This brother, that brother. My family gathered to witness the neighborhood driveways and sidewalks buzz with inquiry as a patrol cruiser, commanded by a short, bearded man speaking into a shoulder-harnessed walkie-talkie, killed the flashing lights and backed, straightened, out of our basketball-hooped driveway and then rolled toward the street’s end. As it did, my father wrapped his arms around my mother. She leaned into and allowed herself to be held by him. I came out from pseudo-hiding to stand right beside my younger brother. The car went and went and the taillights got dim and then went away, and a front door was closed to the world so as to keep secret the holy-shit, this brother, that brother, loud-smacking high-five and stoic giggling that came from me, aimed at him, as soon as I thought the tension was ripe for removal . Kept secret was the steam that curled from the corners of my mother’s shut mouth and my father’s heavily sighed acceptance of how boys go where they are led. Secret was the reheated dinner of silence, sideways glances, and clinking forks. Secret was me knocking on the ajar bedroom door of my brother later in the night and the clutter that was us standing face-to-face with each other, one young and the other younger, one wanting to figure out the world all at once, the other content to sit on a bed and wait, this brother, that brother, that brother telling this brother, Brother, that guy was a shitmouth, with his hazel eyes lit, punished yet proud, both searching the other for a flicker of recognition, both knowing no such flicker existed just yet, but would, one day, and it would hold us up the way sunflowers do in a strong wind—when he would get caught shoplifting dietary supplements from an all-night superstore in what my parents felt surely to be a fraternity prank, used by them as a lesson of tough love as he slept three nights in a holding cell while I worked to convince our mother and father to pony up and bail him out, or when my mother would bald and shrivel of cancer and my father would weep and stammer and bury his head in his tan hands and I would whisper to my mother as she slept and wipe her mouth as she died and my brother would refuse to enter the hospital room, pacing in and out of doorways, not saying it was too tough to be there but implying that he had decided to remember her in his own stranded way, and he would instead linger in hallways full of young squeaky-shoed nurses and dinging elevators, to peek in now and then when the room grew soundless, and see two men, his father and his brother, hovered over the sunken-cheeked waxen figure of what was yesterday, a mass of blankets in the shape of his mother’s body. A sea change in the absence of breath, two men in a room, his older brother, his father, waiting for him, knowing that what they waited for would not come now but maybe later, when the three of them could stand as men who had once felt the same sense of self and who could recollect it. Who had once been proud of the same shameful things, an admiration of silence, a sense of strength, a boy tossed in a Dumpster, this brother staying put and that brother staying away, our father being somewhere between. Who had once shared silence when the rest of the world offered flowers and handshakes that told them what they cared for was fleeting and sieve-like. We waited for him, in a tense room of unused furniture, in a picture-framed hallway, in a dim-lit hospital room, in a crowded funeral home, in three separate states in three separate time zones, as my father would stay in western Kentucky and I would move to northern Idaho and my brother would move to central Florida, we waited for him to stand beside us the way we had stood beside him once, when boys were boys and brothers waited, heart-scraped and hushed, this brother, that brother, when I hugged him after two years apart and thought He even feels like Mom, when our father remarried and hung up the phone and a family became a facial expression of motherlessness, and a thing to move toward, and loneliness became a sort of prayer, and loss meant what would come would not change what had come before. We waited. This brother, that brother, waiting to see what the other needed to find.

M. Lewis is an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho in the nonfiction program. There he serves as co-editor of the literary journal, Fugue. He hails from western Kentucky. This is his first publication. He thanks Jo Ann Beard.

I only remember the gist of the letter, not the details that filled three pages: I loved David. That was why I didn’t go out with Chuggie (another Echo Hill boy) the week before, when his best friend, Dan, told me to stay in the library after the bell rang so Chuggie could ask me out. Soon as it clanged, I scampered out. Then I wrote this letter, and pressed it into the thin slits at the top of David’s beige-enameled locker.

The next morning, I came into school and noticed a strange sort of wallpaper adorning the hallways, and that sweet, chemical smell of fresh copies in the air: my letter. Duplicated endlessly. Pasted against painted concrete block.

It was the second time I’d ruined my life in letters.

After that, the shame shivers grew: these little pinpricks of disgrace that course from my stomach up to my solar plexus and sting me there. I remember something I did, something big or something incidental—I tripped stepping onto the school bus; I ruined a shot on a golf ball commercial by walking into it before the director said “Cut”—and I relive the painful moment. Only the shivers have blossomed, they’ve bloomed, so that now, when I’m alone in the shower or walking down the street or sitting in the subway, the shame shivers are a huge hiccup. They overcome me for a few minutes, and I exclaim, I yell out, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” Or, “So embarrassed, so embarrassed.” I tuck my chin to my chest and my face screws up and I uncontrollably utter these sounds. I know what it looks like. It looks like I’m crazy.

I have conversations with myself in which I explain that I am forgiven for the letter to David and the love letter to my second cousin, Michael, and the letter ending my friendship with Margaret; I understand that these are nothing but poisonous memories running loose inside my veins. But so many of them are on paper. There is evidence of my indiscretions, floating around out there somewhere. They’re not just memories, but words.

Later in my eighth-grade year, I wrote another letter, a confession, to a boy with whom I’d never spoken: Hamenth Swaminathan, who was in love with my friend Juliet, the prettiest girl in school. I said I was going to live with my father, in Saratoga Springs, New York, the next year, and I just wanted him to know that I loved him.

I did not, of course, go to live with my father the next fall—I could not leave my mother, nor would my father have had me—and had to see this boy on the first day of ninth grade. He just looked at me and said, “You didn’t move, huh?”

In ninth grade it was Tony Terrizi, who lived, at least, in my part of town. We rode the same bus. He played a musical instrument, clarinet, like my father; it folded up into a tiny box, which he carried like a briefcase. We had never spoken. He was cute and shy and musical, and on Thanksgiving Day, 1987, I wrote him a love letter. The first thing I told him was that my brother had made me laugh so hard that I peed in my pants. Then I told him I had a crush on him. The next day, on the bus, he said, “Nice letter”—the only words he ever spoke to me.

The letter writing made sense. The mail held so much promise (Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary, “My heart leaps when I see a mailman on the street”): boxes of hand-me-downs from the wealthy, Southern California second cousin I’d never met (I had not one pair of designer jeans, which was a source of real shame in the mid-1980s), and psychedelic drawings from my perpetually stoned father, who apparently forgot to put the child support checks in these envelopes. I had two lives: the school year and three weekends a month in Amherst, and one weekend, summers and holidays, in Saratoga. Letter writing kept me connected to the various components of my fractured life, and, yes, I was good at it. My friends, at least, seemed to cherish these letters, and I would sit in cafés (too young to be pretentious) and write on stationery I had printed myself in graphic arts class, and I’d concoct these sentences to make people like me.

I have always been of the opinion that people write because they want to be liked. But the letter writing led only to the shame shivers, so common now that the only way to curb this emotional Parkinson’s is to confront it.

