Barely two weeks earlier, she and Alma had been walking along Ocean Drive when a rumbling growl had stopped them. They craned back, shielding their eyes, watching a helicopter slide over their heads and out over the water. It stopped about half a mile out, hovering in place like a dragonfly. Squinting, Felice saw a rope or ladder flung from the side and dark forms—people!—being lifted, seemingly plucked directly from the sparkling waves. Tourists gathered on the sidewalk to watch, commenting on the scene. The silhouetted event, from that distance, seemed almost balletic. People around them started clapping, then someone made a comment about spearfishing for Haitians, and a few people laughed. Felice couldn’t move her eyes away: she saw sparkling shadows for an hour afterward.
Now Bethany shifted her face, her eyes looked fixed and unlit. But then a quickness, a kind of whip-crack, slit the air. Perhaps it was just the shock of seeing Felice there at all. Bethany’s mouth opened wide, a black circle. She shrieked and shoved Gary with enough force so he stumbled backwards, laughing with shock. Then Felice saw his face darken. “What the fuck! Little cunt. You fucking little—” He seized her upper arm. Bethany’s hand flickered so quickly Felice almost missed the jab to his windpipe. Gary wheezed, doubled over, grabbing his throat. Bethany leapt off the curb, running, but it seemed to Felice that time wrinkled, expanding and contracting: now it slowed again, throwing details into relief: Felice saw the arc of Bethany’s neck, the scorched ends of her hair, her wrinkled fingertips. She saw how the toe of Bethany’s shoe snagged on a piece of broken pavement, throwing her, chin and palms slamming on the sidewalk, smearing blood. Gary scrambled after her; lunging at Bethany, he snatched at her ankle. She kicked free, smashing his fingers. He screamed and lunged and caught her again, dragged her backwards over the sidewalk. “Fucking—cunt . . .” His voice a rasp.
Felice opened her mouth but couldn’t make any sounds. There was no noise anywhere but Gary’s strangled wheeze. His bad eye seemed fixed on her and she felt as if she were caught in some paralyzing beam. Then Bethany started trying to kick again, her body electrified, one foot flying into his face; she let loose a tremendous, night-whitening blast of a scream.
Felice didn’t remember running, only that when she came around the corner she spotted, just ahead, a girl in a pencil skirt and silk blouse crouching over Alma. The girl straightened as Felice ran toward her and started moving away. “No, no, no—it’s not me!” Felice gabbled, pleading. “There’s a man—he’s hurting my friend—they’re right over there, around the corner—we’ve got to call—”
“Sorry.” The woman held up her hands, warding off Felice. She cut across the street. “I can’t—I’m—I just can’t . . .”
Can’t what? Felice stared as the woman scurried off, as if Felice were the danger. She wanted to run after that woman, to shout, You don’t do that! You don’t leave people!
But it was exactly what Felice had almost done. It’s what she would have done if she weren’t somehow more afraid of going backwards. Nobody cared about girls like Bethany. Felice thought of the meth-head kids, their teeth burnt away to silvery stubs, eyes like crusts, as if you could see the rot of the drug eating them from the inside out. She thought of the kids who drink to unconsciousness, kids who break into homes and drink rubbing alcohol, Listerine, if there’s no booze. Melinda, her arms and legs furrowed with scar tissue from slitting herself with a box cutter. She loved the feeling of it, she’d said, as much as she loved crack. One day her arm—then her whole body swelled, turned hot, an angry bluish-red: by the time they got her to an emergency room it was too late.
Felice went to Alma who was still doubled over on the step. Felice shook her with all her might, but she flopped around. Something clattered out of her pocket to the steps—a cell phone. Felice picked it up, hands trembling, and stared hard at the numbers. Her mother had given her a cell the year before, but she’d let the battery run down, had forgotten it at a bar. The numbers on the metal wafer glowed in her hand: who could she call? The police were unpredictable and dangerous; she didn’t have any friends besides Alma. The girls she’d known in school would have crumpled, gone up like puffs of smoke over something like this. Night air rushed through her: Please don’t let me be like that anymore. The numbered keyboard looked like beads of light under her fingers: she heard her mother’s voice, it was as if Felice had summoned her from the air. There was a tidal movement within her body, her voice crying, “Mommy . . .”
