“Twice.” Holly says it without hesitation. She feels surprisingly calm. “The first time, I was just about your age. Because kids at school were mean to me, and called me mean names. I couldn’t cope. But I didn’t try very hard. I just took a handful of aspirin and decongestant tablets.”

“Did you try harder the second time?”

It’s a tough question, and Holly thinks it over carefully. “Yes and no. It was after I had some trouble with my boss, what they call sexual harassment now. Back then they didn’t call it much of anything. I was in my twenties. I took stronger pills, but still not enough to do the job and part of me knew that. I was very unstable back then, but I wasn’t stupid, and the part that wasn’t stupid wanted to live. Partly because I knew Martin Scorsese would make some more movies, and I wanted to see them. Martin Scorsese is the best director alive. He makes long movies like novels. Most movies are only like short stories.”

“Did your boss, like, attack you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, and it doesn’t matter.” Holly doesn’t want to look up, either, but reminds herself that this is Barbara and forces herself to. Because Barbara has been her friend in spite of all of Holly’s ticks and tocks, all of Holly’s bells and whistles. And is now in trouble herself. “The reasons never matter, because suicide goes against every human instinct, and that makes it insane.”

Except maybe in certain cases, she thinks. Certain terminal cases. But Bill isn’t terminal.

I won’t let him be terminal.

“I know what you mean,” Barbara says. She turns her head from side to side on her pillow. In the lamplight, tear-tracks gleam on her cheeks. “I know.”

“Is that why you were in Lowtown? To kill yourself?”

Barbara closes her eyes, but tears squeeze through the lashes. “I don’t think so. At least not at first. I went there because the voice told me to. My friend.” She pauses, thinks. “But he wasn’t my friend, after all. A friend wouldn’t want me to kill myself, would he?”

Holly takes Barbara’s hand. Touching is ordinarily hard for her, but not tonight. Maybe it’s because she feels they are enclosed in their own secret place. Maybe it’s because this is Barbara. Maybe both. “What friend is this?”

Barbara says, “The one with the fish. The one inside the game.”

23