took out his wallet and tried to give them forty dollars, which they refused.

“This spare’s about had it,” the older man said, kicking it with his boot. “Where you headed?”

“Oakland,” my father said.

“You’ve got a long way to go.”

“We’re on a pilgrimage,” I said. “For the rapture.”

The men continued to stand there, nodding and smiling with their hands in their pockets.

“The end times?” I said.

The one who was supposed to pull out a gun or a knife was hesitant now, unwilling. I smiled above them, into the sun. I was good. I was a good girl.

“All right,” one of the young ones said.

“Y’all be safe,” said the other.

When they pulled onto the road with a wave, Elise and I stood and brushed ourselves off.

We got in our car and sat there, letting them put distance between us. I ran my fingernail back and forth against the seat, making a nice little pattern like a freshly mown lawn.

“Is everything okay?” my mother asked.

“It’s fine,” my father said, agitated. He pulled onto the road, but he wouldn’t drive over fifty and kept talking about where we were going to get a tire. There weren’t any tire stores out here; there wasn’t anything out here. As if to help him, I dutifully watched out the window for signs of life. The interstate markers ticked by and the signs preceding each exit let us know there was no reason to stop. Sometimes the signs were completely blank except for the words “gas” or “food.”

I got out my phone and typed Gabe a message. I erased it and tried again. Nothing said what I wanted to say. Everything sounded generic, boring. I might as well have used the prewritten messages. I put my phone away and listened to my Heaven mix: “Tears in Heaven,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” I’d made the mistake of limiting myself to songs with the word “Heaven” in the title whereas Elise had just gone with theme.

“What are you listening to?” Elise asked.

“Belinda Carlisle.”

“Man, your mix sucks.”

“Let’s trade,” I said, offering her my hot pink iPod. I’d regretted choosing pink the moment I’d stepped out of the Apple store.

“I’m listening to the Dalai Lama right now,” she said, and leaned her head against the window, closed her eyes.

I found a comfortable position and closed my eyes, too. I thought about my job—at least I wasn’t at work. I already wanted to quit even though I’d only been there a month and a half. I had to haul huge blocks of ice from the freezer in the back of the store to the machine at least six times a day. The rest of the time, I stood at the window, taking orders and making snow cones for bratty kids and their young mothers. I didn’t like those mothers, how they assumed doors would be held for them and everyone would get out of their way because they had small children. I liked the boy who worked there, though, watching him change lightbulbs and move boxes around, and I liked the lady with the fake blue contacts who melted Nestlé’s and poured it into molds. Her irises were an unnatural shade and there was a ring of dark brown around her pupils that made her seem alien.

After a while, my thoughts stopped making sense, but instead of slipping into sleep, I realized my thoughts were no longer making sense and I got so excited I was about to fall asleep that I jarred myself awake.

When I looked out the window again, there were more cars. Two lanes split into three and then four and then more lanes than I’d ever seen. I touched Elise but she was asleep, or pretending to sleep, so I left her alone. It was good to see cars again, good to see Starbucks and Taco Bells and gas stations that people didn’t live in. A mountain range loomed in the distance, growing closer by the second, and the sky was clear except for some thin clouds like the streaks left behind by an airplane.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“El Paso, and Ciudad Juárez is right there to your left,” my father said. “Surely this place is full of tire stores.”

“Look, kids, it’s a shantytown,” Elise said, sitting up. She Googled Ciudad Juárez on her phone, and after the general Wikipedia entry, the first thing that came up was “Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez.” She started reading it aloud, and I covered my ears because I didn’t want to hear about women who were sold into slavery and killed at bus stops. Our cousin was murdered by a man who was never found, who would never be found. She was a drug addict and probably a prostitute and no one had bothered to find her killer. It wasn’t like the TV shows, where detectives worked forty-eight hours straight and became close with the victims’ families. I was sure it was the same with these women: they were poor; they shouldn’t have been out at three o’clock in the morning. They were expendable. People were always saying the world was small but that was only to make it seem less terrifying. The world was so big. I hadn’t realized how big it was until now.

My father got off at an exit and drove along the frontage road. Soon enough, we saw a tire store, the kind of place you don’t see unless you’re looking for it. He parked and we went inside and sat in a glassed-in waiting room with a TV in one corner, outdated magazines, and free coffee. It was like every other carwash and car-repair waiting room in the world, and I thought of all the Saturday mornings I’d spent with my father at Personal Touch. He’d read the newspaper while I watched the men clean and vacuum our car and then we’d go to Krispy Kreme, where I’d get my own bag of doughnut holes. I never thought about calories or fat grams then. I just ate and enjoyed eating and didn’t get on the scale to watch my weight creep up.

It took less than half an hour for the old tire to come off and a new one to be put on, and we were back on the road, my father flying through El Paso, gunning it on the curves. He had once dreamed of being a racecar driver. He’d told me this one night when it was just the two of us having dinner, a rare moment when I’d responded to his questions with answers and he’d rewarded me by telling me something about himself. But it was probably just one of those dreams kids have, like they want to be an astronaut or a garbageman, the kind of thing no one actually wants to be when they grow up.

The downtown skyline was impressive—lots of tall buildings and a mountain backdrop. It was like the Old West, despite how big and concrete everything was. There was something about it that made it feel a million years old.

Soon we were in New Mexico, a state none of us had been to before. Our mother said she’d heard New Mexico had nice rugs; she wouldn’t mind bringing home a nice rug.

“We don’t need a rug where we’re going,” our father said.

“Then I don’t see what the problem is with getting one,” she said, which didn’t make sense, but I knew what she was saying. Buy a rug or don’t. Drive across the country or stay home. None of it really mattered.

“Anybody hungry?” he asked. “We’ve got choices here, we should probably take them.” He pulled off at an exit and we were faced with the usual selection of fast-food restaurants.

“Burger King,” Elise said.

“Taco Bell,” I said.

Our mother also voted for Taco Bell. She liked the regular, crunchy-shell tacos, the kind of thing nobody ordered unless they were getting a dozen in a box. Our father agreed to go through the drive-thrus at both if we ate in the car. I didn’t like to eat in the car because he might wreck and kill us all, but I didn’t want Burger King, either. The only thing I really liked there was the chicken sandwich, and it was good, but I could get more at Taco Bell without looking like a pig.

I ordered some onion rings at Burger King, seven in the box, and a bean burrito, a chicken quesadilla, and a Frutista Freeze at Taco Bell.

“Let me have a sip of that,” Elise said, and I passed my drink to her—strawberry on top and mango on bottom.

“You know this probably has like five hundred calories in it,” she said, stirring it, messing the flavors up.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

Our father pulled into a parking space and bowed his head. He said the standard prayer followed by a long-winded, rambling one in which he asked for guidance and courage. You’re going to need it, I thought, popping an onion ring into my mouth and chewing quietly.

Elise slopped the condiments off her veggie burger with a napkin. She took a bite and said she thought it was MorningStar Farms. It hadn’t occurred to her before but she was pretty sure it was MorningStar, the regular veggie patty, cooked to within an inch of its life. My mother unwrapped my father’s double cheeseburger and secured a napkin around it, and he ate while reaching his other hand into the bag for fries. He steered with his elbows and knees, and when the car began to veer off the road, she reached over and took the wheel. I wondered what she thought of him now, if she still saw him as the man she’d married or if he was so different he was like a stranger. She’d told me once that she’d married him because he was ambitious and honest, which weren’t qualities I’d have used to describe him at all. He had been handsome once, though, tall and slim with a full head of hair. Sometimes I got out their wedding album and flipped through the pictures. There was one in particular I liked: the two of them about to leave for their honeymoon. They stood in front of my father’s sports car, and my mother wore an outfit she had bought special for the occasion, had had her hair and makeup done. They were about to fly to Hawaii, first-class. I knew my mother’s suitcase had been lost, but the airline had given her the money to buy a whole new wardrobe, which she’d spent on beach hats, strappy sandals, and overly revealing dresses that she’d probably never worn again. My father hated to fly, and I couldn’t imagine him agreeing to take her somewhere so far-off and exotic. I couldn’t imagine them snorkeling and exploring the beaches, driving around in a rented jeep with the top down. It made me love them more because I knew the day would come when I would also be unrecognizable to myself.

New Mexico was going by quickly, dull and flat but otherworldly. There were strange flat shrubs and bunches of small trees I’d never seen before. In the distance, mountains loomed low and jagged. The Jesus billboards had been replaced by billboards telling us not to drink and drive, which our father said was due to all of the Indians. Their bodies didn’t process sugar like ours did, so they were more susceptible to diabetes and alcoholism.

“You have diabetes,” Elise said. “And they’re called Native Americans, not Indians. Indians are from India.”

Our father said he’d never met an Indian or a Native American that he liked.

“Hey,” Elise said, and we looked out her window at some dust kicking up.

“Thrilling,” I said, but I kept watching it and it was pretty mesmerizing, the way it moved. I’d never seen dirt act so purposefully. I fingered a tiny scrape on my knee from the bottom of the pool—reassurance that I hadn’t dreamed Gabe. I thought about how he’d looked at me, the things he’d said. I thought about his body and his face and the smell of gas in his van. I was going to replay our time together so often I’d have it memorized forever. I was going to replay it so many times I’d never remember any new details.

After that we watched YouTube videos of people driving on I-10 in New Mexico, same as us; most of the videos were shot by a guy who went around the country filming sections of interstate. He’d added various facts and notes at the bottom—when certain projects would be completed, crime rates, the longest and tallest and biggest. The videos were strangely riveting. The speed was doubled or tripled and fast music played. When we ran out of interstate videos, we watched others: kids recording a dust storm they called a white devil, a couple in a motorhome driving across the country. The man kept saying things like “Confidence is high” in a cheerful voice while the woman talked to the dog in her lap. Elise and I speculated about the nature of their troubles, but her phone died and she had to pass it up front to charge it.

