skokie

It was already August, and Rainey was still thirteen.

She had heard about a party that night, one town over, across the canal from where she lived with her mother in an L-shaped ranch house bordered by feral gardens.

Adam Gordon, a guy Rainey didn't know but who was known to the group of skaters with whom she'd been spending her time, was rumored to be having an all-nighter while his parents were in Europe. This was a scenario she was familiar with from the movies her father took her to see, in which crazy, terrible acts of destruction happened in a house—a pizza on the turntable! Mother's ballgowns in the pool!—but by the end of the movie the damage was almost entirely undone, dissolved like the components of a distressing dream but leaving behind some crack, some tear in the fabric of things that symbolized a loss of innocence, aka wisdom. You could not get at the wisdom without the cracking or tearing, it was buried underneath normal life. These movies were always about boys, she had noticed; they offered little to no practical advice to a girl seeking adventure or experience or wisdom.

It was hard to imagine the kind of real-life parents who would let a teenage boy stay home alone for any length of time. Had they not seen the movies? If only Rainey's mother were that cool, neglectful, trusting, or idiotic, her life would be so much easier, she thought. Or—just to dream a little harder—if only they were rich, which seemed to make such parenting traits not only possible but the benign evidence of a naïve but

1 radically nonjudgmental love. Rainey's father, who lived two L stops away, just across the

Chicago border, was that naïve, that nonjudgmental, but was suffering for it; blindsided a few years back by his wife's petition for divorce, he lived alone in a four-story walkup with mice and roaches and the smells of greasy meat and bugspray and understood nothing, did not wish to understand or participate in a life that could turn against you so abruptly. He wanted only to go to the movies, and rent them on videocassette, sometimes two or three a night, and that's what he did.

Rainey had never been to an unchaperoned party, though she’d been hanging around all summer long at Fountain Square, the plaza downtown where skater boys hung out practicing their ollies and grinds, and girls hung out smoking Camels and watching the boys, or painting their nails green or blue or black and then trailing their hands in the cold water from the fountains that ran in cement troughs through the plaza, to harden the polish. Sometimes they panhandled and were shocked and delighted when grown-ups actually stopped and gave them money. Often it was a black person who would stop and

Rainey felt guilty about that, unless they said something religious like “God Bless.” Then whether they were black or white her contempt would momentarily eclipse the guilt.

When they'd collected enough they would go get pizza. Sometimes a group of them would end up back at someone’s house while their parents were still at work, watching

Repo Man or Suburbia on VHS, and smoking pot if anyone had some, or raiding the liquor cabinet if they didn’t. Her mother worked long shifts at the hospital, and slept heavily on the living room couch when she got home, and Rainey was able to get away with quite a lot more than other girls did, mostly, she thought, because she had gotten an

2 early start at things it wouldn’t occur to her mother to worry about until much later. By the time her mother talked to her about birth control, for instance, in her sophomore year, she had already been on the pill and then gone off it, had already sworn off sex with men for a while.

But this was still the summer before high school; in her mind she was an adult trapped in a child’s body. Except it wasn't a child's body anymore. It had small breasts, jutting hips, a menstrual cycle. This body, she hoped, would be her passport to all the places she wanted to go, if she could figure out how to properly wield it, maneuver it. It wasn't a temple, like the principal at school had told her last year when she was sent to his office for dress code violations, it wasn't any sort of place. It was a tool like a sail or a wedge. It was particles displacing other particles, something to hold out in front of her to navigate the visible world that had little to do with her actual, private, mysterious, floating self, though they were obviously connected, at times, by a network of nerves and sensors and inconvenient emotions she was just now learning to control through applied chemistry. If balding Mr. Russo in his polyester suit had been a wise man instead of a middle school principal he might have leaned back in his chair (instead of leaning in close where she could smell the cheese on his breath) and said Oh, Rainey, what is it that you want? And she might have replied I want to be really old and at the end of life looking back, I want to have already done everything so I can die happy. She would not have been able to tell him why she thought having done everything would make her happy or why “everything” consisted mainly of drugs and sex and petty crime and not, for instance, hang-gliding, embroidery, or computer science, but she was busily going

3 through the motions, collecting experiences and checking them off from an invisible, ever-growing list.

