My bed is comfortable. This bed, the guest bed. I listen to his footsteps down the stairs, across the living room, through the kitchen; the door closes really gently behind him. I move into the middle of the bed, splay my arms and legs out, relieved to be alone again, no talking, no repeating myself. No one to see the silly faces I make. I look up at the shapes made by bumps and depressions in the ceiling. An owl. An eel. A sea monster . . .

Chapter Five

Sometimes my parents were amazing. Like when Mom was still singing and she auditioned for a band that had just gotten signed and we went to California. We had a cool car that never broke down, an electric-blue Mustang convertible my parents loved. We drove fast with the top down. At least, I always remember us going fast.

California was strange as well, though. I was little (five? six?), and California felt like a magic word. So I didn’t understand why California wasn’t clean, why I didn’t turn blond and golden there, why I still felt small for my height, and lonely. Why there was always this patina of dirt clinging to the hair on the palm trees, why the scars from mosquito bites still lingered big and black and ashy on my legs. Soon I developed a knack for looking at things without thinking about them. It helped. I just noticed the strangeness, the distance between me and everything else. The cars as they stopped at the traffic light outside my window, the letters on signs sitting bulky against their backgrounds, all these people who didn’t seem to see me.