In Arizona, everything looked different again. I felt like all of the people who were always talking about the homogenization of America were wrong—each place really was different. There were McDonald’s and Targets, but every town was full of different-looking people who had different accents and manners. In some places, the people said “Good morning” and “It’s nice to see you,” as if it wouldn’t be the first and last time they’d be seeing you, but twenty minutes down the road, the people might be cow-faced and unfriendly.

We were charmed by the cactuses, like giant hands reaching into the sky, and the camel at the dollar store where we stopped to buy Pepto-Bismol and toothpaste.

While our parents went inside, Elise and I stood in the parking lot watching a man give camel rides on the little stretch of dirt. I’d never seen a camel before. It was ugly and the humps were closer together than I’d imagined. A young girl, wedged between them, held up a hand and her mother took a picture. Elise took a picture of her mother taking a picture. And then Elise took a picture of me standing in front of the camel with my own hand raised, squinting below the enormously blue and cloudless sky.

We didn’t make it to California. At two o’clock, our father stopped at a casino resort somewhere near Phoenix. He pulled the car into the circular drive and waved the valet driver off.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked. “It’s early.”

“I’m going to check the rates,” he said, getting out and taking the keys with him. There was a bounce in his step I hadn’t seen in days. We were quiet as we watched him walk through the door.

“This place looks nice,” I said.

“If you’re into big, generic casino resorts,” Elise said. “Which I am, don’t get me wrong. They’re a heck of a lot better than the places we’ve been staying.”

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“The deal with what?” our mother said.

“She means last night we stayed at a ghetto motel and now we’re at this luxury resort,” Elise said.

“No, I mean why are we stopping so early. I thought he wanted to make it to California.”

“He wants to gamble,” Elise said. “He’s desperate to get his hands on a slot machine.”

“He’s not going to gamble,” our mother said, though we all knew he’d step onto the casino floor and the lights and sounds would trigger something in his brain, and he’d sit for hours, slipping twenty-dollar bills into machines. For years, he’d been sneaking off to the Indian casino on Eddie Tullis Drive, a beige monstrosity that could have doubled as a medical clinic.

“He gambles all the time,” Elise said. “Everybody knows he gambles.”

“Everybody does not know,” our mother said. “I haven’t told anyone, and you shouldn’t either. It’s nobody’s business.”

“We’re not like you,” Elise said. “We don’t want to live like that.”

“Like what?”

“Lying—pretending we’ve got money when we don’t, that we’re these perfect Christians who never do anything wrong.”

“It’s not lying.”

“It’s deception,” Elise said.

“It’s our reputation,” our mother said.

“I don’t care about my reputation.”

“And it shows,” our mother said, which was possibly the meanest thing I’d ever heard her say to my sister.

Elise paused dramatically and said, “I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wanted.”

I picked up an empty popcorn bag and stuffed candy and gum wrappers into it, passed it up. My mother took it and held it. It would be no fun being a mother, everybody handing you their garbage and wanting things all the time, nobody to tell your problems to. She could never say anything bad about our family. She could only talk about other peoples’ problems as a way of talking about her own.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” my mother said. “It isn’t true.”

Elise was clutching her stomach. It occurred to me that I had no idea when the baby had been conceived; she could be a couple of weeks pregnant or several months. She might even be far enough along that she couldn’t have an abortion, and then what would we do? I imagined taking her to a clinic set up in somebody’s house, a woman bustling her inside before closing the door in my face, which was something I’d seen in a documentary. I didn’t know anything except what I’d seen on TV and I never retained the information I learned. When I watched those outdoor programs, I didn’t actually consider that one day I might be lost in the wild and need that stuff in order to survive. I thought about it, trying to recall something, and remembered the fat hippie saying I shouldn’t eat brightly colored things, that brightly colored things are usually poisonous. If I was ever hungry and found a neon green insect under a log, I wouldn’t make the mistake of eating it.

Our father got back in the car. “I got y’all your own room,” he said, handing us key cards. “Might as well enjoy ourselves on our last night.”

“That’s what the 9/11 hijackers thought,” Elise said. “They drank and got lap dances and then left a copy of the Qur’an on the bar.”

“I hope you’ll be with us,” our father said, buckling his seatbelt.

“I’ll be with you.”

“I sincerely hope.”

He drove through a maze of empty lots and parked, but a sign said no overnight parking so he backed out and kept winding around. It reminded me of that scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation when Chevy Chase and his family arrived at Walley-World. There wasn’t a single car in the lot and they parked so far away and Chevy Chase kept saying “First ones here!”

In the hotel lobby, there was a water wall behind the check-in desk, the casino floor only steps away, dinging with bells and whistles. We walked past a coffee shop and an ice-cream parlor, stores selling dreamcatchers and turquoise jewelry, quilted bags in paisley prints. We passed a Mexican restaurant and a sundries shop. I thought I’d buy a postcard and mail it to Gabe—it occurred to me that I’d never bought a postcard before. I had never been far enough from home. You didn’t send someone a postcard from an adjoining state.

A man held the elevator and we got on. His wife was with him but he stared openly at Elise, and for the first time ever I was glad to be the unattractive sister. Who wanted to be stared at by ugly old men all the time? I wanted to kill him for her, wanted to kill all of them so she could live in peace.

Our parents got off at the sixth floor, followed by the man and his wife.

“We’re in 610,” our mother said, and the doors closed.

“Mom’s as miserable as we are,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling miserable at all. I was excited, nearly thrilled. We had our own room in a nice hotel. There was a pool and room service and I had enough money to buy a dreamcatcher if I wanted.

“Catholics don’t go in for this kind of stuff.”

“Uncle Albert does,” I said.

“Uncle Albert doesn’t count—if he wasn’t building a doomsday bunker, he’d be investing all his money in the Iraqi dinar or some other scheme. Don’t you remember when he tried to get Dad to invest in that black apartment complex?”

“No,” I said. “When was that?”

“A couple of years ago. It was a falling-apart slum.”

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“Mom tells me all sorts of things I don’t want to know,” she said. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“When?”

“At night after y’all go to sleep, we watch The Young and the Restless and she tells me everything. It’s terrible.”

“You should go to your room and read like I do.”

We turned a corner and walked a ways and then turned another corner and I knew I was going to have trouble finding my way back to the elevator. A cleaning lady stuck her head out of a room and we exchanged hellos. She was foreign but her hello had been perfected. I checked her cart for soaps and shampoos, but all of the best stuff had been hidden away somewhere.

We came to our room just as a tiny, severe woman opened the door across from ours and deposited a room service tray outside. She looked at me without any expression whatsoever. Her face was tight and smooth; it reminded me of a stone.

“Good afternoon,” I said. I liked saying “good morning” so much better.

She made a humph sound and closed her door.

“Real friendly around here,” I said, loudly.

Elise slid her key in, opened the door. Our room smelled like carpet cleaner, something that might be called Mountain Fresh or Ocean Breeze. We stood there with our bags, looking at an enormous whirlpool tub next to the king-sized bed.

“What is this?” she said. She stepped into the tub with her shoes on while I went into the bathroom. There was a shower and two sinks and a little TV, everything cool and white. I wanted to feel my bare feet on the tiles.

I flushed and washed my hands, walked around checking everything out. I opened drawers and closets, peeled the spread off the bed. Above it, there was a painting of two empty chairs on a beach. The picture bothered me—I didn’t like it when places pretended to be other places; if people had wanted to go to those other places, they would have gone to them. Why go to Las Vegas to be in Paris? If you wanted to go to Paris, go to Paris.

Elise stepped up and down like she was walking in some kind of muck. “Let’s put on our suits and get in.”

I opened the curtains. Our room faced a parking garage that gave off a ghostly blue light. “Check out this view.”

“You know the creepiest sound ever? A man whistling in a parking garage,” she said. “And they never whistle anything in particular, it’s just this random no-song whistling. They do it to creep people out—they know it creeps everybody out.”

I picked up the phone and called our parents. Our mother answered on the fourth ring. I asked if they had a whirlpool next to their bed, and she said that they did. I asked if they had a view of the parking garage and she said they had a view of the pool and then she said to come down to their room at six-thirty for supper and hung up.

Elise got in bed and tested out the pillows to see how high they were, if she was likely to get a crick. Then she went to the bathroom and peed with the door open.

“There’s a TV in here!” she called. “It looks like it’s from 1989.”

“I saw it.”

We didn’t know anything about 1989 but we referenced it a lot. It represented all of the movies we loved. It represented a time when the captain of the football team might actually fall in love with the homely red-haired girl, when they could make us believe it. I got in bed and Elise continued to talk to me from the bathroom. Maybe we wouldn’t have to drive tomorrow and we could just stay here. And what if the rapture actually happened and we got to watch it on TV? Wouldn’t that be kind of amazing? There were Aveda products! She loved Aveda products! I got out of bed and turned on the water in the tub. The pressure was bad—it was going to take forever to fill up. I kept turning the knob but the water didn’t come out any faster. We could go down to the pool for an hour and come back and it still wouldn’t be filled.

“I’m going to get ice,” she said, clutching the bucket to her stomach.

“Okay, Dad.”

“Come here,” Elise said, setting the bucket on the table.

“What?”

“Just come.”

I followed her to a room catty-corner from ours where a fat lady was sprawled on a king-sized bed, her purple dress bunched up like a tablecloth between her legs. Against one wall, there were four cages stacked on top of each other with two birds in each. Some of the birds were white and some were a pale, lovely pink.

“Mourning doves,” Elise said.