Adam Gordon's party was in Skokie, a suburb twice removed from Chicago, far from any train lines. It took an hour to walk there from her best friend Shella’s house where her mother had dropped her off for an invented slumber party. Usually her mother drove away quickly enough that she could just duck around to the backyard and walk down the alley, but this time she sat there in her little white Honda, idling at the curb as if waiting for Rainey to be let in. Rainey never knew when she'd be caught in a lie; she could not read her mother's thoughts though she was often convinced her mother could easily grasp her own and was just choosing to let certain things go because it was exhausting not to. Did she suspect deception now, or was she just sitting there, not even watching or waiting, just breathing in the first few moments of the daughterless evening?

Rainey went to the side door, rang the bell, and put on a little show of greeting Shella’s mother. Then, stepping up onto the stoop and letting the screen door slam against her butt, she jammed her body into the narrow space between the two doors, hoping it appeared from the street as if she had passed smoothly and unhindered through the doorway and into the house.

A grainy spiderweb covered the small rectangular window inches from her face but its weaver was nowhere to be seen. How embarrassing it would be to be caught by her mother. Her plan would be dragged out of her, the bare bones of it, anyway, and she would be punished, made less free. She would be exposed, scrutinized, questioned. Her lie, she reasoned, was mainly one of terminology. “Slumber party” and “all-nighter” were

4 simply different points spread along the same continuum, and not even that far apart, though she knew her mother would not see it that way. The slumber party was a sort of training ground for the all-nighter, a girls-only affair safely guarded by indulgent parents positioned somewhere in the house, keeping a low profile to give the girls the illusion of autonomy. Sometimes a parent would bring a tray of cookies and then disappear, as if leaving an offering for some famously angry god in need of appeasement. The slumber party in the wee hours became a place for sharing pornography, vodka and sex toys stolen from the caches of parents or older siblings, a place to make out with other girls as a way of practicing technique or even penetrating each other in the dark, two girls zipped into one sleeping bag, in preparation for the hoped-for thing. It had been a long time since

Rainey had been to a slumber party and she felt a sudden piercing nostalgia for them.

Through the web, through the window, she saw coats hanging on pegs, one of which was Shella's rabbit fur jacket she had always coveted. For a moment she wished she could go inside the house and wrap herself in the jacket, turn on the air conditioning and the TV, not go through with her plan to go to the party where Jason and Dmitri would be. It wasn't as if they were expecting her; if she skipped the party she would only be disappointing herself. In the comic books she used to read there were characters who could melt through doors by changing the chemical structures of their bodies to become the wood of the door and then rearrange into flesh on the other side. She'd wished for this and other superpowers before, but tried to put those wishes, like her fear of the missing spider, out of her mind. She was not above magical thinking, not even close, but had been disappointed by it too many times. She held still, barely breathing, afraid of discovery

5 from all sides though she knew the house was empty, Shella and her family camping in the dunes, until she finally heard the sewing machine purr of her mother's Honda driving away.

It was only eight when she got to the neighborhood where the party was. The houses there were big, identical split-level homes set on spongy squares of thick green grass. The sun was just setting, and streetlamps were starting to come on, the air beneath them still hot but no longer sticky. Now it moved horizontally in soft ribbons, kissing the insides of her arms. Earlier that day she had raked the leaves from the sycamore tree that were already beginning to fall in the back yard and now she felt the pleasant soreness of those rarely used muscles. She went to the 7-11, got a blue Slurpee and stood in the parking lot, not wanting to enter the party until it was actually nighttime. Going inside in the summer when it was still light out always reminded her of the children's poem: and does it not seem hard to you/when all the sky is clear and blue/and I should so much like to play/to have to go to bed by day?