David is thirty-four years old now, and married, and a communications director for a mayor in a small town in New England (the town where my step-grandmother is from). I have not seen him since January 1989, when I graduated, midyear, from high school, and I probably hadn’t talked to him for a few years before then. I Googled him, and found his father’s information (they have the same name). I left a message saying I was trying to find David the younger, I had a question to ask him, could they pass on my number.

He calls that afternoon. Immediately I am sweating, heart palpitations, unprepared for confrontation. We exchange pleasantries, basic information. He lists off the people from high school he’s kept in contact with; I can’t remember a single one of them. Except for Chuggie, married and living in Texas and a lawyer, or something.

David is in public relations now, had wanted to be a writer before he went to the “dark side.” I tell him not to underestimate the power of a full-time job. He speaks to me as if I am a reporter—friendly, but resistant. Holding back. He doesn’t know why I’ve called.

I tell him that I want to ask him about something that happened in junior high school.

“Is this about Will Kohler’s basement?” he asks.

“What happened in Will Kohler’s basement?”

“Never mind,” he says.

I ask what he remembers about me.

“That you had a crush on me, and Will Kohler’s basement.”

Does he remember the note?

Vaguely.

Does he remember the photocopies?

“What photocopies?”

I explain.

“No. I don’t. I didn’t do that.” He is unyielding on this matter, about his lack of involvement in it. He is a public figure in his town, worried I will defame him. I promise not to use his name, but it’s such a good name, I can’t bring myself to change it. I too have learned how to betray with words.

I assure him that I know he didn’t do it. I know that it was the work of David’s friend Adam Smith, whose mother worked at the school and therefore allowed him access to the copy machine. I tell him how Adam Smith was still carrying around pieces of the letter in his wallet two years later. He would pull them out in study hall and flash me with them, read a word or two before slipping the worn paper back inside.

“That’s awful,” David says. “I had nothing to do with that. I don’t even remember that.”

I tell him how the memory of this letter has followed me, and how often I’ve replicated it: an unwanted letter, leading to some sort of small demise, and sometimes a large one—I have ended many a friendship with an angry letter, or alienated plenty of men with an unsolicited love letter. David, of course, has little to say on this part of the story. He offers me some advice that his boss once gave him, the key to those who have to deal with the press: If you can say it, don’t write it. Don’t commit it to paper.

The summer before eighth grade—before the letter to David—my father took me on a trip, a little special time. My half-sister had just turned three, and she had been born with a particularly sweet disposition and my father’s lovely hazel eyes, and she was already a long and lanky girl. My father’s version of father-daughter bonding was to commiserate with me that I had inherited his weak chin, my mother’s thick thighs, that I got his feeble brain instead of my mother’s brilliance. It was clear my sister was going to be beautiful and tall, and I was full-grown by then, a whopping five-foot-two, and at the height of the awkward phase. My brother told me I ruined every family photo (he was older, and had already escaped this phase and moved on to handsome).

We traveled the first weekend of that summer to my father’s cousin’s house in rural Maine. Having grown up with my mother—an orphan, whose only brother lived across the country in San Francisco—I didn’t know my father’s family particularly well. This cousin I knew of only because both his daughters had turned out to be lesbians. I stayed in one of the lesbian’s rooms. I scoured it for traces, proof, indications of her sexuality. A greeting card was posted on the wall, with an olive branch-carrying dove water-colored across the page. I scoured through the jewelry boxes: a silver charm bracelet, a large opal and diamond ring. I stuffed all of these things in my duffle bag. Then I opened up a blank page in my red-marbled cardboard-covered Mead notebook, and wrote a letter to my friend Beth Pelky back in Amherst, bragging about my spoils.

After my parents found the letter with my admission of stealing, they declared war on me. My stepmother did a little dance around me, calling, “Thief! Thief! Thief!”

Once, they locked me in the kitchen. My stepmother screamed at me, pronouncing me the most selfish person in the world. My little sister was piling blocks into a tower on the floor. I lifted her up. The blocks tumbled. She instinctively wrapped those soft little arms around my neck. I picked up a twelve-inch Ginsu knife from the dish rack and held it to her throat, and threatenedthreatening to kill her if they did not let me out.

It was the only time my father hit me.

My sister does not remember the incident. Once a year or so, I apologize anyway.

My father swore I left the notebook on the kitchen table, open to the letter. I adamantly denied this at the time, and still I have trouble believing it. My stepmother certainly seems the type to read people’s private papers. But they insisted: I wanted them to read it. They said I wanted to get caught.

I often tell the story of the dittoed love letter, but I have never thought about the other part of the story: I refused a boy who had offered his love to me in favor of one who didn’t.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever came to junior high again after that letter was circulated throughout the school. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t go out with Chuggie. How would my life have been different had I sat there at the faux-wood Formica-laminated library table and waited for Chuggie to walk up, as Dan and probably a few other eighth graders stood sentry in the doorway, watching? My heart would have been beating so hard. Palms would have been coated with sweat. Cotton mouth, yes—like an extended version of a shame shiver, but with a happy ending. We would have been late for class, though we had most of our classes together: me and Chuggie in math, separated by two aisles and yet joined. Imagine the joy: this penniless girl with her name-brand-less clothes and single mother who lived in the crappy HUD-subsidized subdivision on the south side, chosen by this smart, sweet-faced stud. Maybe I didn’t want to sit there and wait, in case Chuggie changed his mind and just kept walking.

“I want to ask you something about the thing with your cousin when I was little.”

My father and I have barely been speaking for the last four months. I’d yelled at his wife, and now he says he won’t lend me money for health insurance until I see a therapist. I am thirty-three years old.

I don’t know what to call it, that central event of my youth. “The incident” maybe. The beginning of the end.

“Okay,” he says. “Is that something you’re having trouble getting over?”

“I don’t know,” I say. Immediately there is this rumbling in my chest, the weird, swollen feeling at the back of the throat that indicates the unwelcome arrival of tears. I have to stop, start over.

“Do you remember the letter I wrote?”

“What letter?” he asks. I am getting used to this response.

“How did you find out about the stuff I stole?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Maybe Bev found the things?”

“You don’t remember finding the letter I’d left on the kitchen table?”

“I don’t remember how we found out about it,” he says. “What letter?”

I explain: He said he found my notebook on the table, but I didn’t believe I would expose myself that way, that I wanted to get caught. We were poor, and I wanted the fancy ring and the silver bracelet and the greeting card with the dove; I thought those things would bring me peace.

“But if I did leave that letter open on the kitchen table, if I did want you to find it, then it was a cry for help, and you sure didn’t answer it.”

He pauses. “There are a lot of ways to handle a situation” is his response.

After the incident, my stepmother had me write a letter to my father’s cousin, in which I explained how I had a problem and that I’d be seeking help. “It was total bullshit,” I say to my father now. “I didn’t believe a word of it.”

He does not remember any letters. None of them. He was stoned.