The woman sat up, excited to have visitors. “Hey, hon,” she said. “Come on in, make yourself at home.” She was truly massive, wonderfully enormous, but her face was oddly thin. “Have some cheese and fruit, if you want. We were just about to have a snack.”

“How’d you get the birds up here?” Elise asked.

“I tip people,” the woman said. “Whenever I go to hotels, I carry a lot of small bills. You give people a handful and they don’t even care if they’re all ones.”

The toilet flushed and a man came out of the bathroom. He was fat but not enormous, just normal fat, with a patchy beard.

“That’s my son, Luke,” the woman said, lighting a cigarette. “Luke and I travel everywhere together, don’t we?” She leaned over the bed and produced an ashtray, set it on her stomach. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was magnetic, strangely beautiful, and had long strawberry blond hair. I imagined her at the beauty salon, having it highlighted, talking to people and laughing like she was just as good as anybody.

Luke stood there watching us, scratching his beard. His feet were planted shoulder-width apart.

“There’s a male and female in each,” Elise said, squatting to look in the cages. I knelt next to her.

“Did you know that mourning doves are monogamous?” the woman asked, waving her cigarette around. “They mate for life.”

“I love monogamous animals,” Elise said.

Luke laughed and my sister turned to look at him, her ponytail flying. He had the kind of eyes that couldn’t look at you straight on—they were always slightly to the left or right, as if you were standing next to yourself.

“How can you tell which are male and which are female?” I asked.

“You put two together and see if they try to kill each other,” the woman said. “That’s why I stack ’em like that—if the males even see each other, they go berserk. Beat their wings and puff out their chests.”

Elise stood and said, “Thanks for letting us look at them.”

“Let’s let ’em fly around,” the woman said.

“Maybe later?” my sister said. “We just got here and we have to unpack and stuff.”

“I trained them in the bathroom and now I can let ’em fly wherever. Even if I leave the door open, they don’t fly away. If I’m not feeling well, they land on my chest and look at me like, Dodo, you okay in there, Dodo? They’re very intuitive animals.”

“Maybe later,” Elise said.

“We’ll be here,” the woman said. “We’re not going anywhere, are we, Luke? We were just about to have a snack.”

Elise thanked her about fourteen more times and we went back to our room. I remembered my horoscope from a few days ago, how I was supposed to be asking questions and I’d hardly asked anybody anything. I should have asked the woman why she chose birds, or about the mating process—did the male and female always like each other, or was it a matter of trial and error? Or I could have asked where they were from, where they were going. It seemed silly that we were all moving around the world for no other reason than we could—cars and planes and boats taking people from one location to another as if we weren’t all going to die.

Elise stood at the desk and flipped open the binder.

“How come you didn’t want to see them fly?” I asked.

“Because that guy was creeping me out,” she said. “Wasn’t he creeping you out?”

“Yeah.”

“He was a fucking creep.”

“Probably a parking garage whistler,” I said.

She picked up the phone and ordered a veggie burger with onion rings, a Diet Coke, and a piece of apple pie. If she hadn’t asked for the pie, I might have believed she’d actually spoken to someone. She never ate pie.

“You didn’t order anything,” I said.

“What I really want is a cheeseburger. Actually, I think it’s the baby who wants a cheeseburger.” She stood in front of the mirror and looked around to see if there was enough space to do her jumps. “I’m going to call room service for real in a minute. What’re you having?”

“Ice cream,” I said.

She did a herkie and then three more in quick succession; they seemed so effortless, so easy, it made me think I could do them.

“Have you ever noticed how skinny people get vanilla and fat people get chocolate? And really skinny people get strawberry. I should probably start ordering strawberry, then I’ll be skinny.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” she said.

“It would be a start,” I said. “It would be something.”

“And you’re not fat, you’re just a little plump.”

“I don’t want to be plump, that’s an awful word, don’t ever say that to me again.” I put my bag on the bed and started going through it. I missed the rest of my stuff. I missed our house, my bed. If we were at home, Elise and I would be outside on the trampoline. She’d insist I do a back handspring and spot me, taking her hands away at the last minute so she could tell me I’d done it on my own. The baby would already be a bad dream and I’d never mention it again, even when we were old, even if I was really pissed off.

She dialed room service and ordered a veggie burger and fries. “Strawberry?” she asked.

“A hot fudge sundae and a Diet Coke.”

“And two hot fudge sundaes and two Diet Cokes,” she said. She hung up and climbed into bed, spread out in the middle.

“You know how you said you never feel anything in church?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“And?”

“I don’t feel anything, either,” I said.

“What about when you were saved?”

I shook my head. “It never even occurred to me to think about whether I was feeling something, or if I believed or not. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No,” she said. “I think you’re a kid.”

“I want to believe,” I said.

“I know you do.”

“Maybe I should talk to Brother Jessie.”

“Call him,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll talk to you.”

I took the Bible into the bathroom and sat on the cool tile, opened it and read: “. . . many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people . . . the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Did standing firm mean believing in the rapture or not believing in it? Was Marshall a false prophet or a man trying to instill faith? Everything had become confusing all of a sudden. Was Elise betraying me or was I betraying her? I went back into the room and climbed in bed next to her, closed my eyes and opened the Bible to a random page.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“‘Jesus said to him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.’”

Elise took the Bible, opened the drawer, and dropped it in. “We’re not playing Bible 8-Ball right now,” she said. She was watching the hotel’s station, jazzy music and a smooth-talking man telling us about the hotel’s amenities. We watched pretty women laugh with their mouths open wide, lightly touching the shoulders of their handsome men. We toured each of the restaurants—the Mexican cantina, the steakhouse, the burger stand, the Irish pub—before moving on to the casino floor. We learned how many slot machines there were, how many table games. Craps lessons were held every afternoon at two o’clock and the annual poker tournament was at the end of the month. We toured the hotel rooms and the pool with its outdoor bars, the gym and spa, and then we were back at the pretty laughing women. We watched it all the way through a second time.

After our third trip through the restaurants, I asked her how many times we were going to watch it.

“Forever,” she said.

“How come you’re not calling Dan? You’re not even Googling anything.”

“Dan? Who cares about Dan?”

“You do.”

“It’s not like I love him.”

“Why would you date someone you didn’t love?”

She looked at me like she couldn’t believe I’d asked that. “You’ll see,” she said ominously.

“I’m not going to ever be with someone I don’t love.”

“You will,” she said. “You won’t believe the things you’ll do.” She handed me the remote control and got out of bed, picked up her suitcase. “When the food comes, just sign your name, the tip’s already been added.” She closed the door to the bathroom.

I changed the channels. On Wheel of Fortune, three nervous college students in their big college sweatshirts took turns spinning the wheel. As usual, they weren’t attractive or charming and I wondered how they’d been selected. I hadn’t watched it in a long time, but quickly remembered how all of the puzzles seemed so obvious once they were revealed, how stupid it made me feel.

At the bonus round, there was a knock. I opened the door and the guy walked past me with a tray, asked where he should put it.

“The bed.” He set it down and handed me the bill in a black book and I added another three dollars on top of all the tips and fees that had already been figured. He let himself out and I sat on the bed. I dug a spoon into my sundae, the ice cream still solid.

I muted the TV to listen for Elise, and then turned it to Anderson Cooper to try and lure her out.

“Anderson’s talking about the Eurozone again,” I called.

“Fuck the Eurozone,” she called back.

A few minutes later, she came out of the bathroom with her hair in a towel and got in bed next to me. We ate our hot fudge sundaes and drank our Diet Cokes and then she cut her veggie burger in half and everything felt right and good.

Elise slingshotted a pair of yellow bikini bottoms at me. She had at least eight swimsuits, which I considered an excessive number, but when you were beautiful you could insist on needing more, requiring more, and people would provide.

She put on her white one, the ruffles on top to make her chest look bigger. She hardly ever wore the white one because she didn’t want to get it dirty. She let her hair down and stood sideways in front of the mirror. There was a long pause while we assessed her stomach. She touched it, ran her hand over its smooth, flat surface. Her belly button was so deep you couldn’t see the bottom of it, but it was going to turn inside out.

“Do you know how many weeks?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

I took my swimsuit into the bathroom. It was still slightly damp; it felt awful, wedging it over my thighs.

We left all the lights and the TV on.

“Let’s take the stairs,” Elise said.

I didn’t feel like it, but I followed her to the stairwell. It wasn’t the kind that was meant for guests—concrete and gray, boxes of Urine Off advertising itself in neon yellow letters. We didn’t see anyone, but there were room service carts with trays of old food and housekeeping carts with stacks of freshly laundered towels.

“I’m not taking the stairs back up,” I said.

“You do what you want,” she said, “and I’ll do what I want.”

On the first floor, there was a table set up in the hallway that blocked the entrance to the pool, two guys sitting at it. They said we needed wristbands to get into the pool area, told us to write our names and room number in their book. They were brusque and mustached and important.

“I forget our room number,” Elise said. “Do you remember it?”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t know where you’re staying?” the older security guard asked, chuckling.

“We’re staying here,” Elise said. “We just checked in.” She found her room key in its little envelope and set it on the table and one of the guys wrote down the number. I held out my hand for the other guy to give me the wristband but he insisted on putting them on us. Then he stood and held the door.

“Jesus,” Elise said. “It’s like Fort-fucking-Knox.”

There were a lot of people milling about—couples and groups of boys and multicultural families, pretty girls like Elise taking drink orders. Old people. Babies. It was good to see so many of them. We walked to the far side of the pool and took off our dresses. After looking around to see who was looking at me—no one—I got out my phone and called Shannon. She picked up, sounding like she always sounded, slightly hoarse like she was still in bed.