She sipped the frozen drink as slowly as she could, both to stall for time and so it wouldn't hurt her head, and watched the rust red globe above the 76 station across the street heating up in daring competition with the blazing pink sky. There was a moment in which the colors poured forth with equal richness and might have blared into one, and then the reddish-orange won and the pink continued to fade and stretch and disappear into a warm deep cobalt, and the sound of insects rose up all at once from the irrigation ditches like a dirge to the vanquished day. A twinge in her abdomen reminded her it was the first day of her period—she reached in her pocket for another candy-coated Advil—

6 but also felt somehow connected to the pain of light leaving the sky, the orange globe and the streetlights siphoning up what was left, dividing the light's meager spoils. Her hair was short and blond and moussed back with something that made it hard and shiny and showed the toothmarks from the comb. She wore red lipstick, an oversized white dress shirt and cotton shorts with little lobsters printed on them, heavy black oxford shoes from

Salvation Army which still bore holes in their tongues from the industrial staples that had held the paper price tags. These clothes were wrong, all of her clothes were wrong, but she was doing the best she could on her small allowance, supplemented by thrilling bouts of shoplifting.

The Gordons' house was a tan brick split-level with mulberry siding. Inside were stark white drapes, beige carpet, and leather furniture. There was a sculpture above the fireplace in the living room, shards of colored metal woven together to resemble nothing

Rainey could recognize, but any kind of art in a house seemed cool to her, seemed to promise something beyond what was conventionally offered. She'd never seen abstract art in a house before, only in museums on field trips where kids would say I don't get it and laugh and run away. She didn't pretend to get it, but she liked being around it, some of it anyway. She didn't know whether to like the woven metal thing. Its colors were too cheerful, they seemed to belie the violence of its form. She found a beer in the crowded fridge and wandered around, nodding hello to boys, most of whom she didn't recognize and who didn't return her nod if they even noticed her doing it. Perhaps she was so awkward she appeared to have a tic in her neck and they were merely being polite in ignoring her. She actually had no idea. It was impossible to know the rules in a new

7 situation. Maybe it would always be impossible, as every situation would be new in its own way; her awkwardness would be continually refreshed. The boys she did not know dressed like the ones she did know, in long baggy shorts and t-shirts with the names of bands silkscreened on them in jagged letters: Meat Puppets, Suicidal Tendencies, Minor

Threat. That was maybe part of why it was disconcerting when they didn't acknowledge her, because they seemed so familiar. They must have either gone to neighboring middle schools or to the high school she would soon be entering. When she finally found the boys she did know and sat down next to Jason on the orange velour couch in the sunken rec room, little tablets of Advil and plastic-wrapped tampons spilled from her shallow pockets, an embarrassment of mauve. That these furtive items were the exact same color had not occurred to her before and she might have laughed out loud were she not so mortified. Tampoons! one boy shouted, and then in a loud whisper said, Look who’s not getting laid tonight. Everyone laughed then and Rainey laughed too. Hanging around boys she’d learned that if you didn’t laugh at a joke made at your expense, it meant you were a pussy. Could one have a pussy and not be a pussy? One could at least try.

Period or no period, she had gone to the party to have sex with Jason, to cross that off the list, but also in hopes of seeing Dmitri, who she was still in love with. She must have hoped Dmitri would try to talk her out of fucking Jason. Dmitri, her ex-boyfriend: dark hair; gaunt, slouching body; monosyllabic. Earlier that summer he had picked her up and carried her across a field just because she said she was tired; while in his arms she'd seen a shooting star over his shoulder. He lived in his mother’s basement—Rainey had met her once: a brittle-voiced Russian woman with peroxide blonde hair, a heavy gold

8 cross around her neck, and imploring, red-rimmed eyes which seemed to convey an utter bewilderment at the task of raising sons in America. Rainey had wanted to tell her Don’t worry, I’ll take over with this one. But Dmitri wasn’t hers anymore—had never been hers in any real sense and now really wasn't. She and Shella had traded boyfriends and there was no going back. This trade was the boys’ idea, and probably just a joke, but for some reason, instead of getting mad at them, Shella had accepted their proposal and so Rainey had gone along too. They made out with their new boyfriends on the spot to seal the deal, right on the corner by Fountain Square, in full view of the bank tellers and office managers leading the five o'clock exodus from the circle of towers ringing the plaza. It was exciting in a way, a wholly new experience, enacted in public like a ceremony or exchange of goods, but she couldn’t look at Shella or talk to her after that for the sharp jealousy she felt. She wasn't stupid. She knew why Dmitri wanted Shella, and why Jason wanted her. Shella was prettier than she was, more effusively feminine, with plush breasts and hips and a full cushiony mouth she made up to look like Marilyn Monroe, but Shella was a virgin and Rainey wasn't anymore. She had done it with two boys already, one in seventh grade and one in eighth, and everyone at school knew about it so there was no point in stopping now. To the boys it must have seemed an even trade. But Shella loved

