On the way to the house, the palm trees whizzed by, and the lights twinkled in a mass of cityscape. She felt bulleted along the freeway, the film sped up to make the audience aware of itself, and she was very aware of herself. Every inch of her body felt in the wrong place, and it made her twitch and jolt and feel like she had the weekend she was sixteen and had decided to see what it would be like to be a coke addict. Then too, she’d felt tumbled onto a movie set. She had given a boy in her class a fifty-dollar bill, and he presented her with the goods. She didn’t know whether she was being ripped off or how to go about getting the stuff up her nose or what to do once she did, and she kept the Baggie in her pocket until Sunday morning when she spied the gardener’s son. She was lying by the pool on a chaise longue, bundled in a too-warm coat, fingering the Baggie and trying to work up the courage to do something with it, when he appeared with a trash bag full of grass cuttings. “Do you do this?” she had said, and pulled the Baggie from her pocket. He smiled. His front tooth was chipped, and when she wondered what it would be like to run her tongue along it, she tumbled into someone else’s film. She was directed to the guesthouse and instructed to sit on the kitchen floor, and she was glad it was a silent movie because it was easier to watch yourself without the distraction of spoken lines. They cut and snorted, cut and snorted until she felt shot through with candied energy and zoomed her way first to his mouth and then down his chest. It was a montage of body parts, and she watched and thought that perhaps the film would stay focused on the two of them rolling around on the brown linoleum, a teen love flick, but it hadn’t, and instead the old standby had flickered on, and she watched herself beaten with the always reliable belt.

Now, the Porsche slid into the driveway, and Josie gritted her teeth. She was drifting through a series of movies, each more stylized than the next. She had tumbled from the weepy family drama of the airport to the Gothic styling of Montecito. Her father keyed in the security code, and the gate lurched open. They drove slowly up the driveway until the house appeared, huge and ominous. Illuminated by the security lights, it looked like some filmmaker’s version of a Victorian mental ward. Standing beneath it, all twenty-one rooms and two staircases towering above her, she felt that if she walked through the door there was a very good chance she might never walk out again.