She didn’t have money for bail and found herself in a holding cell with five other women, one of them puking all night, two of them delusional. She’d been there . . . a day? A week? She wasn’t sure.

And then Nathan suddenly appeared, explained to a judge that she had diminished responsibility. Waved around those papers that CheeseNuts, winner of first place in the dickhead competition, the dickiest head of all, signed when she was fourteen. That was twenty years ago, ancient history, she said, but the DA murmured sympathetically with Nathan. Balloon overhead saying, Didn’t need a piece of paper to show me she’s nuts.

The Zivany Gallery said they wouldn’t press charges if Sonia, meaning Nathan, replaced the window. The DA’s office said they’d let everything go if Nathan took her back to Kansas. Back to CheeseNuts, DDH. Dr. Dickhead.

Molly called yesterday to say she’d sold three pieces, one to a private collector. And two to the Zivany Gallery, oh, irony of ironies. There’s excitement attached to a piece by a certified crazy person. Molly acted as though she’d created the drama just to help my career. Maybe a woman can’t be a dickhead, but she can show more sliminess than most of the male varieties. Bitch, wormhole, you get 35 percent and you want me to thank you for taking it. Fuck off.

Sonia didn’t tell her parents about the sale. They would have taken the money in the name of protecting her from her impulsiveness. Or to cover the bills Nathan had paid in Boston.

• 3. Shirley Kiel. Greatest drunk I’ve known.

Sonia underlined her mother’s name in her journal with such heavy strokes that the pen tore through the paper. Nathan was hard to live with. Okay, Nathan was impossible to live with, but when Shirley was younger, she hadn’t wanted to leave him. She’d rather sit with a cup of vodka—sort of disguised as coffee—muttering under her breath, rehearsing all the insults she would slam him with when they sat down to a burned-up dinner.

Now that Shirley was almost eighty, she would never leave. Where would she go?

Sonia thought about putting fluoxetine in her mother’s vodka bottles. Supposedly it diminished your desire for alcohol, even if you couldn’t admit you had a drinking problem.

Fluoxetine, olanzapine, her own cocktails. Prescribed by CheeseNuts, hovered over by Dan Bors. Dan had been a creep in first grade, and he was still a creep when they graduated from high school twelve years later. He’d crept off to pharmaceutical school and now he was rubbing his sweaty palms against Sonia’s pills, going home, telling his grinning bottle-blond wife— What was her name? It sounded like Jaundice. Jaundice did something or other at the university.