Jason, in spite of his cruel mouth and bad skin and too-wide head—her motivation for the trade was sealed off behind some private hurt or calculation. Going along with things was something Rainey had always done, because it was easier than figuring out what she wanted and then asserting her own preferences, but now she wrapped a philosophy of stoic protest around her passivity. I'll show them, she thought, without knowing who they

9 were or what precisely she hoped to show. At first she had done things with boys out of love, intense feelings that made her heart beat fast and her palms ache, and later, when those feelings bled out, unmet, out of what could pass for a blank futility, but was not entirely without hope. At times she wanted to kill the hope, and at times she wanted to nurture it, protect it, but she didn't know exactly how to do either.

Now, sitting next to Jason who pressed his hard muscly thigh against hers and took a massive bong hit while the others cheered him on, she located Dmitri over his shoulder, in a far corner of the room, playing darts by himself. If only he would look at her! But the longer she looked at him the more intently he focused on the target in front of him. Darts flew from his hand and embedded themselves deep in the painted wooden bands encircling its center. He walked to the board to collect them and she knew he would see her when he turned, if he hadn't already, and she grew nervous. She shifted her focus to the boy next to her, putting her hands to Jason's ear at the same moment she felt

Dmitri's attention land on the two of them. She whispered in Jason's ear, You can still fuck me even though I'm on my period, and was surprised to find that just saying the word produced a corresponding throb in her groin. That moment, she would later realize, was what she had come for, to feel herself glowing and vital like the highest point of a triangle, and she would wish—also too late—that she could stretch the moment out to cover and diffuse all the moments that came after: Jason raising his eyebrows and leaning back into the sofa, watching her grow flushed, Dmitri turning away just as the bong was coming around again, Jason helping her with the elaborate process of taking her first bong hit, lighting the bowl while she fingered the carbs and drew on the chamber until it

10 was opaque with smoke, removing her fingers while he pulled out the slider and told her to suck it all in, to hold it, which she couldn't, looking up from the other side of her coughing fit to find Dmitri gone. When she realized he wasn't coming back all hopeful feeling drained out of her, and at the same time the effect of the pot crept in to fill the gaps between her cells, robbing the heat from her body and putting its weird gummy stamp everywhere she looked, from Jason's florid stump of a nose to the sophisticated weaponry of black track lighting overhead, the ironic stupidity of the disco ball turning underneath it. She grabbed the bottle that was going around the room, a bottle of Brass

Monkey, which was also the song that was playing on the stereo, a Beastie Boys song that had come out that year. It must have been a planned coincidence, which, from the tilting perch of her high, was impressive and pathetic at the same time. Drinking the booze from the song meant that they were somehow inside the song, with its lewd vocals and farting horn blasts. She determined to wrest a little beauty from the moment—if she could be inside a song she could be anywhere. The booze coating her throat tasted like suntan oil and orange rinds. The bottle was shaped like something a genie might escape from; it kept magically floating her way. But she was the only girl who’d shown up at the party, so it was only natural that the bottle should keep coming back to her.

She and Jason knelt on the floor of the master bedroom, their drunk bodies having sex with each other, doggie-style. She thought he was wearing a condom, but it might have just been that her own parts, and his part bouncing in and out of her, felt like rubber; she heard a faint squeaking noise, the product of their union, maybe, or something in the music downstairs coming up through the floor. The lights were on in the room, too bright.

11 Slowly she became aware of laughter in the hallway. No, not in the hallway, outside the window. Boys hung from the trees like monkeys—those funky monkeys!—peering in.

