She found an empty bench and sat, exhausted; squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to see the dead girl’s face, pale and swollen as a sponge. Pin wondered if her mother would be working the dance hall tonight. She imagined her pulling a man in a seersucker suit onto the dance floor, grabbing his arms as they swung around in the grizzly bear. A third person joined them, a girl. No, a doll, flopping around their feet. The man stepped on her face, and her mother screamed as the doll pushed itself up and began to turn, its face no longer a doll’s.

Pin woke, her heart racing. She lurched to her feet and hugged herself, fighting tears, and continued walking.

She considered returning to the shack, yet tired as she was, she knew she wouldn’t fall asleep there. The Kansas Cyclone next door ran the same one-reeler until closing time, accompanied by noisy flourishes from the pianist.

Still, Ikie and the others sometimes hung around the Cyclone. Pin was cautious of spending too much time with them, or anyone, but sometimes her loneliness felt like cold fingers pinching her throat. Ikie and Mugsy and the rest were her age or older, and bigger than she was. At first they’d treated her like a kid brother.

But as the season got under way, the others worked the rides and games for fifteen hours at a stretch, stealing a few free minutes when they could. They were constantly brawling—real fights, sometimes the cops had to break them up. Mugsy stole bottles of beer to share. Ikie flirted with colored girls and, because he looked older, sometimes took them dancing. And they all talked about girls incessantly.

She felt neither girl nor boy but trapped in between. Like an out-of-focus bit of film, one of those fragments where the sprockets didn’t line up. She knew what happened to those damaged frames: they got burned up by the projector or edited out and thrown away.

The trick was to stay out of focus, but on purpose. To always keep moving, hands in her pockets and cap pulled down low to make her look tough. After her sister disappeared, Pin’s mother gave her a shiv that Pin kept in her pocket. Some nights, waiting for her mother to return from the dance hall, she’d fall asleep on the pallet they shared with the knife in her hand.

“Watch it, you fucking punk!”

A drunk bumped into her, nearly knocking her to the ground. A big guy, suspenders loose over his slack belly. Pin slipped a hand into her pocket to touch the blade, its steel cool and reassuring. She gazed at the drunk, and her eyes went funny: she saw two figures stepping into the boat at Hell Gate, the girl in yellow hopping onto the man’s lap. She sucked in her breath. Was this the same man?