“Really?” The jack-o’-lanterns had begun to exude hot lava again until the whole house crackled with flames and the world beyond rushed away from her and then jerked back again till it was right there trapped inside her skull. “And what would that be—a witch?”

Nancy shook her head.

“Vampire?”

Lori—the girl on the steps—answered for her. “We’re both Jackie Kennedy.” She made a circular motion with one hand. “Just like you.”

This time was different—deeper, more immediate, more powerful—and she had neither the leisure nor presence of mind to wonder whether the formula was skewed or if the dosage had been miscalculated in the lab or if it was just her. She went down hard and fast. She remembered sitting on the floor with her back propped up against the couch and Ken on one side of her and Fitz on the other and Ken saying You are too perfect, and don’t you know it, because, really, no joke, I’ve always wanted to make it with Jackie Kennedy—what about you, Fitz? You want to make it with her too? Then she was locked up inside herself for the longest time, just feeling the music and the texture of the carpet beneath her as if it were the portal to the center of the earth and she was dropping down the molten sides of it over and over again, a thousand times, ten thousand, and everybody kept joking and calling her Jackie until she was Jackie and nobody else, Jackie presiding over a televised tour of the White House, Jackie smiling into the camera, hosting Girl Scout troops and sewing circles and all the foreign dignitaries and their foreign wives and all of them gabbling in their foreign tongues. At one point, Hollingshead showed up in a rubber mask and she was sure he was Nikita Khrushchev until he took it off and said, Nyet, nyet, I am only Mickey Mouse, and everybody was laughing and laughing until she had to go someplace quiet, all by herself—the bedroom, somebody’s bedroom—and hold on tight to the wooden post there while all the trains in the world rushed by one after another, slamming at the air and then taking it all, every breath of it, away with them. She choked, she gasped, stroked the carpet—another carpet or was it the same one?—and fell down the very same hole again, right to the center of the earth, and yes, there was someone there with her, a man, a male Homo sapiens, representative of her very own species and a very good friend and true, somebody she loved very, very much, and Jackie Kennedy had the time of her life.