“I was searching the greenway for Gigi,” Mel says. Rose wants to hug her granddaughter, but Dee and Dum have such short arms. “Our house backs up to it, you know.”

“Of course I know,” snaps Boob Job. To Rose she says, “You’ve caused quite a commotion. We’ve been looking for you half the night. We had to call the police.”

“Stella,” says the older woman repressively, putting a manicured hand on the younger woman’s arm.

“Well, sorry that I still care! Sorry that I think she’s still family,” Stella says hotly.

Her name is Stella. Never trust a woman with big boobs and slitty eyes. Still, Rose shouts, “Stella!”

Mel—Grasshopper—comes around in front of where Rose sags between the two men. Her eyes, her roguish smile, are so familiar, so comforting, that Rose’s eyes burn with tears.

“Don’t, Melanie,” the older woman says. “Seeing you upsets her.”

Rose is going to protest, fight the Tweedles, but a sturdy black-haired woman in a Santa-red power suit, fingers sparkling with rings, shoves a large plastic cup filled with ice and orange juice under Rose’s nose. The sides are beaded with condensation; a bent straw sticks invitingly out of the plastic top. Everybody and everything disappears. Rose latches her lips around the straw and sucks until her cheeks cave in, swallows, and sucks some more.

“I bet she got pretty dehydrated,” says Ms. Red Suit cheerfully. “First the flu, then the night’s adventure.”

The juice is nectar. Cool and sweet, it flows over her tongue and down her parched throat. Rose has never tasted anything so good. Afraid it will be taken from her, she drinks as fast as she can. The straw slurps in the ice cubes at the bottom. Liquid painfully swells her shriveled stomach. Still, she gasps, “More.”

“More?” asks Red Suit. Suddenly Rose is hypnotized by the woman’s eyebrows. By their artistry. They are gelled and brushed and painted until they are as exquisite as the antennae of a luna moth. Then Rose flies out of her body, sees it slump, lifeless in the hard male hands. From above, she sees herself as a rose mandala sand painting. Wind comes. The sand eddies, blows into tiny tornados, the pattern scattering.

“Poison!” she screams, juice running down her chin. “They are poisoning me!” With a gust of sand that resembles a human arm, she slaps away the plastic cup and watches it fly in slow motion from the beringed hand.

“Just a mild sedative,” the sturdy woman says. “She is so agitated. I was afraid she might harm herself.”

Wind takes all that is left of Rose, trailing it in pale blues and pinks and golds. Then all of it is gone. Rose is gone.

CHAPTER 2