“So you and Flopsy?” asked Troll Doll. “I saw you dancing together. You like her?”
Lucky shrugged, which was, perhaps, becoming her signature move.
“Don’t know her,” she said.
They were leaning on a pink marble sink with a golden faucet. The walls were pink, too, the color of the inside of a throat. Outside, the bass boomed steadily. All around them glittering mirrors reflected their faces back at them in an infinite loop.
“I wish I looked like you,” said Troll Doll suddenly. “Really badly. Like, I’d kill someone to look like you. Not anyone important or good or anything. But some normal-to-bad man? I’d definitely murder him just to have your face. Or your stomach. Your belly button is so sexy, it looks like a cat’s eye.”
Lucky looked down at her bare torso. At some point in the last hour, she had thrown off her shirt and let someone smear her nipples with black, glittering Xs.
“Does it?” she asked blearily.
“But I mean, how fucked-up is that? About the killing-someone part?”
“Pretty fucked-up,” acknowledged Lucky. She proffered a loaded key toward Troll Doll. “This is you.”
Troll Doll narrowed her eyes at Lucky.
“You don’t even care.”
“No, I do,” said Lucky unconvincingly.
“Do you want to kiss me, yah?”
She hopped off the counter and launched onto Lucky. Lucky let the stylist suck on her mouth hungrily; it felt like having a small koala bear clinging to her front. What did it matter? She opened her eyes and saw a hundred different versions of them locked in a repeated embrace.
“Let’s go back out,” she said eventually. “Find your friends.”
“I don’t care about them,” whispered Troll Doll breathlessly, but Lucky was already sliding out the door.
Sniff of coke. Bump of ket. Get a drink. Have a smoke. Sniffy cokey. Bump o’ keto. Getta drinka. Hava smoke. Shniffml coke. Bumpbumpket. Getaaaa dreeenk. Hashasnoke…The room was bending, the walls relaxing to a wompy softness. Lucky lost track of where her body ended and everyone else’s began. The floor kept giving way beneath her like a bouncy castle. Everything was hilarious and mushy and deeply synergistic. She was moving to the music in a way that was both intricate and reflective, and profoundly, purely carnal. She felt like she knew what every note was going to be before it hit. She was in the moment and just a few seconds ahead. Her hands felt huge.
Now she was in the bathroom with the old Lord and his very young friend, a tiny woman wearing golden nipple tassels. Now she was in a private side room where every surface was velvet. She was kissing a tall guy wearing a pair of angel wings. His tongue tasted like lime. Now he was guiding her face toward another girl’s, a redhead covered in glitter who looked like a strawberry but tasted like cigarettes and Red Bull. Now the man was kissing them both. It felt good, Lucky guessed, or at least not bad. It felt better than nothing. Actually, it would be better to feel nothing—to be nothing. That’s what Lucky wanted most, to find a nick in the fabric of the room, tear it open, and disappear into the black hole behind it.
She snorted something, she wasn’t sure what, off the back of the hand of a woman dressed as Sailor Moon, then she was back on the dance floor. She’d lost everyone, Troll Doll, Flopsy, Rupes, Angel Wings, Strawberry Glitter, the lot. She was falling forward, the palms of her hands kissing the sticky vinyl floor. She was bouncing back up. She was all good, guys, all good. Among the crowd of bodies, a huge smiling man was making his way toward her. People parted around him like drops of oil in water. He was bald as a baby, wide as a horizon, tall as a cathedral. He was a massive, massive man.
“Lucky,” he said, coming toward her. “You’re Lucky.”
Lucky couldn’t stop nodding. Her whole body was juddering. She was dancing, she was falling, she was shaking, she was shedding herself.
“I know your sister,” he said.
“Avery?” Lucky mumbled, her head vibrating from side to side. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see black splotches of light haloed in yellow like sunflowers. She opened her eyes again and his face was huge above her.
“Nicky’s baby.” He beamed down at her. “You’re Nicky’s baby.”
“You knew Nicky?” she tried to ask, but found she could no longer speak.
Lucky grabbed his shoulders and hung the weight of her body from him. He was wearing a plastic tag that said security. Security, she had never had any security, she thought. He looked down at her and his face blocked out all others. He was the night sky. He was the moon. He was a disco ball reflecting back a thousand versions of herself. She was refracting like light in his gaze. She was a million little particles falling all over the dance floor. She was the air the dancers inhaled. She was the music moving on that air. She was thump, thump, thumping. The man smiled down at her with his ginormous, friendly face. Rays of light were shooting out of his head. His smile was a thousand suns. He was the eclipse.
“You’ll always be Nicky’s baby,” he boomed. His words popped against her skin like bubbles.
Lucky didn’t remember letting him go. She didn’t remember falling down. She didn’t remember wrapping a white feather boa around her bare chest; it would leave tiny red scratches all over her breasts for her to find the next morning. She didn’t remember hailing the black cab, tumbling headfirst onto its floor as it stopped outside the quiet Hampstead house, the driver pressing his body to hers, the pinch of his hands on her chest as he carried her out, the relief of him driving off without doing more. She didn’t remember crawling up the steps and slumping on the bristled doormat, unable to scrape her key into the lock. She didn’t remember looking up to find Avery silhouetted in a rectangle of light above her or being carried into the house and up the stairs, one arm slung around her sister’s neck. She didn’t remember crumpling, still partially dressed, into the empty bathtub, nor did she remember Avery turning on the shower, the wet feathers dislocating from her body and clogging the drain.
The next thing she did remember was Avery’s face above her, a curtain of her wet hair swinging as she straddled her in the tub, shaking her awake. A steady stream of water beat down on them. Avery’s face was contorted with effort as she dragged Lucky back to consciousness. She looked like their mother. Lucky tried to say this, but she found she couldn’t speak. Avery was saying something over and over again that she could barely make out over the water, over the ringing in her ears. It sounded like, Not you. Not you too. Not you.
Chapter Five Bonnie
Bonnie was at home lying on her mattress on the floor when she heard the knock at the door. She crouched down and shuffled from the bedroom to the living room silently. Her heart was hammering. She’d spent the last twenty-four hours cycling through periods of frenzied activity and total inertia, manically working out to the point of paralyzing physical exhaustion, then falling into periods of shallow, fitful sleep at odd hours. She’d left her apartment at night to walk the beach alone, following the dark curve of the coast up to Santa Monica Pier, then turning back to retrace her steps several miles to the Marina. The beaches late at night were empty but for the people who lived on them, shadowy figures crouched outside of tents murmuring to each other, their faces illuminated briefly by a flared match or dimly lit phone. Bonnie moved soundlessly past them until she was at the water’s edge, the cold water lapping at her bare feet. There, it was quiet. There, she could walk and think undisturbed. When the sky lightened and the first surfers began to dot the shore, she returned home. She had not seen or spoken to anyone since the attack.
Bonnie looked through the peephole and saw Peachy’s freckled face pressed against the hole, attempting to peer in. Without a word, she cracked the door. He spread his arms to her.
“You don’t call, you don’t write. You playin’ hard to get with me?”
Bonnie ducked her head.
“Come on in, Peachy.”
He walked into the living room and looked at the bare floors, single beach chair, and bags of empty take-out containers.
“Wow, I like what you’ve done with the place. Minimalist.”
“Really?”
“Fuck no! This looks like where a murderer takes his victims to dismember them. By the way, you don’t do that, do you? Hired takeouts and the like?”
Bonnie gave him a look of such genuine anguish, he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly.