Her mother was saying, “Felice . . . Is it you?”
She clutched the phone; edged around the corner: so dark it was hard to see what was going on at the end of the block. She thought she saw Bethany and the man. Felice crept toward her, keeping close to the buildings, outside the penumbra of the streetlamps. The light was dismal, a sort of absence in the air. She could just make them out: the man was on top of Bethany. Felice wanted to tell her mother what was happening, but she couldn’t speak. She clung to the cement face of a building, her thoughts cut to pieces.
The phone fell out of her hands, an object on the sidewalk that spoke with a miniature version of her mother’s voice. She backed away, staring. Behind her, another sound crept up, a metronomic beating: Felice lifted her head to see a lone car stop at the intersection. White with a tattered convertible top, its windows were black, as if the interior was filled with smoke, and a growling thud bounced up the street. The chambermaids had warned Felice to stay clear of cars like this: Haitian gangbangers, Miami Kings, the MS-13 guys down from California. “They’d steal a girl like you,” Hilda had said, “and sell you. Make you into a slave, somewhere far away, and no one would ever hear from you again.” As Felice approached, the music crept over her—a dire, unintelligible voice chanting warnings. The engine roared so loudly it strummed across her bones. She slapped her hands on the tinted glass of the driver’s window. It lowered a few inches and she made out black eyes, a small black tattoo at the outer corner of one eye. “Please—please . . .”
“Qué te pasa, qué quieres?”
There was something about the eyes that struck her as a kind of perfection: she couldn’t look away. “Un hombre—quiere matar a mi amiga—please—he’s got a knife I think—tiene un cuchillo.”
“Fuck, man! No fucking way.” This came from the backseat. “No coño, vámonos de aquí ahora, vete, coño, vámonos!”
There was a quiver of motion within the car and for a terrible second Felice thought he was about to pull away. A light rain had started like static. She put her hands on the partially lowered window: she didn’t care if he buzzed it back up; she wouldn’t let go. She’d caught an accent in his Spanish. Haitian? She’d known a Cuban-Haitian boy in her school—Andres. Once, he’d walked up to Felice in his low baggy shorts and polo shirt and asked her, You know what they call the color of those eyes? She’d shrugged. “Violet,” he’d said in his lilting voice. “Those are violet.”
The perfect black eyes kept staring back at her: in that moment, Felice began to feel that he knew about her, that he knew that all of this was part of her obligation. After several seconds of that gaze, fine and clear as a sheet of glass, the eyes turned toward the corner where she’d pointed. Felice held still. She could no longer hear Bethany’s cries, only the booming from the car.
The eyes flicked back to her: the driver said, “We take care of it. You get out of here.”
Felice stepped backwards, watching as four young men with cinnamon-colored skin climbed out of the car, moving casually as if they were going to a party. One man reaching behind to the back of his waistband. She turned and walked straight up the road without looking back. She walked all the way to the Cove, where the beach rats and outdoor kids hung out. She knew she’d be safe there. It was possible that Bethany would get away. And Alma would eventually stumble home to her mother. For one night, at least, Felice hoped the judgment was over. Sometimes the most important thing was just staying safe, and knowing and being among the right kinds of people—so you didn’t get anyone into trouble. That w
as the most important thing of all—not getting anyone else into trouble.
FELICE CONTINUED DROPPING ACID, loving the delicious, curling sensation of the drug sinking into her system, the sense that she was afloat within her own body. She and Berry lay side by side on the sand, giggling and listening to the trickle of the ocean. Their hands swam back and forth in front of their eyes, leaving contrails. The girls whispered, murmuring, “Wishh, wishh, wishhh . . .” It all seemed hilarious: Felice enjoyed the shifting, transitory feelings.