There were the twelve notes to Ben Quick, the only boy who’d ever written me back (though only once). The angry e-mail to my friend Margaret, informing her, when she got pregnant, that she was having a child only because she didn’t know what to do with her life. The proposal of marriage to my second cousin penned after attending his Bar Mitzvah in Montreal. The time I scrawled the words to Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” on a retaining wall and informed my non-boyfriend Michael to go out and read it, but the rain had washed the words away by the time he got there.

This is the problem, of course: Most of these words cannot be washed away. They are indelible, even though no one seems to remember them but me. The words now translate into feelings and gestures. The letters are shame shivers now.

At no point in this epistolary journey did I stop to wonder if maybe my letters weren’t so brilliant after all.

I got a letter from a college friend in the mid-1990s. He was writing from a mental institution outside Baltimore, where he was recuperating after losing his mind somewhere near the Wailing Wall in Israel. We had lived together in a big group house during my last year of school. We fought all the time, but we were friends, too. It was a hippie school, men in skirts and women with hairy armpits, and it was unthinkable to utter any opinion that veered away from the radical left. My friend enjoyed riling folks up with his fake right-wing stances. I thought he saw me as one of the endless politically correct children of hippies, but then he told me in the letter what he saw. “You make good Chinese food by letting the mustard seeds pop in the hot oil,” he wrote. “A million crafty things spring from your hands. You have the power of sixty hurricanes.”

I carried the letter around with me everywhere. And then I lost it.

We have been writing to one another ever since.

Once, I had an epistolary love affair. The man with whom I was exchanging letters called mine “glittering jewels in the dirt,” which he informed me was a big compliment.

“You make them sounds like iridescent onions,” I said, and I was happy. I like onions. I like sparkly things.

David apologizes for not remembering this incident better.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t know what I was looking for, so I’m not disappointed.”

“I’m sorry about Will Kohler’s basement,” he says.

“What was it that happened in Will Kohler’s basement?”

He mumbles something about a teenage boy’s hormones, about: making out. I remember those silver braces peaking out from between his lips, but I don’t remember kissing him. I remember crying over him into my diary, and circling the tears with a pen. I remember that moment where I walked up to the wall to inspect the photocopies more closely, finding my own words, the particular shape of my letters, those declarations pasted over cinder block. But I don’t remember the time he shined his light on me, put his lips to mine. I don’t remember the one thing that he does recall.

The shame shivers are so bad now that sometimes I’m afraid to leave the house. Sometimes I go days without having them, but other times they recur, volt after volt, walking electroshock. How does it work, kernels of shame that grow and subsume the entire memory, memories reshaped to fit my vision of myself? Why doesn’t David’s lack of recollection do anything to erase, to desaturate, the shame?

He says, “I don’t know who should be more humiliated.”

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Belly, a novel, and lots of articles about real estate, architecture, urban planning and the environment. She has written for the New York Times, Salon.com, House & Garden and many other publications, and her fiction has appeared in Swink, Hayden's Ferry Review, West Branch and The Literary Review. You can scrutinize her at www.lisaselindavis.com. 

The Ohio Barber and Beauty College. A two-story building in the satellite lot of Northland Mall. An Eisenhower-era crew cut in poured concrete and low-slung steel. Sterile and stern. Everything set at ninety degrees to everything else.

The temperature drops as we walk from our Dodge Dart to the front door. Holding the tarnished chrome handle for my mom and little sister, I smell the bitter ammonia of the hair dye and the musky Wella Balsam conditioner and the alcohol solution that disinfects the scissors. If the veterinarian’s office smells anything like this to our dog, Rex, I understand why he pulls so hard against the leash.

I’m fourteen and hyperaware of my body and the various tufts and patches that cover it. I tirelessly monitor my hair, measuring its response to wind and wool sweaters and my Milwaukee Brewers cap. I can’t walk past a parked car without checking my reflection in the windows.

My mom is at the counter talking to a man in a white lab coat and army-issue glasses. My sister and I are sitting on the vinyl waiting area couch, flipping through year-old copies of People and Life. On the glass coffee table is a glossy book that looks like a magazine but is really a hundred pages of glamour shots compiled by some beauty product company. Perms. Parts. Bangs. Feathers. Layers. Colors. Six models with six different hairstyles on every page. They look like the most style-forward senior class in high school history. The Alberto VO5 class of 1984.

“So, did you find the one you want?” the woman asks. She’s got smoky blond hair, moussed into submission. A few long, loose strands are stuck to the V-neck and shoulders of her pea-green smock. Her blush is too red, her shadow too blue. The fluorescent lighting gives away the scars from a long bout with acne.

I touch the oily bumps on my own pimpled chin. “Huh?”

“Did you find the style you want, hon?” She takes my hand. My legs make a sucking sound as I rise from the couch.

What do I want? I want to be Tom Cruise in Risky Business. I want the Ray-Ban Wayfarers and the Porsche 928. I want to have sex with Rebecca DeMornay on a fast-moving elevated train.

She walks me back toward two long rows of barber chairs. Sitting in each chair is a kid with off-brand tennis shoes and in desperate need of broccoli. Or a fat lady in Chic jeans, bursting with phlegmy laughter. Or a wiry man whose vein- and tattoo-laced forearms are locked stiff on the armrests. Student-barbers circle the chairs, their scissors snip-snipping away. The barbers wear identical pea-green smocks and black high-top Reeboks as they dance through fuzzy piles of clipped hair. A few serious men and women in starched lab coats pace from chair to chair, offering instruction or muted praise. A bent-over black guy pushes a broom across the green speckled floor.

I stare up at the white ceiling tiles as she dips my head back into the u-shaped groove cut in the plastic sink. There are a thousand little pencil holes poked into each square tile. The night sky in negative. She massages the shampoo through my hair, her charm bracelets clinking against my forehead as she works her way around my scalp. Her fingernails are moving in expanding and collapsing circles. I’ve forgotten how good it feels to have someone wash your hair. She guides the warm water from the spray nozzle away from my eyes, pushing it back over the top of my head. She reaches for the conditioner, and I catch a whiff of her perfume. She’s right over me, blocking out whole galaxies of ceiling tile. I look up into the V-neck of her smock and see a full inch of brown lace. I’m getting hard under my red shorts. I’m suddenly thankful for the loose plastic apron I’m wearing.

She straightens to open the bottle. “Look,” she says, taking up small sections of wet hair and smoothing them between her fingers. “You’ve already got a receding hairline.”

“Yeah,” I say. But I don’t know what she means.

2. The Shave

My wife, Kate, and I are in Kusadasi, Turkey, on our honeymoon. We’re strolling through narrow streets, grinning and shaking our heads as politely as we can at the carpet salesmen and their offers of apple tea and lessons in the finer points of Oriental rug-making. This is early May, the low season, and there is no behemoth cruise ship in port to make the bright little fishing skiffs look like bathtub boats. We see no other tourists in this tourist town.

