Would it be rude to arrive before six? Yeah, it probably would. I should try to kill time productively. I could have pushed a tourist the way China did. I could have spat on all the nature kids in their stupid Birkenstocks. I could have got arrested like my mother, but I was a good girl now so sever me from the family tree.

At a Chinese market, lilies bloomed in white plastic pails. I chose a pale pink bouquet for my temporary mom and dad. I paid for the flowers with my Fresh Start allowance.

I had one hour left to kill and I knew where I wanted to go.

First thing, I went to McDonald’s, where I ordered a milk shake and headed upstairs to the bathroom to check on my face. In White Oaks, I’d dreamed of cutting my hair like Cassie’s, drawing black lines under my eyes, wearing fishnet stockings with fighter’s boots. Cassie told me her skinhead friends hung around in the gutters below the Empress Hotel. I loved the names of the bands she listened to. The Exploited, The Damned. Maybe, at last, I would have heard music I liked, but I wasn’t going to the gutters. I looked no worse for wear in the mirror, only slightly startled, the way someone looks when a fist is heading straight for her eyes.

HIPPIES SUCK was written on the bathroom wall. I was tempted to write AND SO DO YOU. Lipstick vandalism, trait of a White Oaks alumni.

Two boppy, giggly girls were pouring Southern Comfort into their plastic cups of 7Up. They smelled like Chantilly.

They were giggling about how Pete and Mark were just so cute.

Oh my God, they are so cute. I gave the twinkies a dirty look, but they didn’t shut up. I sent them a message via ESP. Stop giggling. Shut the fuck up. But they just kept giggling as they drank their spiked soda pop. They were really irritating me.

A good girl would like these girls.

A good girl would wish them luck with Pete and Mark.

A good girl wouldn’t want to smash them into the wall.

And I was a good girl now.

At 5:15, a red double-decker bus passed me and a man with a megaphone announced that the stone building on the left was erected in 1835. I thought that when I was rehabilitated, I would apply for a job driving one of those buses. I could show those tourists some sights. Here’s the King’s Hotel, a former saloon during the gold rush and now a place where a girl named Alice gets paid if she acts like a whore. Above the building erected in 1835 is a roof where a girl with blond hair sleeps ’cause she’s got no home. Welcome to Victoria, City of Gardens. Here’s a gutter, here’s a straitjacket; here’s a bed of tar and stone.