“It’s been two months now,” Dakota replied. “I need the old you to come back. I need to have a different conversation. I have to…I have to go meet Andy.”

“Who’s Andy?” Scarlett asked.

“Some grad student my parents found for me to work on French conversation with. I have to meet him up on One Hundred Eleventh Street in a half an hour.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said. Had Dakota told her this before? Had she just tuned it out? It seemed like something she should have heard about. “I’m going to try harder, I promise.”

“Yeah,” Dakota said sadly. “I know you are.”

When she got home, the door to the Jazz Suite was shut tightly, and she could hear low voices from inside.

“In here,” Marlene called.

Scarlett cautiously peered around the doorway into Marlene’s room.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, somewhat formally.

Scarlett didn’t know if she wanted to sit down. She had never been asked to come and sit on Marlene’s bed. It seemed unwise to say no.

Like Spencer, Marlene had her own room. Hers was the only one in the hotel that had truly been redecorated. The walls had been redone in light yellow, because that was her favorite color. Marlene was propped up by her massive supply of pillows and stuffed animals. Scarlett was never really clear where all the pillows had come from, but the stuffed animals were a byproduct of her illness; they are just what people bring when they visit a kid in a hospital. She had well over a hundred. Most of them were in a box in the attic. She kept the choicest ones in her room to form her strange little throne. Scarlett stared at the little monkeys, bears, fish, tigers, and other strange creatures that were smooshed under her weight, yet still looked happy to give their stuffing to support their queen. She was holding a large biography of Princess Diana, one thick with glossy photos.

“Lola’s home.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said, nodding in the direction of the Jazz Suite. “That’s what’s going on.”

Marlene nodded sagely.

“They’ve been in there for an hour. She’s in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Scarlett said, “I figured.”

They both ran out of things to say at this point, and a tense silence fell.

“So,” Scarlett said. “Princess Diana, huh? Is that for school?”

“I bet if Princess Diana had been alive when I was little, I could have met her,” she said. “She went to a lot of hospitals all over the world. She was always going to hospitals.”

“Maybe,” Scarlett said. “I think she went to a lot of hospitals in England.”

“She went to hospitals everywhere,” Marlene said firmly.

“You’re the one reading the book,” Scarlett quickly conceded.

“And she touched people with AIDS when a lot of people were afraid to. She showed people it was okay.”

“That’s…great?”