At the fringe of a bazaar, where wrinkled women in silk scarves sell evil eye amulets and bootleg Calvin Klein underwear, we come to a barbershop. The barber himself is the only person inside. He is sitting in his own chair. Seeing us, he hops up and gestures for me to take a seat in that red Naugahyde contraption, so similar to the ones in which, as a balding teenager, I spent a hundred uncomfortable Saturdays.

I’ve been shaving my head skin-bald for six years—ever since the morning of my twenty-fourth birthday, when I first took a dollop of Barbasol and a single-blade Bic to my disloyal scalp. Not knowing how to say anything in Turkish other than thank you and good night, I point to my stubbled head and make a palms-up what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. The barber laughs and with mock forcefulness takes my elbow, leading me into the shop. I turn that same resigned shrug toward Kate and climb into the chair, thinking, This is the setup to a bad joke: “So this bald guy walks into a barbershop . . .”

First he applies lotion that smells of sage to my head and face. He massages my skull and kneads the thick cords that run the back of my neck. He rubs my shoulders and down my arms. He pushes his thumbs deep between my shoulder blades. Then he squeezes a dab of cream into his palm and presses his hands together for several seconds to warm it.

The shop is fluorescent-orange and immaculate. It smells like lemons. We don’t say anything, the barber and I. We can’t say anything. Instead we exchange an occasional roll of the eye or uptick of the mouth. We point and nod. And I’m at home in the hands of this Turkish stranger.

He smoothes the shaving cream over my head and under my cheekbones and breaks into a smile as he pulls out a four-inch straight razor. In the mirror I can see Kate holding her breath. The barber sees it too. He turns and gestures in a way that says not to worry, he is a professional.

Two parallel wrinkles form above the bridge of his nose as he concentrates on the razor. After each pass, he swipes it clean with white rag. The high-carbon steel makes a pleasant scraping sound as it erases twelve hours of stubble. Soon there are only a few random streaks of shaving cream left on my head. He wipes those away with another freshly laundered rag and motions for me to feel how slick my scalp now is. I know I’ll never have a closer shave.

I’m smiling at Kate in the mirror when a blue flame appears in my peripheral vision. Kate’s eyes grow wide and worried. So do mine. The barber has taken a long cotton swab, dipped it in alcohol, and lit it on fire. He cups my shoulder to hold me steady as he quickly waves the burning swab past my ears, singeing the thin baby hair from the outer folds. He moves to the other ear and then goes to work under my nose. Except for my eyebrows, not a single hair escapes.

He finishes by rubbing a blend of alcohol and lemon oil into my scalp, my cheeks, my neck. Then he claps his hands as if to say Voilà! He is a proud man. He takes his craft seriously. As Kate pays him, he nods and says what must be the only English he knows, “Okay. Bye.”

I shake his hand and say everything I know to say: “Tesekkur ederim. Iyi aksamlar.”
Thank you. Good night.

For twenty years Joe Oestreich has toured the U.S.A. in a beat up Ford Econoline as the singer and bass player for Columbus, Ohio’s Watershed. His most recent work appears in Esquire, Ninth Letter, and the Cimarron Review, and he is an honoree in the 2007 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest.

Dear Recent Graduate:
Come to our main headquarters on Lexington Avenue at 9:00am on Monday, June 16th. You will get a job.

At the bottom of the high-quality paper was a raised triangular black logo that felt neat against my fingertips.

I had just returned home after college graduation with the desperate hope of finding a job in the city—one that might help me discover what I supposed to be when I grew up. I was too curious not to follow up on this piece of junk mail, so that Monday morning I put on a black and white, sassy-yet-professional Betsy Johnson dress and, armed with mace, arrived at a “main” office – a large room filled with gray fold-out chairs and beige rugs covered in questionable stains. There were about thirty of us shuffling about, all roughly the same age and looking equally confused. It was kind of like the movie Clue. Everyone was mumbling, “Did you get that letter?”

After a significant period of suspense, a young man with far too many blackheads on his forehead made a grand entrance from the bathroom. “Hello! Thank you for coming. You are all probably wondering what this is all about. Well, every single one of you was asked here for the same reason. You were all hard-working students. As of this very moment, you are on the cusp of the greatest money-making opportunity in the history of money-making opportunities.” For five minutes he ranted about how life was short and how his cousin almost died at twenty-five and now, not later, was the time to improve one’s standard of living.

Then, like an afterthought under his breath, he mumbled that we were really here to interview for a two-month stint selling knives door-to-door. Kitchen knives, for commission.

People started storming out. The guy waved his arms in the air and pleaded, “If you leave now, you are missing out, folks. You’ll regret it!” I’ve never been able to live with regret, so I stayed in my seat eager to see where this was all going and wondering if he’d ever seen a dermatologist for the blackhead problem.

Ten others hesitantly remained with me. Unshaken by the diminished audience, he clumsily wheeled a TV to the front of the room and played a ten-minute tape introducing us to the marketing company involved in the venture. There were endless testimonials from a diverse group of young adults. “Knife-selling changed everything. It provided marketing experience far more valuable than any expensive business degree.” “These knives sell themselves. All I had to do was show up.” “Thank goodness I opened that letter and was introduced to the world of knife-selling. God knows what kind of degenerate I’d be if I hadn’t attended and stayed for the entire duration of that initial meeting.”

The guy shut the power off, paused, and frowned. “Now, not everyone can just automatically join our company,” he said, tapping one of his blackheads. “We look for superdooperstars, not just hard working students. I’ll need to interview you one-by-one now in the corner area. Wendy Spero, you’re first up. Dave Freedman, you’re on deck.”

I proceeded to the folding chair in the back corner area while the rest of the group watched suspiciously from the other side of the room. He asked me where I had gone to school and what I had studied.

“I went to Wesleya---“

“I think you have something darn special, Wendy. I’d love for you to come aboard. Congratulations! Please stick around for the next portion of the meeting.”

I was slightly traumatized by having to look at his blackheads up close but was thrilled to have made the cut. I didn’t want to make the others envious, though, so I put on a neutral face and swaggered back to my seat.

One by one, we were all formally accepted into this highly selective marketing conglomerate. Then he sprawled out some knives onto a few chairs facing us, and announced that we’d have to buy an initial knife kit for $100.

As the girl next to me stood up, she whispered, “Get OUT! This is a scam!” But I looked at the shiny cutlery and thought, I must sell knives.

Eventually, only two of us were left. The other woman was wearing braces—the clear kind that turn yellow over time. We handed the man credit cards and left with pounds of merchandise and a new purpose in life.

When I immediately informed friends and family that I’d found the perfect summer job, they responded with stilted enthusiasm. I think they worried I had joined a cult and would soon be wearing a flowy skirt and handing out dandelions next to the Holland Tunnel.