Shannon and I had a very one-sided relationship—I asked her questions and she told me how bad things were, how they would never change. At the end of every conversation, she’d realize she had talked the entire time and say something like Next time we’re going to talk about you, though we never did, and I was mostly okay with it. Hearing her complain about her life made me feel better about my own—her life really was pretty shitty. But this time, when she asked how I was, I didn’t say fine and ask about her stepmom or the boy she liked who didn’t like her back. I told her about Gabe, relayed some of the sweeter things he’d said. I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. She said she was happy but she sounded very down and tried to steer the conversation back to herself. I told her he wanted to see me again and was trying to figure out a way to make that happen, that we were maybe in love. She said I should be careful—she didn’t want to see me get hurt.

“I’m not going to get hurt,” I said.

“I hope not,” she said. “I just know how excited you get.”

I didn’t like the way the conversation was going anymore. She was making me feel bad and I was tired of feeling bad. I was tired of relying on her unhappiness to make myself feel better. I wanted new friends, fun girls who laughed a lot and liked to do new things and go new places. Shannon and I always went to the same café where we sat in the same booth and ate the same sandwiches and my life was never going to be any different that way.

“That’s him on the other line now,” I said.

“It is?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “I wish I had a boy.”

“I’ll call you when I get home,” I said, and hung up.

Elise raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

“You want to get in the pool?” I asked.

“Not right now, but Mom and Dad are over there if you want somebody to play with.”

They were in their swimsuits, the same ones they’d been wearing for the past decade. My mother’s was black with yellow flowers, so worn out it was nearly see-through. My father’s was navy blue with white stripes down the sides. It was their day at the pool, but the one time we were at a decent place all bets were off.

“Tell me something from Cosmo,” I said.

“Men like sex, no fatties,” she said. “It’s the same thing in every goddamn issue.”

I’d never heard her say “goddamn” before. I was shocked. I wanted to hear her say it again. I adjusted my swimsuit and walked to the pool’s edge, climbed onto the little shelf. Then I lowered myself in and breaststroked over to my parents. My mother was sitting on a step while my father stood in water up to his belly button. He was moving his arms around and looking about distractedly like people do when they’re peeing. I sat next to my mother.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s so nice here.” They always wanted to know if I was having fun. It made me sorry I didn’t have more fun.

“We’re about to go up,” she said. “We just came down for a minute to cool off.”

My father patted my back as he stepped out and asked if I was having fun. I told him I was and took off, swimming in and out of groups of kids and boys, listening while trying to appear uninterested.

“Here she comes, she’s coming this way,” one of the guys said, on my third lap. I swam a wide arc around a couple of kids playing colored eggs to avoid them. “And there she goes,” he said. Maybe I wasn’t unattractive. If I moved to Arizona, I might be popular. I might be on the dance team, kicking my legs in tall boots at pep rallies. I hadn’t made the dance team in Montgomery and didn’t know if I was going to try again. It seemed better to accept the one failure than to try a second time and fail, like I hadn’t learned my lesson.

I was wearing my cutest swimsuit, a black one-piece with ovals cut out of the sides, and a worn-in baseball cap that belonged to one of Elise’s ex-boyfriends. She had a lot of ex-boyfriend stuff—t-shirts and ball caps and koozies—and she usually wouldn’t say anything if I confiscated something until it was mine. I liked their t-shirts best, which were always thin and soft, tiny holes around the neck and waist. I didn’t know what they did to get them that way.

I got out and resumed my place next to my sister.

“Let’s order a drink,” she said, raising the flag on the back of her chair. “They’ve already gone. I’m sure Dad’s dying to get his hands on a slot machine. Raise the flag on your chair, too.”

Almost immediately, a pretty pool girl came over and Elise ordered two piña coladas. She didn’t ask to see our IDs. Elise signed her name and our room number and, a few minutes later, our drinks came in small white buckets: cold and sweet, I could hardly taste the liquor.

When they were empty, we put our flags back up. Elise signed our name and room number and fresh ones appeared like magic. The more I drank, the closer I looked at things—a beach ball spinning on the water, the pink and blue and yellow panels going round and round, a girl wading into the water with a cast on her arm, cocked at a ninety-degree angle. The dark spots in the clouds. Elise wouldn’t stop reading her magazine, so I got back in the pool. I swam toward the group of boys while one of them stepped steadily backward until he was right in front of me. I stood in three feet of water and said hello. He was tan with strong arms and a stomach full of well-defined muscles. He was old but I couldn’t tell how old because of the mirrored sunglasses and baseball cap.

He asked me a few questions and then I was in his arms, my neck thrown back so my hair dragged the water. My hat floated away and he fetched it and emptied the water out, set it back on my head.

“Is that your sister?” he asked, nodding at Elise.

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you call her over?” he said, and I told him she’d come if she wanted to. I looked into his sunglasses, trying to see what he saw. There was only my face—my nose distortedly large, my hair slicked and smooth. I leaned back and he spun me in slow circles, first one way and then the other.

He started telling me about himself, how he’d started a website to help people find jobs, how it was becoming very successful. He was on a trip with friends and next they’d go to Las Vegas to play poker. I thought about the Las Vegas girl, wondered if they would encounter her somewhere, or pass her on the street.

I looked at Elise’s chair but she wasn’t in it. I found her talking to a lifeguard, a short boy with a red floaty slung over his shoulder.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and swam over to her. “Come over here with me,” I said, interrupting her conversation. The guy was kind of fat for a lifeguard. If he could pass the test, I might pass, too.

“In a sec,” she said.

I swam back to the boys and Elise followed as the lifeguard climbed onto his perch.

We let them buy us a third drink and made plans to meet later, plans that Elise said we’d break if anything better came along, but I couldn’t imagine anything better coming along. The only thing that might be better than these boys were other boys.

At dinner, we sat at a circular table too big for the four of us. It made me feel lonely and far away from everything. I concentrated on the alcohol moving in and out of parts of my body I’d never felt before. When the dining room went quiet, there was a buzz in my ears like a lightbulb.

Though I’d hardly said a word, it seemed unlikely that my mother wouldn’t know. I avoided her eyes. She would be angry and disappointed if she found out, and I didn’t want her to look at me differently. If I wasn’t the good daughter, I wouldn’t know what I was. I wasn’t popular or a cheerleader or a straight-A student. I wasn’t on the dance team. I wasn’t a member of the Student Council or even the Key Club. There were so many things I wasn’t that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

My father ordered a bottle of red wine and asked the waiter for four glasses.

“John,” my mother said. “These kids aren’t drinking.”

“It’s a special occasion,” he said. “Just for toasting.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

The waiter came back with a bottle and poured an inch of wine in my father’s glass, waited for him to take a sip.

“Taste it,” Elise said, which he did, nodding pleasantly.

Then the waiter went around the table, pouring us each a quarter of a glass.

“We’re about ready to order,” my father said.

“I haven’t even opened my menu yet,” Elise said.

The waiter said he’d give us a few minutes and set the bottle down. Elise grabbed it and filled her glass. Then she filled mine, as well. My mother handed me hers and we swapped. When the dining room went quiet again, the buzz in my ears returned. It was oddly pleasant.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” my father said. “Tomorrow we go home.”

Elise and I looked at each other. Home was Montgomery. Home was our house and our school and our friends and our dog. It was the clothes in our closets and my sister’s boyfriends and the neighborhood where we rode our bikes down the middle of the street because there were hardly any cars.

“You mean Alabama?” Elise said.

“He means heaven,” I said, reaching for the breadbasket and knocking over my glass in the process. The wine spilled all over the white tablecloth, pooled in my plate.

“Nice job,” Elise said.

“Jess,” my father said, like I’d ruined everything, like everything had been going so well up till now. He got angry when I spilled things, when I swallowed water too fast and it went down the wrong way. It was like he thought I did these things on purpose.

The busboy took my plate away and brought a towel, sopped it up, but there was still red everywhere, terrible as blood.

My father opened his menu. “Order anything you want.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Elise said. Nothing good ever came after that. It was never How would you like a bowl of ice cream? Or There’s a good movie playing. Why don’t we all go see it?

“What’s that?” he asked.

“How are we paying for this trip?”

“With the money we saved for this purpose,” he said.

“We know you lost your job,” she said, and I recalled a dinner, much like this one, after our father had gotten that job: white tablecloths and oversized menus, Order anything you want.

“I can order the lobster?” I asked.

“Your father said you can order whatever you want,” my mother said.

“Have you been leaving the house in the morning and going to the park?” Elise asked. “Or the library?”

I couldn’t remember him with a briefcase at all.

“I need you to leave this table,” he said. “And I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the night.” He said “face” in a really nasty way, like it was the most horrible thing ever.

“And don’t you leave your room,” my mother said. “I’m gonna be up there to check on you in half an hour.”

My sister finished her wine and put her hands on the edge of the table like she was going to push. Then she stood and left as the waiter was walking over to take our order. He stood there smiling and we were all so tense I could feel how awkward we were making him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, asked if he should come back in a minute. Something about it was satisfying—he wasn’t a part of us, didn’t belong. We were unhappy together, miserable even, but it was ours.

“No, we’re ready,” my father said. Then he looked at my mother and asked what she wanted. She ordered the surf and turf with a salad and a loaded baked potato, and the rest of us followed suit.

I imagined my father at the kitchen table a few weeks from now opening the credit card bill, the smell of pot roast we’d be eating for days. My mother would have us bag up all our old clothes for the Ultcheys and the other families who had given their money away, as if they needed our worn-out clothes, while my father assured them that we would all be in heaven soon, that this was not the life He had intended for us. I wondered whether he really believed it, if he’d ever believed.

The busboy brought another basket of bread and my father tore off a piece. He spread a thick layer of butter on it and immediately dropped it on his shirt.

