Older men were often mentioned as having “creepy” attractions to the girls—Lonnie, her friends, or the group as a whole. It was difficult to decipher how old these old men were or how the girls knew them—whether they were parents or teachers or men they met at parties or bars. This was never desirable. They may have admitted to teasing them a little, but it always ended in obvious rejection. At least that’s what the girls always claimed. Why the men continued to pursue them was a constant source of poorly concealed delight and intrigue for them.

Lonnie’s girlfriends were repeatedly taken advantage of. They never said “rape,” they never seemed to think these instances were anything more than annoying, but phrases like “I was too drunk to stop him,” “I wouldn’t have let him sober” were all over the place. Was this a way to spin regrets into victimization? Or had Lonnie grown up entrenched in a culture of date rape? Had they just come to expect that it was something that happened, if they got drunk with boys?

These notes were probably not very different from the ones I had passed in school with girlfriends of my own, but Lonnie had kept them. I had not, so there was no way to remember, no way to compare.

I also found a childhood jewelry box, shaped like a piano, velvet lined, with a ballerina pirouetting to the tinkling tune of the “Nutcracker Suite” when open, but instead of jewelry, inside I found baby teeth in the little compartments—a whole set, incisors, canines, molars, their insides browned with decay. I arranged them on my palm, in order, ran my fingers over their jagged edges. Lonnie’s childhood mouth, kept inside pink velvet. This was so perfect it filled me with an unexplainable rage. I slipped one—an eyetooth—into my pocket.

7

SAM’S AND MY APARTMENT FACED AWAY FROM THE STREET. With her window open I could hear the call to prayer of a distant mosque, an occasional siren, the automated announcements of the Long Island Railroad, and, more loudly than anything else, the church down the street at odd hours, not just Sundays but nights during the week too. There were words thundering into a microphone, a choir, the hammering of an organ. The fact that I couldn’t understand any of it made it haunting—that stentorian male voice following me around my home, accusing me of something, though I didn’t know what it was.

Sam was hardly ever home. She worked long hours in administration somewhere in the city and had other friends, family, a whole other life. We’d never been close. I’d moved in only after responding to her Craigslist ad.