All her life, people had looked at Zanne and seen one type of girl, when inside she felt completely different. They expected her to be mysterious and alluring and experienced, to give as good as she got, even if she wanted none of it. The attention had started young—when she was a baby, according to her mom—strangers at the grocery store, babysitters at the playground, even her teachers telling her how pretty she was and marveling over her eyes. They were blue like deep water, like twilight, sapphires, true blue, not a hint of green. She’d heard it all, and nothing she said in response was ever right. If she said thanks, she sounded conceited; if she deflected, she was ungrateful; if she said nothing at all, she was just rude. Mrs. Rivera sometimes came to her defense with that righteous fury of hers. “What are you staring at, pendejo? Can’t you see she’s a child?” But when Zanne tried that tactic herself, it usually backfired. All those compliments boomeranged back as insults—tease, bitch, cunt. The best thing to do, she’d learned, was to pretend she hadn’t heard. Especially as she got older—when her male teachers stumbled over themselves and even her own father looked at her like she was a maddeningly ripe fruit sent to perplex him—pretending ignorance was a necessary defense.

When those men at the parties looked her over, she let her eyes go lifeless. She thought of dead things. A goldfish in a toilet bowl, charred trees after a wildfire, her mother. Sometimes that was enough to make men stop. Sometimes it only made things worse. So she’d lock herself in the bathroom, put her key into a baggie, and do a bump. She’d look in the mirror, wipe her nose with her thumb, and wonder what her mom would think of her doing blow in the bathroom of a bar. Maybe she would’ve understood. It was a fantasy Zanne had liked to slip inside, that her mom was watching over her, on her side no matter what. She could feel her mother all around her, suffusing her with warmth. Then she blinked and she was back in the bathroom again, the smell of piss on the seat, the fluorescent tube flickering above, the echo of her mother still there in her face. Was it just the blow? No. Maybe.