“Seems like I can’t hardly eat without getting something on me,” he said, dipping his napkin into his ice water. I watched as he rubbed his shirt until a large wet spot stuck to his chest.

When the salads came, we stabbed at the pieces of lettuce. I drank the little bit of wine in my glass and didn’t ask for more. After a while, my mother attempted to make pleasant conversation but neither my father nor I were interested. It must have been the quietest meal of my life. My father didn’t even pray when the steaks and lobster tails were placed before us.

After dinner, I pulled my mother aside and asked if I could get Brother Jessie’s number. I’d prepared an answer but she didn’t ask, just got out her phone and called it out to me.

When I got back to the room, Elise wasn’t there. There was a note on the desk: “Meet me at the Irish bar. You can wear my blue dress.”

I sat on the bed, staring at Brother Jessie’s number. Though I saw him twice a week at church, and sometimes on Saturday mornings for breakfast in our kitchen, I’d never had any reason to call him. It made me nervous, talking on the phone to people I wasn’t used to talking on the phone to.

I hit the call button. On the second ring, he answered.

“Brother Jessie?” I said. “This is Jess Metcalf.”

“Jess,” he said, “it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“That’s good to hear,” he said. His voice sounded different. People always sounded different on the phone; they used their phone voices. “So tell me, what’s happening?”

“We’re in Arizona. Somewhere around Phoenix, I think.”

He made some affirmative-sounding noises so I said other stuff—how it felt like we’d been driving for a very long time, how things weren’t going very well. I told him about the car accident, the flat tire. He said car trips were like that, accidents and flat tires, that those things weren’t out of the ordinary.

“It was a really bad accident,” I said. “A man died. I touched his neck, trying to feel for a pulse.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“And there was a little girl. I think she was in a coma.” I felt like crying, but if I started, it might go on forever. I’d cry for Tammy and the bird woman and the Las Vegas girl, for my mother and father and the baby Elise wouldn’t have and my cousin who had died before she’d figured out how to live.

“We’re all praying for y’all,” he said. “The whole congregation.”

“Thank you.”

“What you’re doing is a good thing.”

“Thank you,” I said again. And then, “How come? Why is it a good thing?”

He took a swallow of whatever he was drinking, ice clinking in his glass. “You’re spreading the word,” he said.

“We haven’t been spreading the word that much.”

“I’m sure you’re doing what you can.”

“No,” I said. “We’ve hardly talked to anyone.”

“Maybe your father thinks it’s best for you to concentrate on each other right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re doing. I feel kind of lost,” I said. I wanted to tell him everything, wanted him to say I was okay, that we were okay, but he wouldn’t. He’d be disappointed. He might be angry.

“It sounds like you’re about to make a breakthrough,” he said, the ice clinking again.

“It does?”

“Jess, forget about your family and the trip for a minute. Have you prepared yourself for Him?”

“That’s why I’m calling, I don’t feel prepared at all. I don’t even know if I want it to happen.”

He paused for a moment, as if to let this sink in, and said, “What if it’s not Him you’re doubting, but yourself?”

That sounded right. I had no reason to trust myself.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, and his baby, Rachel, started crying. She had some kind of deformity, one side of her face pocked with strawberries, a tumor eating up her eye. A benign tumor, my mother said, not life-threatening or even painful, though I didn’t know how she would know whether it was painful or not. The only time I’d held her, I put my hand over the bad side of her face to see what she would have looked like normal, what she was supposed to look like. She would have been a pretty baby.

His phone fell to the floor and he picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You still there?”

“I’m here.” I turned on the TV and pressed mute—no matter what station you left it on, it defaulted to the hotel’s channel. At the spa, a smiling brunette was giving a pretty Asian woman a facial. I wondered if they hired actors or if these were real employees.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“How you violate yourself,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Do you want to be forgiven?” His voice cracked on the word “forgiven.” “We all want to be forgiven, Jess.” He breathed my name into the phone—Jess, Jess—as I sat there, unable to say anything. We were quiet for a long time, maybe ten seconds, and then he said my name louder, more clearly. I threw the phone across the room; it hit the wall and bounced off. I walked over and picked it up, knowing I hadn’t thrown it hard enough to break it. It made me hate myself. I was always worried about everything, how much a new phone would cost, how much trouble it would be to go to Verizon and get a new one. I wanted to break it and not think twice about breaking it. I wanted to be beautiful enough to demand expensive things and believe I was worthy of them.

I made a half-assed search through Elise’s suitcase for a cigarette, but of course she had them with her. Then I went to the bathroom and sorted through her makeup bag, the inside coated with a thick film of shimmery powder. I put on eyeliner, mascara, and blush. I used the hair dryer and some lotion to try to get my hair to do something it didn’t want to do. Then I put on Elise’s blue silk dress, a dress I’d specifically asked to wear before and she’d said no, and stood in front of the mirror. I didn’t look like a different person, but I didn’t quite look like the same one, either.

The bar was like Applebee’s with its green-glowing beer signs, men hunched over baskets of fried food. Elise was seated at a four-top by the window with a salad in front of her, watching a tennis game on TV. She’d changed into a new outfit, a short black dress and a pair of heels. She might pass for a woman meeting friends for drinks after work.

“Order a Coke,” she said. “I have a flask.”

“Where’d you get a flask?”

“Dan gave it to me for my birthday.” She took it out of her purse and passed it across the table. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, it said. “The whiskey I got at the liquor store. It cost me twenty dollars of your money.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That’s right,” she said. “You won’t need it where you’re going.”

“I wish you’d stop taking my money,” I said.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever taken your money.”

“I wish you’d stop asking for it, then.”

The waitress came and I ordered a Diet Coke. I looked around—it was Friday night and people were celebrating the start of their weekend. Weekends meant nothing to us. We had no reason to keep track of days except for the one our lives had been revolving around for months.

My drink came. I took a few gulps and poured the whiskey in. I stopped myself from checking to see if anyone was watching. If someone saw us, they might say we couldn’t do that, or kick us out. I told myself it didn’t matter—worst-case scenario, we got kicked out and we’d go someplace else, but even though the worst-case scenario wasn’t even bad, I dreaded it. I hated to be told I couldn’t do something. I checked my breasts, adjusted them.

“How are your boobs?” she asked.

“Nice.”

“You look pretty.”

“Thanks.”

We drank for a few minutes and then she said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“What’s that?”

“Cinderella’s slipper.”

“Cinderella’s slipper,” I repeated.

“Yeah—how come it didn’t turn into a rat or whatever when the clock struck twelve?”

“Why would you be thinking about that?” I asked.

“Because I was thinking about leaving my clothes outside and it reminded me.” She took out her cigarettes and her LOVE HURTS lighter and placed them on the table, though there were no ashtrays and no one was smoking. “It’s a good question, right?”

I wondered if she’d just light up, like a movie star. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Cinderella in a long time.”

“But you know the story.”

“Yeah, I know the story.”

“The slipper’s left on the step and the prince takes it around—”

“I know what happens,” I said. “Have you seen the boys?”

“No,” she said. She took her straw out of her glass and drank from it, tiny little sips like she was feeding an injured baby bird.

“I called Brother Jessie,” I said.

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

“He asked me to tell him how I violated myself.”

“He asked you to tell him what?”

“He said, ‘Tell me how you violate yourself.’”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“No, I’m serious. I could hear his baby crying in the background. Rachel.”

“Stop.”

“And the ice clinking in his glass.” I picked up my Diet Coke and moved it around but there was too much ice, the glass too tall and thick.

“What are you gonna do?”

“What do you mean ‘what am I gonna do?’”

“I mean ‘what are you gonna do?’” she said.

“Nothing.”

“What are you talking about? What if he’s done this to other kids? What if he’s done a lot worse?”

Who cares about other kids? I thought, but then I felt bad. I cared about other kids. “I doubt he’s done anything,” I said. The one and only time he’d touched me, we were at church. I’d been sick and hadn’t seen him in a few weeks and he’d pulled me to him, cradled my head to his chest. The hug had gone on too long—anyone who’d seen the entire thing, gauged its length, would have found it inappropriate.

“We have to tell Dad,” she said.

“Why? We never tell him anything.”

“But this is important,” she said, looking at the door. I turned to watch the guys from the pool walk over. There were four of them, sunburned and wearing their nice clothes.

“Can we sit?” the one who’d held me asked.

“Sure,” I said. His eyes were bloodshot, a swampy green. Two of them went to get chairs and the other two sat, making a lot of noise and taking up as much space as possible. They seemed wrong out of water.

The fattest, loudest one put his hand on the back of my chair and smiled with all of his teeth. The one who’d held me—Jay or Jason—picked a cherry tomato off Elise’s salad and popped it into his mouth. She pushed it across the table to him and took out her flask, poured more whiskey into her glass. I wondered if she was always so standoffish, or if she only acted this way for my benefit. Who was she, really? Was she the person who rode bikes with me and jumped on the trampoline, or a careless drunk who went off with strange men and did God-knows-what? Was she a standoffish bitch, or a good-hearted person who was kind to the most downtrodden of God’s flock?

“What’s your name again?” I asked.

“Jake,” he said.

“Jake,” I said. “I like that name.”

“You guys been here long?” the fat one asked.

One of the others set shots on the table. “Date grapes for everyone,” he said.

“That’s not funny,” I said.

“That’s what they’re called. We all got date grapes, not just you guys. I’ll get you a birthday cake next if you want.”

“I’ll have a birthday cake,” Elise said.

We held up our shots.

“To new friends,” the guy who’d bought them said.

“To the rapture,” said Elise.

We clinked glasses and drank. I drank half and set the other half back down. I could feel my blood start to move again. I couldn’t hear the buzz in my ears, but if I went to the bathroom I might be able to hear it.