Jason stumbled over to shut the curtains and they went into the master bathroom, a chamber within a chamber like the vault at the bank. She crouched on the mat by the tub while he fucked her some more from behind. That position was good because it meant she didn't have to look at him and because it was something new to check off the list. She hadn't liked the view of her tits swinging under her like pink-tipped udders in the bright room with the other boys watching, and though now she forced herself to look instead at the springy bathmat under her fingers with its strange looping threads, she couldn't quite eject the first image from her mind. The bathmat was soft, expensive seeming. She wanted to lay her cheek on it. There was no logical stopping point to what was happening, no relief on the horizon. Jason was too drunk to come, and though her eyes burned and her throat felt raw, she was too numb to cry. Someone jimmied the lock and the bathroom door opened, spilling light onto the white tiles. Ugh, there’s blood on his dick, one boy shrieked. So then they could stop.

They ended up in another bedroom where Jason passed out cold for the rest of the night. Despite all the alcohol she'd consumed she wasn’t tired, and sat by the window waiting for dawn. The pot had worn off and for that she was grateful. She loved the middle of the night for its quiet, for the fact of being awake while others slept, it was like stealing time or being invisible, a bubble of freedom in the middle of a summer which was already so wide open it was a little scary. The only thing that detracted from her freedom was the knowledge that other people existed and time would move forward and

12 her future would not happen on its own—she would have to create it out of nothing, whatever it was. She would weave it out of scraps like the metal sculpture in the living room and have no reference point for knowing whether it was good or even whether she liked it or not. Outside the window and all across the suburbs, sprinklers turned on and performed their jerky clockwork—spit. spit. spit. whirrrrr—turning in place like mechanical birds. Worms struggled up for air from the soaked lawns, tried to wriggle outside the sprinklers' radii. The room she was in appeared to belong to a little boy. There were pictures of planets on the wall and a small wooden desk with a blotter and pencil holder and a wooden model of the solar system. A pair of twin beds were made up with

Star Wars bedspreads, a stuffed giraffe leaned against one of its pillows, the lone representative of Planet Earth in the room's decor. Jason slept on the other bed, still wearing his sneakers and a red bandana tied around his big shaved head. She wondered where the kid was whose bed he had passed out on.

Sometime during the long silence after the sprinklers shut off, a guy she'd never seen before came in, sat in the desk chair and started talking. He talked about cocaine, how he’d done so much of it he'd burned away his septum and needed an operation to reconstruct the tissues. Probably he was lying, Rainey thought. He was tall and sort of feminine with a gravelly voice, and a great flop of soft-looking auburn hair over his right eye. The rest of his hair was buzzed short, the way everyone wore it. She wondered briefly if he would want to be her boyfriend, but this boy seemed to exist on a plane beyond want. He bobbed above her on a cool glacial sadness. She wished there were a way she could touch his sadness, to drink from its pools without diminishing or

13 contaminating it. He was older than she was, but not much older, maybe 16.

You know, he said, looking out the window with her, the Nazis tried to march here once. His voice seemed to come from him and come from someplace far away at the same time.

What Nazis? she asked. You mean like World War Two?

No, sweetheart. Neo-Nazis, in the seventies. They couldn’t get a permit to march in their South Side neighborhood, so they threatened to take it here, to Skokie. You know, cos it has the highest count per capita of concentration camp survivors in the U.S.

She hadn’t known this, though she knew a lot of Jewish people lived in Skokie.

And what to make of sweetheart? Old ladies in grocery stores called her sweetheart, not young men with buzzed hair and burned out septums.

Can you imagine, he said—it wasn’t a question—growing up in a death camp, seeing your parents hauled away and turned into soap or whatever, then somehow getting free, making it across the ocean and ending up in this shitty boring little place that at least felt safe, and then some American pricks who weren’t even born yet when the war ended want to dress up in their SS uniforms like it’s Halloween and march past your house? His faraway voice swirled around her and out the window. He didn't need to know what she thought; he was just talking.

Jesus, she said, and he laughed.

Jesus has left the building, he said. And then, The Jews killed Jesus! He laughed again, but not exactly as if he were laughing at her.

She tried to imagine it: men in black boots and swastika armbands filling the quiet

14 street, passing the 7-11 where the proprietor wore a white turban, goose-stepping and

Heil-ing Hitler in choreographed perfection like in the movies, while tiny shriveled men in yarmulkes peered out silently from their blue-draped windows. It was hard to believe that could happen here, and anyway, it didn’t, the floppy-haired boy told her. The Nazis got their permit to march in their own neighborhood, Marquette Park, a place she’d never heard of.