They slept out on the beach, but Felice’s life improved with her new friend. They’d met in a crowded hall on a go-see for Gap and shared Berry’s caramel Frappuccino. Berry had grown up in North Jersey in a three-story pale blue house with black shutters and gables and gingerbread trim (Felice had seen the photograph) and she knew all sorts of valuable things. Berry and Reynaldo came with their own problems of course, like their bulimia. Reynaldo’s habit (or profession) of following men out of the bars. So you never knew what he’d look like the next morning, covered in bruises that turned black, bruises the size of eggplants on his chest and neck, and once his eye bulged and leaked blood and he had to have part of his eyelid sewn back on.
But they were also smart. Berry, for example, taught her to shoplift at nicer places, like the Lord & Taylor or the Saks Fifth Avenue at Bal Harbour. Berry and Felice were careful not to return to the same store, never to steal more than an item or two at a time. The salesgirl would ring up new jeans, a silk tank top, and baby doll dress—snipping off the alarm tags—then suddenly Berry would decide that she needed to try everything on again: she’d sneak out of the dressing room while Felice sent the clerks all over the store on errands for matching belts and handbags and scarves.
“They expect you to shoplift at Swim N’ Stuff and the secondhand places—those guys’re just waiting to catch you,” Berry explained. “Not as much at Lord & Taylor.”
The staff in these palatial stores did seem resolutely disinterested, swanning around, all lethargic elegance. Felice sometimes had the impression that they were in on a grand collusion—the sales staff masquerading as wealthy women, Berry and Felice masquerading as shoppers.
Each night around 1 a.m. they’d walk over to one of the cavernous places like Mansion dressed in new jeans and heels that they kept in a locker at the Nineteenth Avenue Y. First Berry, then Felice ducked under the velvet rope, flashing silver leather wristbands that Mauricio—the head bouncer—had given them. They never paid for cover or drinks. Felice wasn’t modeling much—but that was even better, Berry told her—she was pre-discovered. Overhead, images of singers and volcanic landscapes and smoking cars splayed across fifty-foot screens; the space rang with an industrial, metallic din, and the girls’ throats ached from screaming into each other’s ears. The best part of those places was that only silver wristbands were allowed on certain floors. It was as if the desires of the earth had been boiled down and Felice and Berry were part of it—the best thing anyone could ever be. They danced on the mobbed gleaming floor, while regular people could dance only on the stairs and upper levels, staring down at them.
It was fun to go to shoots when she was fourteen and be a sort-of model (the only real ones appeared in certain magazines—on the covers). People gave her clothes from new designers and paid her with hundred-dollar bills, all for letting them do stupid things to her hair and face. But she hadn’t counted on how much she would hate modeling. The soul-suck of standing around, of sets and steaming lights and fussy stylists and the photographers barking commands: More life in the eyes—no—intelligent life. Give me something! And that one designer—his horrible, thick, old-fashioned clothes—rayons and orlons that stuck to her skin, crackling with static. He walked onto the set in the middle of shooting (Felice was supposed to look like she was pumping gas), grabbed the flesh of her upper arm, and announced that she was “heinous.” She couldn’t be a real model, because she was 130 pounds and only five feet nine. Both the New York scouts wanted her to lose at least ten pounds. She refused to even try. Her life was precarious and she didn’t like the confusion she felt about dieting and just not having enough to eat. The scouts also wanted to take endless Polaroids of her, to fly her to New York or Milan, to paint streaks in her hair, and make her go live in one of those retards’ palaces off of Collins—three-bedroom apartments packed with ten other skinny, starving, tall girls. Bulimia ballrooms. It was just another version of the life she’d left behind in school: pretty spoiled girls and too much money. She started to dream about Bethany, about the seraphic eyes watching her from the driver’s seat, the one night she’d passed through judgment. Felice didn’t want to lose that moment.
SHE WAKES TO an ivory sky; over the water to the east, a plane tows a banner advertising the dance party at Automatic Slim’s. The air feels mossy, the sun rising in layers of new light, and Felice slowly sits up, her bones stiff. She inclines toward Emerson and examines his sleeping face. His size and his manner make him seem older than he is. Asleep, he has a boy’s face with a softly curving mouth and pale, almost transparent eyelashes and brows. She admires the fact of his strength: it strikes her as a kind of luxury.
If only, Felice thinks. If only I wanted to kiss him.
“Hey.” Emerson is awake, gazing at her from the grass.
“Hi,” she says moodily: she can’t help it.
