– She’s got a dick.
She frowns.
– Huh?
– Last I heard, Sela was pre-op. She’s got a dick.
She shakes her head. -
I put a cigarette in my mouth.
– Christ if I know.
She watches while I light up and take a drag and blow smoke. She watches while I do that, while I stand there and itch all over from the need to get the hell out and do something for Evie and try not to look like I’ve got a care. She watches until there’s a long ash hanging from the end of the cigarette and I’m looking for a tray.
She smiles and points at a low table next to an Eames chair and ottoman.
– Over there.
I walk over, my hand cupped below the ash, and knock it into the silver tray on the table and stand there and smoke some more.
She points.
– Can I have one of those?
I dig the pack from my pocket and shake a smoke out and toss it to her. She catches it and places it in her mouth and walks down the room until she’s right in front of me.
– Light?
I snap the Zippo in front of her.
She places the tips of her fingers on the back of my hand, guiding the flame closer to her, the unbuttoned cuff of her long-sleeve blouse sliding up her forearm and revealing the lone silver bracelet torn from a pair of handcuffs locked around her right wrist.
Her eyes flick from the bracelet and the few links of dangling chain to my eyes and she catches me looking at the cuff, remembering how it got there.
She gives a little smile, like she’s just scored a point, and she draws on the filterless Lucky, and immediately starts hacking.
She doubles, choking and heaving, holding the smoke out at arm’s length.
I pluck it from her fingers and put it in my face as I cross to the bar and pour a glass of ice water from a crystal pitcher and bring it back to her.
I hold it out and she shakes her head, tears steaming down her cheeks, huge phlegmmy hacks shuddering her little body. I push the glass against her lips and tilt it up and she’s forced to open her mouth and swallow, half of it running down her chin. The coughs subside into little hiccups and she knocks my hand aside. I take the glass to the bar and set it there and watch while she wipes her running mascara with the tails of her top.
I drop the cigarette in my hand into the water at the bottom of the glass and pluck the one she started on from between my lips and tally her score.
– You almost had it down, you know.
She looks up at me, the makeup smeared from her face, the teenager beneath it revealed.
– Had what down?
– Your mom’s act.
She stops wiping her face, walks around me behind the bar, drops a couple ice cubes in a glass, pours some kind of triple-distilled boutique vodka from Romania or someplace over it, and tosses the drink down her throat and pours another.
I smoke the cigarette I took from her mouth.
– See, that’s not bad. You got the drinking down pretty good. Except your mom probably wouldn’t have bothered with the ice. But you’re what, seventeen? So you got time to develop. Another twenty years and you’ll be a perfect Upper East Side white trash burnout with a real grown-up booze jones, a trophy husband, a stable of gigolos, and a perfect ass.
She sips her second drink, her breath raising mist from the ice.
– And when I’m just like my mom, will you kill me just like you killed her?
I take a drag. Taste her lipstick. Remember her mother’s kiss.
I drop the butt in the bar sink.
– One other difference, she would have offered me a drink.
She finishes her own and puts the glass on the bar.
– Well, like you said.
She starts for the door at the far end of the room, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes.
– I’m not her. Get your own drink. I’m gonna go change.
– I won’t be here when you get back.
She stops at the door and drops her blouse on the floor.
– Now who’s pretending, Joseph? I mean, of course you’ll be here. You just can’t wait to hear why I had Sela bring you up here. And to see how I’ve grown up.
And so Amanda Horde goes out of the room smiling, wearing thousand-dollar jeans, a scrap of black lace, and the handcuff I once took from my own wrist and put on hers.
Damn me. Damn me if she isn’t right.
Yeah, I killed her mom.
Sort of.
Mostly she was dead before I broke her neck. Mostly she was infected with a bacteria that was turning her into something. Something you can call a zombie. For lack of a better word that describes something that goes around eating people’s brains. Mostly she wanted to die. Afraid as she was that if she was around much longer she’d eat her own kid.
Far as I’m concerned, parents eating their kids sounds like more of the same. Doesn’t mean I want to watch it happen or anything. Killing the woman just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The right thing, or the best option.
But she did ask me to do it.
And she did kiss me.
It was a complicated night.
Think about a night like that often enough, you’ll ask a lot of questions. Most of them about yourself. The kind of person you are. What you’ll do and why and when you’ll do it. What you believe in. What you really believe in.
In the movies, a vampire can’t see himself in a mirror. Just because I can, that don’t mean I got to like looking. What’s inside is inside for a reason. Because you’re not supposed to see it.
The girl, she’s a girl. A kid. She doesn’t know any better. And I know fuckall about what she really wants because she’s a teenage girl and who the hell knows what goes through her mind. Figure she wants everything. She wants to see everything the world has to offer. And being a rich kid, she wants to
Ah, youth.
I make myself a drink. She comes back after I’ve made a couple more.
– Sela can’t get drunk.
I watch her come to the bar; she’s kept the jeans, pulled on a tight pink tuxedo shirt with ruffles down the front, reapplied the makeup, and resprayed her retro-80s-rocker-grrl-shag cut.
I top off my bourbon and cross to the windows and look down at Park Avenue.
– Then she’s not trying.
Amanda laughs. -
– We can all get drunk. We just have to work real hard at it. Get enough booze in the system before the Vyrus
