"Get into bed."

The sheets were smooth. There was a clean case on the pillow. She climbed in and lay down, shutting her eyes against the dawn light that creeped under the window shade. "What time is it?"

"About six."

"It's a school day. You're tired out."

Erika said gravely, "I'm sick in bed. Sinus."

"They'll dock you."

"I can't help it."

"I'm poison to everybody I ever loved," Kate said. She started to cry. "Go away before I hurt you badly."

Erika said in a low, harsh whisper, "If you don't shut up I'll hit you on the mouth."

Kate was shocked into a moment's silence. Then she said shakily, "I'm only thinking about you."

"You're only thinking about yourself. All drunks are selfish."

"That isn't fair."

Erika didn't answer. She sat down in the black mesh chair, picked up the blouse she had been mending the evening before, and began to run the needle through a ripped cuff. Kate, who had no knack for small housewifely chores, lay watching her. Erika did everything deftly and well, no matter how tired or busy she was. Her room was always neat, her shoes were polished, she washed out her stockings and underclothes every night and hung them on plastic hangers to dry as though these little chores had some special virtue. There was something appealing about all this domesticity in a girl who looked like a boy.

"What are you thinking about?"

"Erika, did you ever want to die?"

"Of course... many times. The first time a man did something to me—but then it was a lot of men. One wouldn't have been so bad, maybe."

Kate's heavy eyes flew open. She had never though about Erika in connection with men.

"I was twelve years old," Erika said quietly. Slightly far-sighted, she held the needle away from her eyes and drew thread through the eye and knotted it. "It was soon after they took me to the camp. It was almost the first thing that I can really remember, I don't know how I got to the camp in the first place or what happened, I was a little bit crazy, we were all a little bit crazy. We didn't get much to eat for a long time."

The needle flashed in and out through the thin material.

"They killed the old people and the children. Not always right away, but sooner or later. They ate too much and they couldn't work so hard. The young men went into labor battalions, many to Germany. They took the pretty girls to the places for officers—you know, where they went when they wanted women. The ugly ones they killed after the soldiers had them. I was twelve, with my hair in braids, but already I was starting to grow up a little—"

"Me too," Kate said in a whisper, "I was thirteen. Go on, what happened?"

She was still for a moment, holding her needle. Then she went on as though having started to tell her story, she was under some compulsion to finish. "They took me to the guard room for questioning. Of course they did that all the time, it amused them to see us suffer. Some never came back. Not all the soldiers were bad, some were decent men who had to serve in the army, like soldiers everywhere—but the bad ones ran the camps. You have to be hard to do such things—"