“What’re you thinking about?”
She scowls, then tears up a handful of coarse grass and sprinkles it over Emerson’s head like confetti. “What. Is. It. With. You?”
He grins and bats away the grass. “I’m starving. It’s seriously time for food.”
Emerson says they can get breakfast at his friend Derek’s place. She thinks again—a strand of anxiety—that she has to get work. But as they start up Michigan Avenue, Felice realizes that it feels good to let someone steer the course of the day. What else would she be doing? Smoking on the beach? She’ll just stop for coffee, maybe a cigarette—then she’ll get going. It’s early and the air is soft as sea foam. As they walk, Emerson talks about his parents. “Jim—my dad—he was Mr. Activist Guy. But originally he was an engineer—he worked on the rockets at Cape Canaveral. Then he, like, became a hippie and moved to Fort Lauderdale. Totally a dad by accident. My mom too, pretty much. Neither of them was so into it.”
“Did you love them and all?” Felice feels as if, walking this way, hands in pockets, staring at the pebbly sidewalk, Emerson carrying her board, that she could ask or tell him anything.
He shifts the board to his other arm and the back of his hand brushes hers. “Well, yeah,” he says finally. “We fought a lot, but I guess we loved each other—me and Jim and Mandy, and my brother Tosh.”
“I have a brother too,” Felice says. “Stan.”
“Yeah? Did you used to fight?”
“Not really—not so much back before. But he got pretty pissed at me—I’m sure he hates me by now.” She smiles.
“Not exactly your fault you got born.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly beg to have a little sister, either.” But that’s not what she’d meant. Scuffling her sneakers in the white dust, she feels protective of Stanley, who’d seemed to Felice—even back when he was fifteen and she was eleven—heroic and slightly removed, reading about stuff like feeding the poor and cleaning the environment. “So, if you all loved each other,” she says, barely able to stop herself from adding, so fucking much, “so then why are you, like, living in the gutter and all?”
“I’m not living in the gutter.” Emerson laughs—a fine, clear tone. He puts one hand in his pocket and carries the board loosely in his other arm. “I don’t know. I just wanted to try living not in a house for a while. Or, well, not in the same house my family was in. And not at a college either. Jim says that college is just another arm of the military-industrial complex.”
“Pfft!” Felice curls her upper lip. “What isn’t?” That came directly from Stanley.
“What about you then? Why are you staying i
n a place like the Green House?”
‘Oh.” She shrugs heavily, aware of Emerson’s scrutiny. “No reason. Same as you.” She walks with her arms crossed.
Emerson is still considering—his eyes lifted as if reading something on the air. “I guess—for us it all kind of fell apart. Jim and Mandy never got married in the first place, so . . . They said it’s too hard on kids if you have to go through a divorce and all. So. Pretty thoughtful.” His smile is private, directed at the ground; Felice looks away, uncertain if he’s serious.
“They made it too easy—in a way—to fall apart. I mean, next thing we know, Dad’s kind of living with Sandra—this other lady with a baby son—over in Plantation. And Mom moved to Denver to take jewelry design classes.”
“They moved away from you? That really sucks.”
Emerson’s expression is mild. “Well, they were pretty decent about the whole deal. They talked to us tons about it before they went. I had some impulse control problems, I guess. I’d get a little wild. Jim still stopped by the old house sometimes and gave me and Tosh some cash for groceries and stuff. Of course Tosh would always spend it on weed mostly.” He smiles at her again, that flickering, uncertain expression, but now he’s looking at her.
“Fuck,” she says softly. She lets her knuckles graze his, their fingers intertwine for a few moments before she lets go. They walk several more blocks, silenced by traffic noise, and negotiate a chaotic intersection. Then they pass a residential hedge tall as a gate and the traffic howl diminishes and the street opens to tall, wide trees like those in the Gables. Felice has never been in this neighborhood before—sticking to places she knows—crowded, touristy spots on the beach and a few secret street rat places—avoiding the police and kids from school. She feels exposed and anxious walking up this stately street: there are houses with circular drives, velvety emerald lawns, and children’s bicycles on the lawns. “So where’s your brother now?”
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