“I’m Brad,” the guy who’d bought the shots said.

“Jess.”

“You’re a bad cheerser,” he said, and asked if he could give me a lesson. He picked up my glass of Diet Coke and whiskey and gestured for me to raise my shot. “First you make brief but meaningful eye contact.” We made eye contact that was longer than brief. I smiled, but he looked at me like this was serious business. “Then you raise your glass, clink, and look the person in the eye again. And then you drink. If it’s a shot, you take the entire thing—not half.”

“I can drink half if I want to,” I said.

“You can,” he said, “but that’s not how it works.”

He had me practice until he was satisfied I’d gotten it right. Then he took out his wallet and went back to the bar. I wanted to know a man well enough to go through his wallet. I imagined faded, unused, and expired things, a stack of warm bills. Everything mine for the taking.

The fat one started telling me about Yelapa, Mexico, a place he’d lived after he graduated high school. He’d made a lot of money crabbing and spent his free time surfing. He’d go back there one day, he said. He’d live on a boat and sail somewhere when he got bored and eat fish right out of the ocean. I tried to make eye contact with Elise but she was talking to Jake, laughing and touching her hair. It was getting so long, like Amish hair. Like Mennonite hair. He told me about a particular tree where he’d always find coconuts that had sprouted, the inside like a marshmallow you could eat with a spoon. But sometimes they’d sprouted and were bad.

“How could you tell if they were bad?” I asked.

“The smell,” he said, shaking his head. “The smell was awful.”

I didn’t care about him or his dreams, but it didn’t stop me from imagining the two of us on a boat, scooping the marshmallows out of coconuts before they turned.

“So Jess called our pastor earlier,” Elise said, and everyone stopped talking and looked at me.

“Elise,” I said.

“And he wanted to know about her masturbation techniques.”

“He wanted to know what?” they said. “Wait up, hold on a second.”

“Tell them,” she said.

I told them the story: the phone call, the ugly baby, ice clinking in his glass. As I talked, I realized how infrequently I told stories to a group. I didn’t like feeling that I had to hold their attention, like at any second I could lose it. This was a good story, though, and they sat with their elbows on the table, leaning in. When I was finished, I had the same conversation with them that I’d had with Elise, about what I was going to do. I didn’t like this talk about what I was going to do. I would tell Shannon and my mother, maybe, and she could tell my father if she thought it was necessary. But there was something else that made me want to keep quiet—I didn’t want anyone to say I was lying. I’d only told the story twice, and was sure it had happened, but already it felt like something I’d made up.

“That’s some fucked-up shit,” Brad said after everyone had returned to their separate conversations. I took a sip of my drink. He said he was sorry that that had happened to me. There was an awkward pause and then he tapped the window. “I’m in asphalt,” he said, still tapping, as if I didn’t know what asphalt was.

“It must be boring being a grown-up,” I said.

“There are perks.”

“Like what?”

“Like I can walk into any bar and have a drink.”

“I’m having a drink at a bar right now and I’m fifteen.”

“You’re having to be careful, though,” he said.

“I like being careful,” I said, which wasn’t true. I was tired of being careful. Kids weren’t supposed to be careful all the time. I wanted to be like my sister, who made friends and mistakes easily. It was like she’d been born knowing how to live.

Half an hour later, the boys left to go to a different bar and Elise and I walked over to the coffee shop. I bought a brownie and we sat at the bar facing the casino floor. I looked around for my father.

“Do you want some?” I asked. The brownie was huge, like a giant piece of birthday cake.

“No,” she said.

“It’s terrible, like a grocery-store brownie. Really waxy.” I squashed a corner into the doily, getting chocolate in my nails. This made me happy and I smiled and then looked around to see if anyone had seen me. I didn’t like to be caught entertaining myself in public; there was something humiliating about it, though I couldn’t say what it was.

The woman on the other side of me had a mug of tea. She held it up to her lips and blew. Tea looked so relaxing. I thought I should start drinking tea.

“Hello,” she said. She was in her mid-twenties, with a boy haircut and long dangly earrings. She asked where we were from.

“Alabama,” I said.

“Alabama the beautiful,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Is it beautiful there?”

“It’s okay.”

“Is it green?”

“It’s pretty green,” I said, “but not like some places, not like North Georgia or anything. It’s just regular green.”

“I miss green,” she said.

Elise jumped off her stool and said she’d be back, and the woman and I were quiet, watching people move around the floor. There were a lot of old and disabled people, but there were plenty of young people, too—girls in dresses and sandals, boys in khaki shorts and collared shirts. They looked so easy, relaxed. I wondered how many of them felt that way.

“Why are you here?” the woman asked, moving her head so her earrings swung back and forth.

“We’re staying at the hotel,” I said, “me and my parents and sister. My dad likes to gamble.”

She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. Then she said, “I’m with my family, too. Last summer we stayed at a cabin at Slide Rock and this summer . . .” She waved her hands around. “I guess I don’t always get to pick.”

“How many nights are you here for?” I asked.

“Just two. I told them I couldn’t stay any longer than that.” She took a sip of tea. “I brought along some projects to occupy myself, but I don’t see myself doing any work. This isn’t exactly a work-conducive environment.”

“No,” I said, my eyes following a long-haired boy in smiley-face pajama pants. I folded the doily around the rest of the brownie and squeezed until oil soaked through. “What do you do?”

“I’m a caregiver,” she said. “I sit with elderly people.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I guess. It leaves me a lot of energy to make my art.”

“What kind of art?”

“All kinds—photography, murals. I work a lot with found objects.”

“Oh wow,” I said.

“And sometimes I write things.”

“What do you write about?”

“Last week I wrote a twenty-word poem about honor killings,” she said. “Do you know what honor killings are?”

“Like when a woman in the Middle East cheats on her husband and her family has to get their honor back?”

She nodded. “It was titled ‘Field’s Last Bloom.’” She continued nodding and I wondered if she nodded so much when she wasn’t wearing dangly earrings. She must have liked to feel them move. “After I finished writing it, I felt compelled to do something so I found an empty field and dug up the words by hand.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really neat. Whose land was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head, took another sip of tea.

“How’d you get the letters to look the same?” I asked.

“I didn’t bother too much with that,” she said.

“Was it hard?”

“The hardest part was remembering which letter I was on. I kept having to go back and check.”

“That’s really neat,” I said again.

She shrugged and drank her tea. I wanted to know why she’d done it, what the point of it had been, but I didn’t want to offend her. It seemed unbelievable that someone would spend so much time and effort doing something so purposeless. It would have been better to donate money, or write a blog post about it. I imagined her standing in front of the poem after it was complete and seeing nothing but a bunch of holes. Like a pack of moles had dug up the ground.

“Did you take any pictures of it?” I asked.

“A few, but only for myself.”

“That’s really cool. I’d like to do something like that.”

“You should,” she said. “I’ll do anything once and if I don’t like it or I’m not having fun, I’ll think, You are having an experience.”

“So you’re thinking that right now?”

She smiled. “Touché.”

I’d never met anyone like her. Instead of watching TV or playing on the Internet, she wrote poems about human rights issues and searched out empty fields. It made me envious, but I also felt sorry for her. If she went back there now, her words would be unreadable; she’d have nothing to show for her efforts. But maybe that was the point.

Elise returned with a plastic bag and I stood and told the woman it had been nice talking to her.

“You too,” she said.

“I hope you get to go camping next year.”

“Thanks,” she said, and then she wished me luck. I didn’t like it when people wished me luck. It was like they thought I needed it, like I wouldn’t be okay without it.

On our way out of the coffee shop, I saw my father. He stopped at a machine and stared at it for a moment, pressed a few buttons. Then he sat at the one beside it. I wondered if someone would come along and sit next to him, at the machine he knew he should be playing, and hit it big. I wondered if he always chose the machine right next to the one he felt compelled to play, if he always purposefully fucked himself.

Elise tripped, nearly falling on her face. I took the bag out of her hand and looped my arm through hers.

“How’d you get so drunk?”

“I’m not that drunk. I just need to eat something,” she said. “I got me some french fries.”

I slowed as we passed the Native American store with its turquoise jewelry and dreamcatchers, watching the girl behind the counter. She had long silky hair but she was wide-faced and flat-nosed and thick.

“Hold on a second,” I said to Elise, and signaled for her to sit on a nearby bench. I stepped into the store and smiled in the direction of the girl, who remained slouched over the counter with her hands folded in front of her. “How much are the dreamcatchers?” I asked.

“All prices,” she said. “I think our least expensive one is sixteen.”

“I want it,” I said.

“It’s that one,” the girl said, nodding to one in a corner.

“I want it,” I said again. It was perfect, the one I would have chosen even if I hadn’t known the price.

She stood on a stool to get it down for me. She wasn’t that big but her butt was disproportionately large and I wondered why she didn’t do something about it, go on a diet or do some kind of target exercises.

“What do they do?” I asked. “I mean, how do they work?”

“Positive dreams slip through the hole in the center and glide down the feathers to the sleeping person,” she said, like she’d said it a hundred times. “The negative dreams get caught up in the web here. Do you have a lot of bad dreams?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what a normal amount of bad dreams are.”

“I never have bad dreams.”

“I dream my teeth are falling out sometimes.”

“You’re worried you’re not attractive enough,” she said. “Or you’re sexually frustrated, but they all seem to mean that.”

This irritated me. I was a lot better-looking than she was—nine out of ten boys would pick me over her, or at least eight.

“I’m really into dream interpretation,” she said. “Give me another and I’ll tell you what it means.”

“I don’t remember any others,” I said.

“Come on.”

“Sometimes I dream I find a treasure chest and it’s full of gold.”

