Just give me my first opportunity.
Flash.
Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, “Do you know what the Benjamin Standards guidelines are?”
Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, “I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training.”
Brandy pulls out into the street and we’re almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.
There’s a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There’s still Manus in the trunk, and we’re already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.
Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.
Arson, kidnapping, I think I’m up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.
“I’ve got eight months left to my RLT year,” Brandy says. “Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”
Chapter 33
ump to the moment around one o’clock in the morning in Evie’s big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.
Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and say:
You know that Evie’s wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie’s trying to figure out if there’s a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I’m stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie’s supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It’s not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.
But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.
I’m an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.
Evie slept with my fiance, so now I can do anything to her.
In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible …? Like go into the guy’s locker room at Gold’s Gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany’s and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.
Just by his being so dumb, Manus could’ve stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.
My dad, he’d go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn’t get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I’m the cadaver.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
Evie would be right next to my mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would’ve found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can’t get away from the open casket fast enough, and I’m lying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I’m wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.
And red high heels. And no jawbone.
Of course, Evie says to my mom: “She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite.” Sensitive Evie would say, “Guess this makes you oh for two.”
I could kill Evie.
I would pay snakes to bite her.
Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too-green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.
I hate Evie.
Me, I’m rotting with my blood pumped out in this slutty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn’t fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.
I look like shit, dead.
I look like dead shit.
I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.
No, really, I’d tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie’s urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.
Me, at Evie’s funeral, I’d be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather minidress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I’d sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary’s big black Caddy, and I’d have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.
Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.
Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There’s a smash with cigarettes and matches everywhere.
Bourgeois dead girl that I am, I wish all of the sudden I hadn’t done this, and I kneel down and start to pick up the mess. The glass and cigarettes. Only Evie …a cigarette box. It’s just so
And matches.
A little tug hits my finger, and I’m cut on a shard so thin and clear it’s invisible.
Oh, this is dazzling.
Only when the blood comes out to outline the shard in red, only then can I see what cut me. It’s my blood on the broken glass I pull out. My blood on a book of matches.
No, Mrs. Cottrell. No, really, Evie wanted to be cremated.
I get up out of my mess, and run around leaving blood on every light switch and lamp, turning them all off. I run past the coat closet, and Manus calls, “Please,” but what I have in mind is too exciting.
I turn out all the first-floor lights, and Manus calls. He has to go to the bathroom, he calls. “Please.”
Evie’s big plantation house with its big pillars in front is all the way dark as I feel my way back to the dining room. I can feel the doorframe and count ten slow, blind footsteps across the Oriental carpet to the dining room table with its lace tablecloth.
I light a match. I light one of the candles in the big silver candelabra.
Okay, it’s so Gothic Novel, but I light all five candles in the silver candelabra so heavy it takes both hands for me to lift.
