“Most of the time everything’s okay, but once in a while I have this feeling…” Delicately she peeled a flake of skin from her forearm and examined it minutely. “And my father—he’s kind of weird. It’s hard to explain.”

“You don’t have to. My father was kind of weird too.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, not listening. “I don’t know. All I know, every time I do something he just like stares at me. So I do nothing.”

“Don’t you think it’s obvious why she…?”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“Isn’t it obvious to your father?”

She shrugged, tracing a finger through the dust on a book jacket.

“I mean like when she chose to do it. The fiftieth anniversary of the bomb drop on Hiroshima. And then just after the Twin Towers fell…”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She snapped the flashlight off and on again, off and on. Little orange-red flares tailed across my retina. She went a bit out of focus, as without another word she stepped over the books she had so assiduously collected and disappeared down the ladder.

TWELVE
THE PRINCE

I hung in there, lurking you might say around Valerie, Abby, and Derek, trying to penetrate that magic triangle. I hung in there, lonely and slack and dim-witted, like a moth on a window attracted by the warmth within.

Not that there was much warmth among them. The tone was set by Val, who seemed as little interested in them as she was in me. Three isolates they were, inseparable but strangers to each other.

Let me not distort. In truth, Val and Derek got along well enough; they seemed to have so little in common that there were no grounds for conflict or resentment.

I tried to be fair about Derek. Certainly he must have been a vessel of incandescent sorcery—why else was she so taken by him? Was it his pretty face? Like so many scumbags he had the features of a mass-produced android, one of those shallow-eyed washouts who populate TV commercials flogging a cure for dandruff. His wit? Derek’s eloquence was that of a rather backward monk immured in silence. On those rare occasions when words were indispensable, his speech was limited to the laconics of a telegram (“Val. No toilet paper in bathroom”).

His sartorial virtuosity? Perhaps. When he wasn’t sporting his spotless tennis whites, his style of dress was Early American Saddle Tramp—tight-crotched jeans, scrolled boots, Western shirt with smile pockets (and rivets yet), and a half ton of burnished buckle on a wide leather belt billboarding his name, each letter hyphenated by stars. A coxcomb cowboy, old D*E*R*E*K, whose linkage with the range was not easy to determine.