The following weekend, Laura, my best friend from high school, invited me to her family’s rented summer-house in Martha’s Vineyard so I could reboot before officially starting. Because we spent every moment at the beach, and I never motivated to put on sunscreen, I got a severe burn on my face. Big red chunks of my skin dangled. I looked like I was in one of those old ABC after-school specials based on a horrible true story, like I’d been burned in a fire by an evil stepmother or something.

Because my face felt so insanely hot, when we smoked weed that Saturday night, it was as though I were experiencing the evening’s events from the bong’s point of view. I alone could identify with the burning herbs on the receiving end of a pothead’s inhale. It was deep.

When I returned to the city, I rushed to the dermatologist, who could barely hide her fearful reaction to my appearance. She prescribed a soothing white steroid cream for the swelling, and two days later, I grew a spontaneous mustache. A little prickly Fu Man Chu one.

So I had the mustache, the burn, and a sack o’knives.

I was ready to sell.

The knife-selling process was a safe, meticulously thought-out scheme. Per the instructions in my knife-selling packet, I called my mom’s good, trustworthy friends and politely asked for some names and numbers of their good, trustworthy friends. I then called these people up and performed a well-rehearsed, innocent shtick: “Hi, so, um, so-and-so told me you would be nice enough to help me out. I’m learning about marketing and wondered if I could come over to your house maybe for just a couple minutes and practice selling…things…to you.”

Each sucker would reply, “Oh sure dear, that’s sweet. Well, I’m not going to buy anything, but sure—if you want practice.” Shortly thereafter I’d arrive at their apartment. They’d open the door, notice my deformity and mumble, “Oh. Oh my. Oh dear. Have you tried aloe?”

I’d sit at their kitchen table and compliment their hair. We’d gab about our friend in common. Then I’d commence the mind-blowing presentation: I’d slice brown leather into strips with steak knives. I’d cut a thick rope with a bread knife. In one fluid motion, I’d cut a penny in half with large silver sheers. (A thrill in and of itself because cutting currency is technically a federal offense.) I’d revel in the subtle sound of every long, deep, satisfying incision.

At first my customers would act condescending, politely nodding and mumbling, "Uh huh, yeah, uh huh.” But as the presentation progressed, they’d find themselves seeking clarification. “Wait, hold on. How much is that one again?” There was simply no way to remain unaffected by my slick marketing moves.

I was also prepared for the toughest of customer questions. They’d ask, “But wait, if your knives are that sharp, aren’t they dangerous?” Unfazed, I’d grin and explain that actually, using one of their dull knives was far more risky. “Statistics show that chefs are 46% more likely to slip while cutting a tomato from a worn down blade.”

They’d let out a contemplative, “Huh. Wow. Yeah.”

To close the sale I’d lean in, signal for them to lean in, look around (there would only be two of us in the apartment) and whisper, “You know what? I’m not supposed to do this, but I’ll give you a free spatula with that bread knife. How’s that?” A tiny bit would come out of my commission, but they’d fall for it every time—they’d end up buying an entire set, which they didn’t even need in the first place, just to get something for free. Then we’d hug. They’d thank me profusely, and I’d leave with seven hundred of their dollars.

I was thrilled to be good at a real grown-up job, and I didn’t feel guilty because at the bi-weekly knife meetings, the convincing blackhead dude explained over and over again that by selling people these knives, we were massively improving their lives—even if they didn’t cook. I was making the world a better place.

I even preyed on our dearest of family friends. My friend Emily recalls her mother telling the family at breakfast that I’d be coming over that afternoon to practice selling “things,” and that she might go ahead and buy one item—just to be nice. Later that evening, as the family talked about their days at the dining room table, her father asked, “Oh, so did Wendy come over? Did you end up buying something to be nice?” Emily’s mom fell silent. She had spent over $2,000 on knives she didn’t remotely need. “Look. Stop hounding me. I don’t know what happened!” She moaned. “She…she cut leather and then pennies and…and I just lost all control. They seemed really necessary at the time…I swear…We got a free spatula!?”

While I calculated purchase totals and filled out the necessary forms, my clients would happily write down twenty or so names and numbers of friends I could contact. I would call those people up, do the shtick, sell them knives, ask for names, and so on and so on. After three or four weeks I went to so many houses that I had no memory of the original round of victims. I’d call some random guy and say, “Hi, Mary Bingham recommended that I contact you. She said you might be nice enough to help me out…” all the while having no remote idea who Mary was. Then I’d arrive at his door and chat with him for a solid fifteen minutes about Mary’s terrific new gig in the meat-packing district. After noticing the words “cute dog” next to Mary’s name on my special knife-selling pad, I’d be sure to add, “And wow, Mary’s dog is something, huh?”

Eventually, I started getting calls from people desperately seeking knives. “Hello, um, I heard you are a knife expert and you come directly to people’s houses…can you fit me in? I know you must be so busy. Please. I hear you are the best. I don’t trust those pushy salespeople in stores. Salespeople are the worst, ya know?”

Sometimes between appointments I would take a break and wander into a big clothing store like Urban Outfitters. Upon passing through the metal detectors, the entire alarm system would go off. The guard would ask, “Uh, ma’am, what do you have in your bag?” I’d reply, “Knives.” He would laugh, and let me in. I was invincible.

The sale of the century occurred one Tuesday afternoon when a friend of a friend of a friend asked me to meet her at her office. As I exited the elevator and walked through the corporate glass double doors, a middle-aged receptionist asked, “Can I help—oh! Are you the knife woman?”

“I…guess?”

She led me to an enormous conference hall with a stage, got on an intercom and announced, “Attention employees. The knife demonstration will commence in five minutes.” Three hundred people then poured into the space, and a small fellow with a bowtie got up and bellowed, “With no further ado…the floor is yours. Do your thang!”

“Heh. All right…right…okay!” I began. “So, you guys ever cut a tomato and find that the skin gets all mushed?!”

“FUCK YEAH!” yelled the crowd.

Beyond energized, I took out the leather strip and smoothly cut it into thinner strips. I took out the penny and dramatically cut it in half. I took out the impressive bread knife and sliced my left thumb.

Blood was everywhere.

A man shrieked, “Holy—you need to go to the emergency room?”

“Not at all!” I called out nonchalantly. I grabbed a towel from my bag, wrapped it around my hand, held it above my head, applied the necessary pressure and continued the presentation. And made a fortune.

I was relieved when the summer started to come to an end—my back had begun to ache from schlepping around the heavy mass of metal, and my fingers were covered in Band-Aids. But in order to go out with a bang, a week after my big sale I decided to fly to the annual knife-selling convention in Indianapolis, where I was greeted by large posters of rainbows that read, “Fulfill your potential. Persuade! Sell! Conquer!” At the award ceremony that evening I won a tall trophy AND a VCR for selling the most knives in the tri-state area.

Excerpt courtesy of Hudson Street Press

On our barrel is an open bottle of red wine, several empty beer bottles and the remains of our last round of food: empty cockle shells; octopus tentacles sliced into thick white sections, smeared with paprika and stabbed with toothpicks; the feathery spines of small fish whose cheeks have been hollowed out by our forks. A waiter's disembodied arm nudges a basket of bread aside and sets down a plate of grilled shrimp.

