She stopped to watch the Velvet Coaster begin its ascent, riders already screaming with anticipation. Pin could follow the cars’ progress with her eyes closed: with every clank and shudder the screams grew louder, until they became a single terrified howl that died into relieved laughter as the cars returned to the shed to be unloaded.

“Move it!”

Someone knocked into her, a beefy man in work clothes, his face puffed with drink. Pin kicked him and watched as he staggered, then fell. Before he could stumble back to his feet, she was gone.

She ducked in and out of the throngs of line lice, kicking up dust as she scanned the ground for coins or feathers, hatpins, cigarettes. A boy she knew had once found a silver powder box on a ribbon. She spied a pink carnation fallen from a dude’s buttonhole, grabbed it, and stuck it into her own buttonhole. It smelled like Glory, sweet and slightly dusty.

A wave of longing overcame her. She imagined standing next to Glory, taking turns at the Mutoscope; but would an actress even want to see a moving picture?

And what if Glory wanted to see where she lived? Almost everyone Pin knew at Riverview lived elsewhere. Near indigents, like Pin and her mother, squatted in makeshift shelters so they could save enough to pay for a tenement room during the winter months. Pin and Gina’s tiny shack—constructed of plywood and plaster lath, painted to look like a log cabin—was a castoff from the Sunny South minstrel show, where colored actors danced the cakewalk and sang “Dixie” for audiences made up of white immigrants from Germany and Sweden and Ireland. When Ikie learned where she lived, he’d stared at her with open contempt.

“You living in a slave shack? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Since then, she avoided the shack except as a place to catch a few hours of fitful sleep. On nights when Gina worked as a dance teacher—ten cents a dance, no hugging—Pin lay alone on the pallet they shared.

Once her mother didn’t return until late the next morning. Abriana’s disappearance had been like this, a splinter of worry that grew septic as it worked its way through Pin’s body: now, as then, she paced to keep from throwing up. When her mother did return, eyes sunken with exhaustion, her dark hair unbound beneath her straw Panama, all she said was “I met a friend.”

Pin wouldn’t show Glory the shack for cash money. Just the thought made her hot with shame. She trudged along the Pike, pausing to buy a slice of watermelon from the watermelon man, ate it, and tossed the rind into the trash pail. Food made her feel better. She wiped her fingers on her knickerbockers and decided she’d go to Hell Gate.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15