The rotting wood of the house was painted blue, not sky blue, but dark blue, the blue of wet jeans and American police uniforms. The broken windows were covered with Saran Wrap; an A in a red circle was spraypainted on the front door. I stared at the house, and after a few minutes, I saw a girl. A girl who must have come from the Empress gutters, ’cause she was dressed just like Cassie, with a shaved head, a fringe of bangs, a body enveloped by a green army jacket. She gave the door a sudden kick. When no one answered, she shimmied up a rain pipe, and climbed in, head first, through the plastic pane of the window. I saw the soles of her black boots rise up against the window’s edge. Then she vanished, and the sky seemed whiter and duller than it had ever been before.

I went back to reading about arteries. Must be the speed, I thought, because I just could not concentrate.

That night, I asked Nicholas about the Blue House.

Don’t go there, he ordered.

Why not? I said. It looks like something fun is going on inside.

It’s skanky, he said. It’s disgusting.

Nicholas had been around or so he liked to say. He’d been to California twice; he even lived in San Francisco for six weeks when he was my age. A sneaker company paid for his trips; he skated in contests; he said he was legendary. Now he was twenty-three; he was still a skateboard star; he sold speed on the side and had gouged cheekbones and almost gold eyes and all the little boys who adored him called him Skills. Just trust me. You don’t want to go inside.

The Uplands mansion was white with smooth pillars rising on either side of the clean entrance door. All the lights were off; the owner was a Hollywood producer who was always in L.A. The moon lit up the concrete curves of his swimming pool. I lay back on the wealthy man’s lawn chair, wishing I wasn’t so restless. All night, boys came through the carefully trimmed bushes, until there were fifteen of them, taking turns. They would stand in the shallow end of the drained pool, and then skate toward the deep end, riding up the smooth curves.

The boys’ bodies threw huge shadows across the walls of the pool. Monsterlike, the shadows loomed with immense bent knees and raised arms. Though they’d never admit it, I bet those guys liked having their bodies become dark giants there in the quiet concrete valley of a rich man’s waterless swimming pool.