The shrimp are as long as my hand and sausage-fat inside their carapaces, scarlet antennae curled insensible on the plate. Each eye gleams like a lone pearl of caviar. We split their shells with our fingers, tongue the meat from the cavity. We break off the heads and turn them upside down like thimblefuls of soup. Their antennae brush questioningly against our palms, but, unrepentant, we curl our mouths around them and suck the insides from their little skulls. It's infinite shrimp, tasting of smoke from the grill and the coral-streaked white meat of their bodies, the oceanic sweetness of their shells curving, tough as fingernails, against our tongues.

An hour later, walking briskly up First Avenue, I feel my hair stand up on end. It rises poised and alert from the follicles, and despite the cold a sudden flush of blood heats my scalp and my face. I run my hands through my hair, scratching at my skin to get rid of the tingling. I am too warm. A throb is caught in my throat and I can't swallow it away. It feels substantial and round, nestled like an egg in my windpipe.

My husband sees me lay a hand against my throat and stops on the sidewalk. My eyelids are growing taut as blisters, my lips thickening. I stand on First Avenue, wondering if I have time to get back uptown. The last time this happened it was so slow I drove across town to the hospital I liked best. But this is moving faster. Steve hails a cab, and as we get in I say to our friends, already speaking with some difficulty, "You go on to the bar. I'm just going to the nearest emergency room."

By the end of the ten-block drive to Beth Israel my tongue has swelled until it lies across my teeth in a slab and my lips are purple and stiff. The egg in my throat is larger, and with a frill of panic around my heart I realize that until I get to a hospital my throat will just keep tightening. Once this begins, nothing in my body knows to stop. I pray there'll be no traffic jams.

In the ER they hustle me to a bed and toss a hospital gown my way, leaving Steve to fill out forms. They return a minute later with an IV and injections of epinephrine, Benadryl, and Prednizone. My eyes are closed against the light above me, so I only feel them prodding me, sticking adhesive monitors to my ribs and chest. I open my eyes when someone asks where I ate and what might have caused this. "This" is anaphylactic shock.

"Probably shellfish," I guess thickly.

"Okay, what kind?"

It seems best to catalogue everything remotely aqueous, so I say, "Shrimp, scallops, mussels, cockles, octopus, sardines�"

The resident and the nurse exchange glances.

The resident looks at me over his glasses. "Never eat shellfish again," he orders.

"I don't even want to," I lie.

After a few minutes the resident says, of the tapas bar, "You know, I keep meaning to go to that place." It occurs to me that he is trying to keep me occupied and calm. In fact I am fairly relaxed now. I bristle with needles, am swathed in blankets, speckled with adhesive patches bearing jellied circles and metal buttons that send my pulse to the monitors. Things are happening. People are watching.

"Was the food good?" the resident asks.

"Worth it," I croak, and pass out.

I went into anaphylactic shock once before, in Wisconsin, but somehow it hadn't seemed to matter. We thought it was crab rangoon, which I only tasted because someone else ordered it. That time I thought my scalp itched from sweat after dancing, so I waited awhile, finished my beer and went home, where I took an Allegra and lay down.

That time I thought there was something caught in my throat, but the something turned out to be my throat. At the UW hospital I sat in a chair and handed over my insurance card and explained the problem, and then we ambled over to a bed and I took a leisurely intravenous cocktail of Benadryl and epinephrine. Every now and again someone popped in to check on me. I slipped in and out of sleep. After a few hours we went home, none the worse for wear. We had just gotten married and were about to move to New York. Other things seemed more important. What were we thinking, we chided each other, ordering shellfish in the Midwest?

After that first reaction they prescribed an Epi-Pen, which is an automatic injection of epinephrine. You drive it down hard into your thigh when you feel the first warnings, like the throat swelling or hair standing up on end, and a needle pops out and jabs through your clothes and into your muscle. It comes in its own little tube, like Pez.

A few weeks after the first attack and months before the second, I tested myself. No crab rangoon, obviously, but at the Delaware shore I whacked fresh blue crab with a mallet and picked out the white shards of meat. After the first bite, it got easier and easier. Fresh seafood seemed so healthful, not like the dicey shellfish I had grown up eating on special occasions in Ohio and later in Wisconsin. I shattered scarlet lobster claws and dug out the flesh with the prongs of my fork, wrenched several dozen clams from their shells and crushed their bellies in my teeth without a thought. I was pretty sure my Epi-Pen was somewhere in my purse.

Steve and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Good God, can you imagine if I were allergic to shellfish?" I crowed. We were out on a porch, drinking beer and eating from a mixing bowl filled with steamed clams and wine. I held the shell down and wrenched a clam off its tight bundle of muscle, leaving a round wound like a bullet hole in its flesh.

"It wouldn't have been right," Steve agreed. He ate a slice of lobster tail. We had killed the lobster first with a headfirst dive into hot water and then cracked open the shells as we looked for roe. There wasn't any, so we flattened its head and legs and sauteed it in butter and wine. Now it was lobster in lobster stock, scarlet with tomatoes. It was delicious.

"I mean, you can't not eat shellfish," he continued, slurping some broth. "We plan vacations around it."

I have a terrible feeling we then clinked our beer bottles in a nitwitted little toast.

The morning after my most recent trip to the emergency room I wake with my skull heavy and congested.

"Am I still hideous?" I ask Steve.

He looks me over. "You look like you've been through something," he admits.

My eyelids are swollen, changing the shape of my eyes completely, my mouth is lavender and puffed. In my throat the egg has shrunk to a grain of rice.

After this latest incident I have a sheaf of prescriptions and referrals—almost as many as when I was a child. As a kid I existed among a flotilla of specialists around Akron and Cleveland: the ear, nose and throat guy, the optometrist, the dermatologist, and of course the allergist. By age seven I was unimpressed with needles thanks to my weekly allergy shots. At first the nurse told me to kiss my mom when they jabbed me, but soon I was strolling in alone and slouching in my chair, my arm flung out at the nurse, casual as a junkie.

Though I knew the consequences I often couldn't resist doing things that would send me into allergic attacks. I would count the sneezes, because I couldn't do anything else while they went on. Thirty, forty, fifty. I reacted badly to pollen, grass and ragweed, but nevertheless at my brother's baseball games I joined the other kids in hurling ourselves down a steep, weedy hill. Our bodies left a series of flattened lanes in the grass. Clunky in sneakers, our feet kicked up the grass cuttings, and before I finished my first roll I knew I was in trouble. My eyes were beginning to water and I had already sneezed once on the way down. My skin was smeared with green juice and bent sticks of grass like bug legs. Nevertheless I figured I had a couple more rolls in me before I would have to stop and take a few of the red tablets my mom carried for moments like this.

