the floor in a sprinkling of pills and capsules and tablets.
“He’s her half-brother,” Brandy calls back.
The doorknob rattles. “You have to help me,” Parker says.
“Stop right there, Mr. Parker!” Brandy shouts and the doorknob stops turning. “Calm yourself. Do not come in here,” Brandy says. “What you need to do …” Brandy looks at me while she says this. “What you need to do is pin Ellis to the floor so he doesn’t hurt himself. I’ll be down in a moment.”
Brandy looks at me and smiles her Plumbago lips into a big bow. “Parker?” she says. “Are you listening?”
“Please, hurry,” comes through the door.
“After you have Ellis pinned to the floor,” Brandy says, “wedge his mouth open with something. Do you have a wallet?”
There’s a moment.
“It’s eel skin, Miss Alexander.”
“Then you must be very proud of it,” says Brandy. “You’re going to have to jam it between his teeth to keep his mouth open. Sit on him if you have to.” Brandy, she’s just smiling evil incarnate at my feet.
The shatter of some real lead crystal comes through the door from downstairs.
“Hurry!” Parker shouts. “He’s breaking things!”
Brandy licks her lips. “After you have his mouth pried open, Parker, reach in and grab his tongue. If you don’t, he’ll choke, and then you’ll be sitting on a dead body.”
Silence.
“Do you hear me?” Brandy says.
“Grab his tongue?”
Something else real and expensive and far away shatters.
“Mr. Parker, honey, I hope you’re bonded,” the Princess Alexander says, her face all bloated red with choking back laughter. “Yes,” she says, “grab Ellis’s tongue. Pin him to the floor, keep his mouth open, and pull his tongue out as far as you can until I come down to help you.”
The doorknob turns.
My veils are all on the vanity counter out of my reach.
The door opens far enough to hit the high-heeled foot of Brandy, sprawled giggling and half full of Valiums, there half naked in drugs on the floor. This is far enough for me to see Parker’s face with its one grown-together eyebrow, and far enough for the face to see me sitting on the toilet.
Brandy screams, “I am attending to Miss Arden Scotia!”
Given the choice between grabbing a strange tongue and watching a monster poop into a giant snail shell, the face retreats and slams the door behind it.
Football scholarship footsteps charge off down the hallway.
Then pound down the stairs.
The big tooth that Parker is, his footsteps pound across the foyer to the living room.
Ellis’s scream, real and sudden and far away, comes through the floor from downstairs. And, suddenly, stops.
“Now,” says Brandy, “where were we?”
She lies back down with her head between my feet.
“Have you thought any more about plastic surgery?” Brandy says. Then she says, “Hit me.”
Chapter 12
bout plastic surgery, I spent a whole summer as property of La Paloma Memorial Hospital looking into what plastic surgery could do for me.
There were plastic surgeons, a lot of them, and there were the books the surgeons brought. With pictures. The pictures I saw were black-and-white, thank You, God, and the surgeons told me how after years of pain I might look.
Almost all plastic surgery starts with something called
This will get gruesome. Even here in black-and-white.
For all I learned, I could be a doctor.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
Manus once said that your folks are God. You love them and want to make them happy, but you still want to make up your own rules.
The surgeons said, you can’t just cut off a lump of skin one place and bandage it on another. You’re not grafting a tree. The blood supply, the veins and capillaries, just wouldn’t be hooked up to keep the graft alive. The lump would just die and fall off.
It’s scary, but now when I see somebody blush, my reaction isn’t: Oh, how cute. A blush only reminds me how blood is just under the surface of everything.
Doing dermabrasion, this one plastic surgeon told me, is about the same as pressing a ripe tomato against a belt sander. What you’re paying for most is the mess.
To relocate a piece of skin, to rebuild a jaw, you have to flay a long strip of skin from your neck. Cut up from the base of your neck, but don’t sever the skin at the top.
Picture a sort of banner or strip of skin hanging down loose along your neck but still attached to the bottom of your face. The skin is still attached to you, so it still gets blood. This strip of skin is still alive. Take the strip of skin and roll it into a tube or column. Leave it rolled until it heals into a long, dangling lump of flesh, hanging from the bottom of your face. Living tissue. Full of fresh, healthy blood, flapping and dangling warm against your neck. This is a pedicle.
Just the healing part, that can take months.
Jump backward to the red Fiat with Brandy behind her sunglasses and Manus locked in the trunk, and Brandy drives us to the top of Rocky Butte, the hilltop ruins of some lookout fort where if this weren’t a school night kids from Parkrose and Grant and Madison high schools would be breaking beer bottles and enjoying unsafe sex up here in the old ruins.
Friday nights, this hilltop would be full of kids saying:
The ruins are just a few layers of stone blocks still on top of each other. Inside the ruins, the ground is flat and rocky, covered with broken glass and coarse orchard grass. Around us, in all directions except the road coming up, the sides of Rocky Butte are cliffs rising from the dot-to-dot streetlight grid.
You could choke on the silence.
What we need is a place to stay. Until I figure out what’s next. Until we can come up with some money. We have two, maybe three days until Evie gets home and we have to be gone. Then I figure I’ll just call Evie and blackmail her.
Evie owes me big.
I can get away with this.
Brandy races the Fiat into the darkest part of the ruins, then she kills the headlights and hits the brakes. Brandy and me, we stop so fast only our seat belts keep us off the dashboard.
Clatter and tintinnabulation of ringing metal against metal chimes and gongs in the car around us.
“Sorry, I guess,” Brandy says. “There’s shit on the floor, got under the brake pedal when I tried to stop.”
Music bright as silver rolls out from under our car seats. Napkin rings and silver teaspoons rush forward against our feet. Brandy’s got candlesticks between her feet. A silver platter bright with starlight is slid half out from under the front of Brandy’s seat, looking up between her long legs.
Brandy looks at me. Her chin tucked down, Brandy lowers her Ray-Bans to the end of her nose and arches her