“Hmm,” she said, twisting up her mouth. “You’re about to unlock some important information that you’ve kept hidden from yourself. Of course it could mean other things, too. I’d need to check my book.”

This made me wonder if I’d been molested as a child and had repressed it. When people unlocked important information, wasn’t this always the case? Nobody ever unlocked anything good. I handed her my money, hooked a finger through the loop, and didn’t thank her as I walked out. This went against everything I’d been taught and felt very liberating.

Elise was still on the bench. “A dreamcatcher,” she said, putting her cigarette out on the floor.

I explained how it worked, that the bad dreams got caught up in the web and the good ones slipped down the feathers.

She stuck a finger in the hole and wagged it. “My dreams have been all fucked up lately,” she said. “Like they’re picking up where somebody’s left off the night before.”

An elevator was open and we stepped inside—we had it all to ourselves. I looked at myself in the mirror, first one and then turning to look in another and another. One day I would have a house without mirrors, not a single mirror to remind me of myself. It was amazing to think about, having my own place where I could do whatever I wanted. I could go to bars and drink beer or watch Friends reruns in bed for days and nobody would be there to say anything. I could order pizza and answer the door in my pajamas. When the elevator was about to stop, I jumped so I could feel the floor rise to meet me.

At our room, Elise couldn’t find her key. She emptied her purse all over the carpet, shaking it and turning out the fabric lining.

“What are you doing? I have one right here.”

The woman across the hall opened her door and deposited another room service tray outside. She was in a white bathrobe, pink foam curlers in her hair. She closed the door and Elise crawled over and picked up a perfect half of an untouched sandwich. “It’s got turkey on it,” she said, tossing it down the hall.

“Go pick that up,” I said, gathering her stuff, running my hands over the carpet to make sure I’d gotten all of her bobby pins and loose change. I noticed the chocolate in my nails, like dirt.

“Do you want to see the birds?” she asked. “Let’s go see the birds.”

“She’s probably asleep.”

“I want them to land in my hair.” She flipped over onto her back with her legs and arms splayed, lightly touching her head with one hand.

“Get up.”

“You look funny from this angle,” she said, laughing. I left her there and went into our room, set her food and purse on the bed. I laid the dreamcatcher on my bag and looked at it. I hardly ever bought anything for myself, and never anything so decorative. I couldn’t wait to get home and find the perfect place to hang it. The light on the telephone was blinking red—a message from our mother.

I went to get Elise but she was already in the bird woman’s room.

“Come on in and close the door,” the woman said. She was in bed in her big purple dress, Luke in a cot by the window, shirtless.

Elise opened the middle cage, and I went over and knelt next to her. The birds stayed where they were, one on either side, their heads tucked into their bodies.

“I think they’re asleep,” she said.

“We were all asleep,” Luke said.

“What if they see the other birds?” I asked. “I thought they’d beat their wings and go berserk.”

“They will,” Luke said.

“It’ll be okay,” the woman said.

“Come here, little birdies,” Elise said. “Pretty little birdies, sweet little birds.” She called to them like she was calling a dog, patting her knees. I could feel Luke’s eyes on us. We probably reminded him of all of the girls who’d never liked him—girls who’d made fun of him in elementary school and then hadn’t cared enough to do even that. Elise called louder.

“Just be quiet for a minute,” I said, taking her hand. We backed away from the cage and waited. I glanced at Luke in his cot with its thin white blanket. He hadn’t bothered to cover himself, and his breasts—they could only be called breasts—were small and folded over. They were different from a woman’s, missing whatever was inside them that gave them shape.

Finally, a bird flew out and perched on the fat woman’s foot. It looked around with its jerky bird neck before flying from one wall to the other as if measuring the dimensions of the room.

“This one likes to peck,” the woman said. “Not hard, just little love pecks.” The bird flew back to her foot and demonstrated, and the woman squealed and tossed her head about.

“I want it to peck me,” Elise said.

And then the other bird was out of its cage and they were both flying, stopping to look at us from the desk, the top of the TV cabinet. It reminded me of being a little kid, how I’d stand on tables and chairs to see things differently. How it would alter my perspective in the most pleasant way. I leaned against the wall and watched them. At the beginning of summer, on a walk around the neighborhood with Cole, a baby bird fell from its nest and landed at our feet. I’d nearly stepped on it. I was sure it had been some kind of omen, like a black cat in a dark alley, only a thousand times worse. It was dead, slick and eyeless.

When I looked at Luke, his eyes moved off to the side. He was the kind of guy who walked into a library or a movie theater and shot up a bunch of strangers, the kind who wouldn’t even have the guts to shoot himself afterward. He’d put the gun in his mouth and pull it out, put it in and pull it out, and then maybe break down in tears.

No matter how she called them, or how still and patiently she waited, the birds wouldn’t go near Elise. She stood and held out her arms like a scarecrow and they cut an even wider arc around her.

We got in bed and opened the box of fries, drenched and soggy with cheese.

“This is the orangest cheese I’ve ever seen,” I said. I stuck a finger into a corner, cold and gloppy.

“That means it has a lot of nutrients,” she said.

Or it’s poisonous, I thought. “Mom called,” I said. “We should call her back.”

“You call her.”

“She called my cell, too. She’s probably freaking out.”

“So call the woman.”

We ate while watching Anderson Cooper, our dresses wrinkled and hiked up our thighs. She stopped eating to tell me about Anderson’s brother, how he’d committed suicide. “‘I can’t feel anything anymore,’ he said, hanging from the ledge of a tall building. And then he let go.” She said he was handsome and rich and had everything and he still wanted to die.

“Do you want to die?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I love my life.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“I thought that was your point.” I concentrated on getting as much cheese onto each fry as possible before putting it in my mouth. “How do you know Anderson’s gay?” I asked.

“He’s thin and well-groomed and eats a plain baked potato for every meal.”

“A plain baked potato?”

“That’s what I read. He thinks eating is a burden.”

“I wish I was like that,” I said. I closed the box and threw it away, washed the cheese off my fingers. Then I took off Elise’s dress and hung it in the closet, put my shorts and tank top on.

Anderson was over and some other guy was talking about the rapture. If the rapture was supposed to start at 10 P.M. tomorrow night in California, it would start earlier in other parts of the world. For some reason this hadn’t occurred to me. Australia was waiting to see what would happen. They were sixteen hours ahead of us and it would all begin, or not begin, in a few short hours.

“Shit,” I said. “I forgot.” It seems like God wouldn’t care about time zones. Why do we have time zones again?”

“Because people used to set their time based on the sun but it was a mess,” she said. “Imagine if you were traveling and had to catch a train or something.”

“How do you know everything?”

“I make stuff up a lot,” she said. “People don’t question it if you act like you know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m not going to be able to sleep now,” I said. “I’m going to have to stay up all night and watch.”

“You can sleep with the TV on,” she said, nuzzling my arm.

There was a knock at the door, a series of hard raps. Elise ran over and looked out the peephole. “What do you think? Should we let them in?”

They heard her and called yes.

“What about your boyfriend?” I asked.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Yes you do.”

“I think I’d know it if I had a boyfriend,” she said.

They knocked again, calling our names, and she opened the door. They walked in like they belonged, but when they got to the middle of the room, stood there looking out of place. And then one of them sat in the chair and another sat on the bed. One of them said he had to take a piss and went to the bathroom. The last one looked out the window and commented on the view.

The one who’d bought us date grapes, Brad, was on the bed.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

“I will, thanks,” he said, taking off his shoes. He had a nice smile, much nicer than Gabe’s, but I wanted Gabe, my beautiful boy. My beautiful, lovely blond boy. Why hadn’t he texted me? I hoped he didn’t think I was just some girl who had given him a handjob in the back of his van. I was, of course, but I couldn’t think of myself that way, and couldn’t think of him thinking of me that way, either. There had been something special between us.

Brad ruffled my hair. I had the urge to go to the bathroom and check, but I just smoothed it back into place and looked at my sister, standing on the bed. She ordered the Yelapa guy to stand in front of her and climbed onto his shoulders. Then she directed him around the room, running her hands along the bumpy ceiling. She told him to jump and he hopped, his feet not even leaving the ground.

Brad played music on his phone, a tinny, desperate sound, as Jake took a tin of cigarettes from his shirtfront pocket. He pulled out a wooden box and slid the top off.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Weed,” he said.

“You can’t smoke that in here, people will smell it.”

They said everyone was asleep but us, that no one would smell it. They said they’d been smoking in hotel rooms for years. I imagined the police kicking down the door and arresting us, taking us to jail. Our father would have to come down to the station and bail us out, and he’d be disappointed in me.

“Light it up,” Elise said.

They passed the little metal cigarette around: inhaling, coughing.

“I might want to try it,” I said.

“I thought it was a gateway drug,” Elise said.

“It’s a slippery slope,” Brad said, passing it to Jake. Jake knocked it against the table and refilled it, handed it to me. I held a lighter to the end and the weed burned as I sucked. I didn’t feel like I was getting much, but I breathed out a huge puff of smoke.

“I don’t think I feel anything,” I said, after a while.

“It’s pretty shitty weed,” Jake said.

“I didn’t feel anything my first time, either,” Elise said. “Or I was so drunk I couldn’t tell if I felt anything.”

I took another hit, sucking and sucking and breathing out a ton of smoke. I coughed—it felt like the smoke was trapped in my throat and I couldn’t get it out.

“That’s enough for you,” Elise said.

They continued passing it around while I watched TV. The reporter was interviewing people on the streets, asking them whether they believed the rapture was coming. I didn’t know why reporters were always interviewing people on the streets. I had a thought about it, something that seemed like a very good thought, but then someone said something and I lost it and couldn’t get it back. I didn’t even bother trying because I knew it was no use.