I remember all of that, but until I found myself in the hospital again I had forgotten the hive-y summer when I was three and my doctors forbade me to touch everything worth eating. No wheat, dairy, mayonnaise or eggs, no nuts, no chocolate. (Expensive shellfish, which no one in Stow, Ohio was wasting on a toddler, barely warranted mention.) My parents served me steamed rice, soy milk, carob chips, and fruit. My protests have not been recorded.

The hives went away and the doctors told my parents to give me forbidden foods again, one by one. One week they gave me cheese, then a chocolate bar, then an egg salad sandwich, a few roasted peanuts. I accepted each one contentedly, with no ill effects. We had moved on to new specialists by then, anyway. I needed glasses, I had broken my arm, I was prone to sinus infections and nose bleeds. I was not the pretty toddler I had been before the doctors, but my skin remained clear of hives no matter what I ate. For the rest of my childhood and into adulthood, I forgot I ever had a problem. I learned to eat fearlessly in the interest of culinary research and greed. I tore the heads off shrimp and lobster, ordered tripe and thymus glands. I made noises of distant sympathy for a friend with a fatal nut allergy that required him to tote an Epi-Pen as we ate our way through Italy and France.

Now, after the second attack in six months, I try to be afraid. I fake little shudders when I read recipes for linguine and shrimp, pad thai, any of the things I used to eat so frequently.

I still want them.

When my husband catches me at a restaurant without my Epi-Pen, he scolds me. Thereafter, as we leave the house, Steve blocks the door and says accusingly, "You have it?"

At another tapas bar with my sister I nibble a piece of calamari, reasoning it is not shellfish. Lately I have been eyeing menus at sushi restaurants, wondering how one categorizes a sea urchin. As I spear another piece of squid, my sister looks at me like I'm sipping strychnine.

"It's a cephalopod!" I protest. For a moment she seems unable to speak.

At least she too is restricted. She is pregnant: no crumbly, damp cheese for her, no wine or margaritas out by the pool. Still, she wins. At a restaurant she orders crab enchiladas and I sigh and look at her plate. She is smiling fondly at it: rich white strands of crab sigh forth from a soft golden corn tortilla, bright with salsa verde.

"That's just fine," I tell her bitterly. "You enjoy that crab and I'll just take a big sip of my wine."

I have made an appointment to find out exactly what I reacted to. I am hoping for shrimp, just shrimp. I can do without it, however delicious those monumental prawns in the Village were. I have had a lot of shrimp in my lifetime, but there are never enough clams and lobster to satisfy me. I courted my husband with a recipe for garlicky clams, which I never admitted was incredibly simple. When he moved all our things into the first apartment we shared I thanked him with lobster risotto. It can't just be chicken for me.

Having grown up far from seafood in the Midwest, I have waited a long time for New York City. The best we could do in Ohio was an infrequent splurge on littlenecks and lobster. That was the only time my parents hated to share. Normally I would barge in on their special parents-only meals and get samples of steak and sips of wine, but at lobster time my mother set her mouth, cut me a tiny bit of lobster tail and knocked the excess butter off with a sharp rap of her fork against the china cup.

While it awaited this fate, the seafood went into the refrigerator. There it was disturbed periodically by the children, who were interested in the brown paper bag that moved. We would open it stealthily, look into the bright eyes of the doomed lobster and feel a bit sorry for it as it weakened. It hardly bothered to stretch its antennae after awhile. I ate it anyway.

The allergist enters the room with a rack full of irritants. The nurse has dotted me with black magic marker, four long rows of twelve each on the white flesh of my forearms. The tray holds rows of small plastic rods, each soaking in an individual puddle of allergen. They stab me with them one by one, tossing the used sticks in the garbage. Down row after row, my arm erupts in stings, spreading crimson archipelagos across my skin. Grass, dust mites, pollen—vicious little jabs in some of the most sensitive skin I have. I refuse to cringe. Egg whites, chocolate, wheat. Just like when I was a kid. My arms sting and itch and I am not allowed to move them. Immobilized, I sit with my palms turned up and a pillow in my lap, watching my skin all but bubble in anger. "Don't move," barks the nurse. Peanuts, shrimp, lobster.

It's a bit of a mystery, says the allergist.

In the test I reacted only mildly to foods I have eaten without incident many times. The shrimp barely showed up. He suspects it is an issue of combination: alcohol, an allergen, and exertion like dancing—in other words, "fun"—and next thing I know I am in the hospital. But we can't say for sure. I could be wrong about the whole shrimp guess. Maybe it's peanuts. But maybe it's almost anything.

The allergist gives me a pamphlet on anaphylactic shock. Among the symptoms: "a sense of impending doom." I remember that cab ride to Beth Israel.

Whatever the trigger is, it's hiding in my system, warning me to eat the vegetables, the pasta, to sip a glass of someone else's wine, not to dance. I imagine myself in rural foreign countries, trying to find my way to a derelict hospital with my empty Epi-Pen. I have always wanted to go to Thailand, where the magnificent street food is rife with sprinkles of dried shrimp, which I can't bring myself to discount. I know enough to fear the French, whose stocks might draw their sweetness from invisible pounds of shrimp heads. It doesn't matter to me what the allergist said; I'm convinced it was the shrimp we tore apart so happily. So no more shopping trips for giant head-on prawns on Grand Street, no more bragging rights about eating shrimp brains, any more than I still hurl myself down the hill through the grass. I will probably have to prepare flashcards for myself for every foreign country I ever visit. So much for my food writer's voracity.

Faced with another grilled shrimp, one curled naked and beheaded in rice, I might not fear it. But one that is lipstick—bright, its tough shell shining and its pearly black eye trained on me� I can tell I have grown tentative, still believing that plunge into shock was an issue of offense rather than biology. I have a vision of myself in the tapas bars and sushi counters of the future, watching the people around me scarf up sea creatures while I sip my tea sedately, nibble grilled zucchini or pickled radishes, doomed to maintain a respectful distance.

No such problem at the shelter, where the preferred Newport 100 was elongated especially so that two people could go halfsies on it. Thus, the minute you pulled out a cigarette, someone said, "Gimme halfsies," and somebody else said, "You got another one of those?"

If you had three cigarettes or less in your pack, you could decline — "I only have one more after this, and my wish" - which was your "wish cigarette," the one you turned upside down as soon as you opened the pack while saying to yourself, for instance, "I hope I'm not, and I hope to god I never get, pregnant." You smoked your wish cigarette last, ruminating on the wish, and if you gave it away, you risked not finding your perfect new boyfriend, or magically receiving a thousand dollars.

Because I was the white girl, people smoked all my cigarettes. "White girl, Jenny, Jane. Gimme one." I resented it, but went along with it, griping to myself. If I didn't act friendly, it was confirmed that I was a stuck—up racist bitch. I was fighting a losing battle on that front ever since I "dissed some brothers" outside the Orange Julius while coming back from a shelter—sponsored trip to 42nd Street to see A Nightmare on Elm Street. What did I do? I didn't even know. We were strolling down the Deuce, making crazy killer razor—claw fingers at each other, and a swarm of guys launched right at us, sucking their teeth and muttering suggestions, so I tried to skirt past them. Not two blocks later, the whole group's cutting their eyes at me and hissing, "Bitch. Stupid white ho."