He continued talking, managing to transition somehow from the Nazis to his parents, who were considering having him locked up. You know they still give shock treatments in those places, he told her. They give you a piece of rubber tubing to bite down on. Though he talked about himself now, his voice stayed oddly detached, drifting around the room like an ice floe, broken off from but not diminishing his essential sadness. She wondered how he did it. He was not emotionless. It wasn't that at all. It was as if he only let melt what he knew he could refreeze. He played with the wooden model as he talked, spinning the planets faster and faster around the pencil yellow sun. Rainey let her attention drift. She was thinking about the survivors of concentration camps living right here in this town next to the town she grew up in, and how that was sort of interesting. When they’d studied the Holocaust in school, she and Shella had written numbers on each other’s arms in ball-point pen. They were convinced that they suffered more than other people and had talked about starving themselves and shaving their heads to put their suffering in people's faces. They had wanted to do this to stand out against the background of cheerleaders and Seventeen magazine covers, to make their unhappiness visible, to register their disdain for what they were supposed to want, and even and

15 maybe especially their disdain for what they did want, but the people who'd actually gone through that collective suffering—now the world's benchmark for measuring all suffering

—and had survived it just wanted to fit in somewhere and be normal, boring, dull. Rainey had cut her hair short, and shaved it on the sides, but wouldn't go any further without

Shella doing it too, and Shella had chickened out entirely and left her own hair long and untouched and shining.

Anyway, the boy said before floating out of the room, I think I’m going to kill myself. You take care now. His breezy threat was nothing she hadn’t heard before. Girls said it all the time. She was a little annoyed he hadn’t asked her a thing about herself.

Maybe that was the cocaine talking.

The rest of the night she was vaguely aware of voices outside the room, of people trying to come in, drunk and insisting and belligerent, and of a voice she didn’t recognize stopping them from doing so. In the morning she learned that an old friend of Jason’s, a guy named Hank from a neighboring school, had appointed himself as guardian of her dubious honor. It was Digby who told her, a sweet kid with a harelip and glasses who always wore a newsboy cap, and was constantly ridiculed but functioned within the group as sort of a mascot. According to Digby, if Hank hadn’t been there, she might have been raped all night long next to Jason’s passed out body. Is that right, she deadpanned, but she was impressed. So rape would not be checked off the list just yet. She wanted to shake this guy Hank’s hand upon hearing the news. As much as she disliked Jason, the idea that he had a friend with a sense of honor or duty was appealing to her, even if he had done it for Jason's sake, not hers.

16 It was around noon on Sunday when everyone who’d stayed the night at the party left Adam Gordon’s house. The air was hot and still and fragrant with acacia blossoms and baking asphalt, and Rainey could hear the church bells of her town ringing on the other side of the canal. A group of boys—Jason, Hank, Digby, Alex, Stork, and Billy— had walked her to the bus stop and were preparing to leave her there and ride off on their boards. Buses ran once an hour on Sundays if they ran at all. She must have suspected she was a joke to those boys, and a dirty one at that. The boys who pretended to be her friends were no different from the ones who’d climbed the trees in the back yard to partake of her humiliation, a humiliation that tried its best to follow her into high school that fall, and that she tried to dissipate by sheer force of will. It was her yardstick, in a way. If you had heard the rumors, if you knew what she was and didn't care, or even admired her for it, for enduring it, you could be her friend. What was it that she even was? A girl trying to turn herself to stone? Where was the shame in that? Stones were noble, mineral, elemental. She had aimed her body for a place beyond shame, where sadness wasn't just recognized but holy and revered. So why did she feel her obscene parts poking red and hot through her clothes when those skaters coughed “whore” under their breath in the corridor at school? The boy who came into the room that night—Adam

Gordon, it turned out—did end up killing himself, hanging himself in his parents' living room, where she had once stood looking at art; the rumor that went around high school was that he'd been a homo; no wonder he hadn't been interested in her.