“Hey, Jess,” Elise said. “Jess?”

“What?”

“You’re grinding your teeth.”

“I’m not grinding my teeth,” I said, unclenching my jaw. I was also digging my fingers into my legs. I stood and took my phone into the bathroom, stared at Gabe’s number. I typed things and deleted them, typed and deleted. He didn’t love me. I wasn’t special. I went back out and resumed my place on the floor.

I didn’t like the way the weed made me feel, so I took another hit, hoping it would make me feel differently.

“Come on,” Brad said, taking my hand and leading me to the bathroom. He locked the door behind us. His face looked larger and redder in the bathroom light and I didn’t want to be alone with him but I also felt special, chosen.

“Hi,” I said, as he moved toward me.

He propped me up on the counter and put his hands on my thighs. They felt a lot like my own, hardly like anything.

“Hi,” I said again.

“That was your first time smoking?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“How’d you like it?”

“Fine,” I said. “I don’t care about anything.”

He tilted my neck and kissed it, held my hair back with one hand. He was pulling too hard but I didn’t say anything. “I want to make you feel good,” he said. “Can I make you feel good?” He kissed me before I could answer, his hands moving higher and higher until they were touching my panties, rubbing the thin material between two fingers. I couldn’t remember which pair I had on. They were probably a good pair because the good ones weren’t as comfortable so I saved them for last. I wondered why Elise hadn’t knocked. The old Elise would have knocked already, would have come looking for me last night.

“Are those veneers?” I asked, pulling away.

“No,” he said.

“They’re perfect, like movie star teeth.”

“Close your eyes.”

“You must not drink any coffee,” I said.

“I drink plenty of coffee,” he said, “and I smoke, too.” He sounded angry about it. I closed my eyes and he tilted my neck and kissed it again. Then he began to suck and I wondered if I was going to wake up with a hickey; the thought of it excited me.

In the room, a Bruce Springsteen song played, one I didn’t know.

Brad unbuttoned my shorts, tugged at them.

“It bothers me that Bruce Springsteen is always talking about factories and being poor. Once you’ve got that much money you shouldn’t be able to write about being poor anymore,” I said.

“This was only his second album,” he said. “He wasn’t rich then.”

“He was a rock star, though.”

“Shhh.”

“Don’t tell me to shhh. I don’t have to be quiet.”

“No,” he said. “We can talk about Bruce if you want.”

“That’s all I wanted to say about it.” I lifted up and he pulled off my shorts. I was wearing a pair of blue panties that had lace at the top in a lighter blue, one of my prettier pair that fit well and didn’t have any bloodstains.

“These are sexy,” he said, running his finger along the lace. Then he moved them to the side and pushed his finger in, first one and then two. He said I was tight and I hoped he didn’t say anything else about it. I smiled at him. My smile felt big and fake and made me think nobody could ever love me.

He unbuttoned his shorts, unzipped them, and pulled himself out—half-hard, big.

“It’s big,” I said.

“Is it?”

“It seems really big.”

“It’s not huge or anything,” he said. He took out his wallet and found a gold condom. I watched him open the wrapper with his teeth, roll it down his dick.

“Wait,” I said, placing my hands against his chest.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t have to,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“I’ll go slow.” He gave me a sad look like he might love me, pulled me forward, and pushed himself in. I didn’t want to do it anymore and wanted to stop him—all I had to say was that I’d changed my mind. I could just pull my shorts up and leave the bathroom and he would let me. I could leave. I didn’t have to do this. I scooted to the edge of the counter and wrapped my legs around his waist.

“Hey,” I said, but it was so quiet. I put my hands under his shirt and held onto him, tried to concentrate on his skin, which was smooth and warm. I wanted to pull him on top of me, wanted him to smother me, make it hard to breathe.

After a few minutes, he grunted and tugged my hair. Then he was still and silent. I tried to move but he held my legs in place, closed his eyes. The bluish lids were lined with veins. There was a tiny mole below his left eye that added so much.

He peeled the condom off, hobbled a few feet over to the toilet, and flushed. Then he put his hand on the back of my head and smiled at me before zipping his pants.

When he left, I locked the door and set about cleaning myself with a washcloth. I peed, brushed my teeth, washed my face. When there was nothing left to clean, I sat on the toilet and listened to them talk and laugh, knowing I would never be a part of it. I would always be separate, thinking about what expression my face was making, what people thought of me. Observing peoples’ weaknesses and flaws—their big thighs and crooked teeth and acne, their lack of confidence, their fear. I would always think the worst about people and it would keep me from them because I couldn’t accept myself.

Elise sat alone on the bed, wobbling back and forth. I got up and went to the bathroom, peed for the fourth time in two hours.

When I came out, she was fumbling around in the closet.

“What are you doing?” I asked, sliding open the door.

“I have to use the bathroom.”

“You’re in the closet,” I said. I turned on the light and led her to the toilet, stood there until she told me to go away. I got in bed and tried to get comfortable. I imagined myself melting into the mattress, becoming a part of it.

A few minutes later, she came out unwrapping something.

“What do you have?” I asked.

“A candy,” she said, popping it into her mouth.

“You might choke.” I held out my hand and she spit the peppermint into it. I set it on the table and told her to go to sleep, but she began to cry, softly at first and then gasping, sucking breaths that hurt my chest, my heart.

“Elise?” I said. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“You know what,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

I wanted to list things, like our mother listed things when our father lost another job, or when we didn’t have enough money to go back-to-school shopping. She would remind us of all the things we had—our health and each other and a roof over our heads—things we’d always had so they never seemed like anything. I could tell her she was beautiful and smart and funny and popular, that she could walk into any room and heads would turn. But I didn’t say these things and the crying slowed and I thought it would stop but it started up again, terrible and heaving. I wondered how anyone would ever be able to love her. She was too beautiful. It was like being too rich—all you could think about was what the person could do for you.

I walked over to the tub and turned on the pitifully slow-filling faucet. I could still feel Brad inside me and wondered how long it would take to go away. I hate myself, I thought. I thought it again and again and it felt good, like I was finally admitting something I’d kept secret for a long time.

“Why don’t you take a bath?” I asked, watching the water creep into the tub.

She didn’t say anything. I sat there for a moment, looking at her, and then took off my clothes and got in, waited for the water to fill up around me. I ducked my head under and held my breath, my ring scraping the porcelain—God was supposed to be my husband. I was supposed to be married to God. I imagined slicing my wrists open, red against white. It would be so bright, so beautiful. I could hear my heartbeat and remembered that it only had so many. It seemed cruel, putting a little bomb inside us like this, something that we had to always find new ways to ignore.

I adjusted the water with my foot and looked over at my sister.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asked.

“Worst like what? The meanest?”

“Whatever.”

“I used to like Marc,” I said. “Do you remember Marc?”

“He only carpooled with us for like four years,” she said.

“I couldn’t talk to him so instead of being nice I was really mean. I put gum in his hair and told him he smelled bad and one time I told Mom he’d gotten another ride home and we left him in the rain.”

“I remember that—we had to go back and get him and he was soaked.”

“And now he’s in Ohio and I’ll never see him again,” I said. “He’ll always think I hated him.”

“I bet he knows you liked him,” she said. “Kids do shit like that when they like each other.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe he didn’t know then, but I bet he knows now.”

“I hope so,” I said.

She was quiet and I wanted to ask about the worst thing she’d ever done but she’d probably done some actual bad things, which was why she was asking. She turned onto her side, facing away from me.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” she mumbled.

“I’m sad we’re not going to make it to California. I wanted to see the ocean.”

“I’m sure it’s not that great.”

“I bet it’s nice.”

“These aren’t the last days of California,” she said. “You’ll see it eventually.”

A few minutes later, she was asleep. No matter what, she never had any trouble sleeping.

I got out of the tub and dried off with a damp towel. I let it fall to the floor and walked over to the window, stepped onto the ledge. The blue light of the parking garage reminded me of a mosquito zapper. It could have been dusk or dawn. I pressed my hands to the glass and leaned forward, thinking about Brother Jessie’s baby. Why would God have given him a baby like that? I wondered if his wife had spent her pregnancy afraid, if it had caused the baby to be deformed. If I ever became pregnant, I’d be terrified the whole time, and my baby would be born dead or worse, completely messed up. I’d have no choice but to sacrifice my life for it, and people would say how good I was, how selfless.

I closed the curtains. Then I put on my clothes and got in bed, letting my hair soak the pillow. At home, I’d have waited for it to dry, or put a towel down. At home, I wouldn’t drop things when I was done using them. I checked my phone. As usual, no one had called or texted. Before I could think better of it, I typed a message to Gabe—I’ve been thinking about the back of your van—and pressed send. Then I set the phone screen-side-down on my chest and waited. A minute later, I picked it up and looked at it, adjusted the volume. He was probably asleep. It was late and he was asleep and had been asleep for hours, but I needed him to be awake. I wanted to tell him everything. I felt like he would understand, that he was the only person who would understand.

I played games with myself—counting down from ten, ignoring the phone—but nothing worked, so I gave up and recited the Lord’s Prayer. I said it over and over until the words got all mixed up and I had no idea how it went.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed I was blind except for a small square in the upper right-hand corner of my vision. I had to keep moving my head around, positioning the square in just the right place so I could see. I saw a banana, reached out and grabbed it. I peeled it and took a bite and each bite brought back more and more vision until I could see normally. Then I dreamed we were at home and my mother was in the driveway, being dragged off by a snake as big as a car. My sister yelled for me to get our father so I went inside and found him asleep in his chair. Gunsmoke was on TV, which made it feel less dreamlike. Instead of screaming, I shook him until he woke up and we ran outside, but by that time, the snake had her whole body in its mouth and we just stood there and watched.