hired some kind of children's book illustrator, some wallpaper designer. They probably thought our art would be too ugly, too upsetting. They didn't know, most of the kids would have done exactly what the hall artist did. Peaceable kingdoms in which nothing bad ever happened. Soaring eagles and playful lions and African nymphs carrying water, flowers without sexual parts.
'This is the fourth time I've been here,' Paul Trout said.
It was why I'd never seen him except in the art room. If you came back on purpose, ran away from your placement, you lost your privileges, your coed nights. But I understood why they came back. It wasn't that bad here at Mac. If it weren't for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn't have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell- block or psych ward. They could paint the halls all they wanted, the nightmare was still real. No matter how green the lawn or bright the hallway murals or how good the art was on the twelve-foot perimeter wall, no matter how kind the cottage teams and the caseworkers were, how many celebrity barbecues they had or swimming pools they put in, it was still the last resort for children damaged in so many ways, it was miraculous we could still sit down to dinner, laugh at TV, drop into sleep.
Paul Trout wasn't the only returnee. There were lots of them. It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way.
'You cut off your hair,' he said. 'Why'd you do that? It was pretty.'
'Attracted attention,' I said.
'I thought girls liked that.'
I smiled, felt the bitter aftertaste in my mouth. This boy might know a lot about cruelty and waste, but he didn't know a thing about beauty. How could he? He was used to that skin, people turning away, not seeing the fire in his lucid brown eyes. I could tell, he imagined beauty, attention, would feel like love.
'Sometimes it hurts more than it helps,' I said.
'You're beautiful anyway,' he said, going back to his drawing. 'There's not much you can do about that.'
I painted Claire's dark hair, layering blue and then brown, blending in the highlights, catching the red. 'It doesn't mean anything. Only to other people.'
'You say that like it's nothing.'
'It is.' What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
'You've never been ugly.' The boy looked down at his hand filling the blank spaces in a science fiction scene. 'Women treat you like you're a disease they might catch. And if in a weak moment they let you touch them, they make you pay.' His mouth closed, then opened to say more, but closed without saying a word. He'd said too much. His mouth turned down. 'Someone like you, you wouldn't let me touch you, would you.'
Where did he get the idea he was ugly? Bad skin could happen to anyone. 'I don't let anyone touch me,' I finally said.
I painted in the pharmacy jar of butabarbitol sodium on the rag rug by her bed, the tiny pills spilling out. Bright pink against the dark rug.
'Why not?'
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.
Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.
Because I could still see a woman in a red bathrobe crawling in the street. A woman on a roof in the wind, mute and strange. Women with pills, with knives, women dyeing their hair. Women painting doorknobs with poison for love, making dinners too large to eat, firing into a child's room at close range. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.
I painted a mirror on the wall opposite Claire's dresser where there was no mirror, and in the red-tinted darkness, my own staring image, with long pale hair, in the crimson velvet Christmas dress I never got a chance to wear. The me that died with her. I painted a crimson ribbon around my neck. It made my neck look slashed.
'Are you gay?' Paul Trout asked me.
I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn't know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific — chair, eye, stone — but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out. I thought of my mother's lovers, Jeremy and Jesus and Mark, narrow-waisted young men with clear eyes and voices like slipper satin across your bare chest. I thought how beautiful Claire was, dancing in her own living room, jete, pas de bouree, how I loved her. I looked up at him, 'Does it matter?'
'Doesn't anything matter to you?'
'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.'
'That's not much.'
I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that.'
WE WALKED the Big Field together when he got his privileges back. The girls called him my boyfriend, but it was just another word, it didn't quite capture the truth. Paul Trout was the only person I'd met there I could talk to. He wanted to see me on the outside, asked for an address, a phone number, someplace he could reach me, but I didn't know where I'd be, and I couldn't trust my mother to forward anything. Anyway, I'd decided not to give her my new address. I didn't want anything more to do with her. He gave me the name of a comic book shop in Hollywood, said he'd check there, wherever he was. 'Just mark the letters Hold for Paul Trout.'