She held her hand out to Hank under the scorching hot metal of the bus shelter, in full view of the other boys, offering to turn what he’d reportedly done into an act of

17 grace, hoping he might see what was at stake and, through the simplest of gestures, make her human again. Hank was like a better-looking version of Jason, taller, lankier, and without the acne eruptions on his cheeks, though there were some scars among the fine blond stubble of his beard. He wore a black bandana tied in the same fashion as Jason's red one. It was clear to her that Jason had copied his look rather than the other way around. He looked at her hand, this boy Hank who’d sat outside her door playing hero, and a look of flustered horror spread across his face, followed almost immediately by an amused smirk. He shook her hand once as if wiping something on a rag, not looking at her face. Then he harnessed his features, hopped on his board, and rode away. The rest of the boys followed suit, a few of them waving goodbye. Jason kissed her cheek and said,

I'll call you, and then he rode off too. So it had nothing to do with her, what that boy had done.

The bus came sooner than it might have, and she stepped into its air-conditioned darkness and sat near the back. It wasn't long before it caught up with the pack of boys on their skateboards, weaving from street to sidewalk and back again in random but elegant patterns, like a river current snagging around obstacles like rocks or branches but always and inevitably rejoining the same flowing mass of water. For a few blocks they kept pace with the bus without a thought that she might be watching from its darkened windows.

Probably they'd left any thoughts of her behind entirely, back at the bus stop, and she was able to watch them the way a mother might, or some disinterested stranger. It was invigorating to move among them like that, unseen and unknown. She saw Hank yell something to Jason, and watched Jason's face break out in a wide smile that transformed

18 his features into something goofy and angelic, a cartoon of glee, and she knew that was the face Shella loved, and felt a pang of longing for her friend who might never be her friend again, though it wasn't clear to her who had sacrificed who or for what.

Where was Dmitri? He was probably at home watching his little brother while their mother was at church, praying for a good man to come along who could be like a father to them, when really she wanted him for herself. People lied even in their prayers, prayer itself was a lie, the idea that anyone listened or cared too preposterous to contemplate, and yet it was true that the habit of longing, of saying please, give me this, was hard to break. The thing to do would be to make yourself the prayer on everybody's lips, the way Shella had, or at the very least to be your own prayer. Rainey knew she would never have been able to watch Dmitri laughing and goofing off through the window without wanting to slam her skull against the shatterproof glass, could never detach herself from what she felt if the feelings were that strong. But she could choose situations and people about whom she felt very little, and maybe that would protect her.

She couldn't bring herself to hate Dmitri for leaving last night, though she wished he had at least spoken to her. Not that it would have changed her course but she would have known that he cared, even a little bit. Though perhaps Dmitri in conversation with the dartboard was at his most eloquent, his unspoken love for her and—why not—his rage at losing her shooting from his hands in tight, controlled explosions. She watched Jason stealthily ride up alongside Digby and snatch the wool cap from his head. It was ridiculous that he wore it all the time, even in summer. It invited ridicule, but she understood his need to wear it anyway. The need to have some sort of identity, however

19 dangerous or reviled. The boys tossed it around for a while and then it fell in the gutter and Digby fell behind to retrieve it and then struggled to catch back up. She thought again of the floppy-haired boy’s story. Not his personal story, which, even if it were true, was too close to her own to be of much interest. She thought about the Nazis from

Marquette Park, and decided that in spite of the trouble they’d caused, or wanted to cause, they probably weren’t real Nazis at all. They were probably just boys, doing what boys do.

The bus sped up to make it through a stoplight, crossing the bridge over the canal, leaving the pack of skaters behind, and Rainey kept her eyes looking forward at the trees and at the metal signs for streets named after trees, some of which she knew from having climbed as a child, or from collecting their seed pods to suck on or stomp open, or their petals to make perfume that only ever stunk of rot when she opened the jars, or from peeling off their bark to touch the tender naked skin, and some of which were only words that stood for trees she could not picture and might one day know or if she never knew, whose names would forever remain the names of streets in a town she'd once grown up in. Then the words themselves if not the trees lost their meaning and fell apart into letters and then the letters too became just shapes, some open, some closed. She leaned into the hard backrest and softened her eyes—finally, she was tired—and the trees became a blurred green tunnel she entered, emerging into sleep.

20