This was the period when her brother wasn’t just wetting the bed once a week but daily. Because of his trauma-induced feelings. That he could only express via urine. Don lay in the stinking little children’s room and felt excited. She knew she’d soon disappear from here. Away from the scent of urine, the glare of the lamp outside, the shuffle of people waddling behind their invisible walkers. Don closed her eyes and tried to imagine a future. Though she never really succeeded at it. She didn’t know what it smelled like at the seaside or in Bangkok, she had no idea what rich people in elegant apartments did. So she just imagined London. White, gleaming, and modern. And right in the middle of it, herself. Picturing this unknown world kept her excited until the following morning. She held on to it until school, where of late Don was no longer laughed at as gay or cursed as lesbian. The other kids had begun to fear her. A development she enjoyed. She’d been sneered at and derided for as long as she could remember. She didn’t conform to average specifications. Her average classmate was white. Or Pakistani. Girls wore dresses or skirts. They began using makeup at age seven and had sex for the first time at ten. Boys smoked, drank beer, and wore hoodies, they were white with bags under their eyes, or they were Pakistani, in which case they had nothing to do with the others. There was no room for interpretation, no in-between. In between there was only Karen and Don. The freaks. The ones you could beat up. But that was in the past. Now when Don set foot in the schoolyard with Karen, everyone looked at the ground. Like in the animal world, thought Don, as she swaggered across the yard like a fucking cowboy. Karen walked behind her, or at her feet,

Never fully there.

KAREN

Sat in her room, which was actually a closet, with no windows, but at least a door. It doesn’t take much to satisfy people. She read about Bajos de Haina, a city in the Dominican Republic that had been contaminated by a battery recycling company. City of freaks. They intrigued Karen, who wondered what it would be like if everyone in Rochdale looked like her. Or if they were all interested in the same things she was. At age five, Karen had found a book on system biology and ever since had been obsessed with microbes, blood, hormones, and computers. Those had become the worlds in which she preferred to live instead of on the shabby surface of this so-called world. Karen ran her hand over the scar on her head—