Still, life here in the Minors wing was marginally more comfortable than at Main, where I'd spent my first night and morning. Whereas Main held maybe seventy—five girls at a time, half of them sleeping on foam mattresses on the floor, the Minors wing housed only fifteen girls in shared bedrooms in a private, four—story brownstone, with two nuns or counselors on duty at all times. My new bed was in a room on the third floor with two other girls, Big Perla and Treece. Big Perla was the size of a sumo wrestler and she never spoke. Treece was a square—headed girl with square—rimmed Cazal glasses who hated my guts.

Treece's friend Sherri also hated my guts, and Sherri was psycho. Her fists were always clenched, her neck veins strained, and her nostrils flared; she was like a charging bull with cornrows. Sherri was six or seven months pregnant, her belly stuck out like a load of laundry in front of her, and she was determined to miscarry � often, when the nuns weren't looking, she'd take a flying leap at the arm of the sofa, or smash her belly into the stair banister.

I'd already had a run—in with square—head Treece and Sherri the pregnant psycho, my very first week at the Minors wing. They were hanging out in our room one night after lights out, dancing around by the window, fucking around with some guys standing down on the street, flashing them and miming blowjobs, whooping it up like it was Disneyworld. I was tired, and I knew Big Perla was trying to sleep too, and if the nuns had to come upstairs to shut us up, we would all get punished.

"Oh my gawd!" screeched Sherri, her big belly throwing distended shadows as she lurched around the room, heaving with laughter. I wasn't interested in a seven—thirty pm curfew, or cleaning the stairs with a toothbrush, so I pulled the pillow over my ear and grumbled, "Shut up."

The men on the street were forgotten. "Shut up?" said Treece, suddenly behind me. She reached out and slapped me in the head. "I know white girl didn't just tell me to shut up."

"Oh yes she did," said Sherri, at the foot of my bed.

"Hey!" I said, as Treece jumped on top of me, pushing the pillow hard on my face. "MMMPH!"

I flailed in panic, the feet of the bed scraping and bumping on the floor as we thrashed, and the nuns immediately called up the stairs, "Ladies!" They were on their way. Treece got me with a fist to the side of the head, then scrambled back across the room to her bed, as Sherri fled to her room. Sister Thomas Rita opened the door and hit the lights. Treece and I lay there panting, pretending to wake from a deep sleep. Perla lay there with her eyes and mouth shut, as usual.

"What just happened here," demanded Sister Thomas Rita. She was a tall, broad—backed woman, formidable even in her sixties.

"Nothing," I said, my heart drumming loud in my ears. "I don't know, I was asleep."

"I didn't hear nothin'," said Treece, grumpy. "Sound like it came from upstairs." Perla showed us her silent back, pillow over her ear.

Sister Thomas Rita wasn't buying it. "I know I heard something. In this room. Who else was in here?"

I shook my head and shrugged, mouth innocently agape. Treece continued to act affronted. "Nobody! We was sleeping!"

I could feel a tender spot throb where her fist hit my head. "Honestly," I said, "we were."

Sister Thomas Rita squinted at me. She was a tough old nun, and she had no problem throwing you out for breaking the rules. No fighting was the first rule; fighting would get you thrown out of the shelter right then and there � both of you. Even if you were just defending yourself. I looked up and blinked at her, blameless.

Sister Thomas Rita left, unsatisfied, and Treece and I sank back in our beds. "I'ma catch up with you later," she promised me.

"Look, I'm sorry I said shut up, I apologize." Jesus.

I had not slept easy since that night. I was way on the tips of my toes. I waited until the last person was finished in the bathroom so I could be the last person in bed. I stayed out after school until dinner, and after dinner I stayed in plain view in the TV room until it was time for lights out. But if I ever happened to cross Treece or Sherri coming from the bathroom, or going down the stairs to the kitchen for chores, they'd press right up against me in my face and flex.

"White bitch."

And I'd do my best not to flinch, even at the fake punch that often followed, or the real shove. Just scurry away, get past it. I wouldn't be here forever.

Where was I going to go? That was the burning question. The counselors determined that "family reunification" was not a viable solution in my case � they were talking to me about foster care, or a group home. Scary, but exciting to think about a new life, one that didn't include any of my ostensible parents. As long as the shelter wasn't sending me back home, I'd go just about anywhere.

My mother had called the shelter twice so far. The first time, I called her back, revving up my indignation in advance so I wouldn't immediately cave in when she told me that Dave was gone and she begged me to come home.

Which she didn't. "I don't know what is the matter with you," she said, coldly, her heels echoing on the floor as she paced. "This is unacceptable behavior. You'd better get your butt home, pronto. You have a lot of explaining to do."

"Me?" Blood rushed to my face, swirling in my ears. There must have been some kind of mistake, I must have misdialed the phone � the lady on the other end was supposed to be crying right now, apologizing, swearing to make it up to me if I'd forgive her again. Instead I heard Dave in the background, clearing his throat like a bad actor, making his presence known. "You said you weren't taking him back, I told you...!"

She rolled over this like a tank. "You don't set the rules around here! Now you can come home right now, or I can throw away all of your belongings. If you don't live here, your stuff doesn't live here either."

I hung up the phone, went to the bathroom, and cried for about an hour.

I didn't return her second call.

Girls came in and out of the Minors wing. A girl named Bernadette, gawky with a big flat nose, locked herself in the pantry with a knife � they had to call the nutwagon to come and get her, straightjacket and everything. Nuns didn't fuck around. Two girls, both named Tina, got thrown out in one night, after fighting each other over a bisexual boy hustler named Angel. A small, bow—backed Chinese girl came in one afternoon, stayed for about an hour, and sneaked out, never to be seen again.

Then my scary square—head roommate Treece got bounced when she showed up two hours past curfew, trying to get in the door. Everybody knew, if you were even fifteen minutes late, the counselors were already packing your stuff in a plastic bag and people were claiming your leftover toiletries. You missed curfew, you didn't get back in the house, period, ever.

So Treece's ousting could not even remotely be my fault, but of course Treece's hate—mate Sherri tried to put the blame on me. I heard her talking loud about me in the room next door: "You can't trust that white bitch. She always running to the nuns, complaining out her neck. Watch, she gonna get me thrown out, too. Watch."

Sherri wasn't even waiting to catch me alone any more, now she'd try to fight me right there in the TV room. "I hate that white bitch. She know I'm talking about her, but she too scared to look over. Bitch can't even look at me. Hah." Then she'd punch herself in the stomach. There was no possible response to this; I'd tried everything � laughing, scowling, leaving the room, addressing her — "I don't know what your problem is with me, Sherri, I never did anything to you."

Somebody mocked me from the corner, my corny white girl enunciation: "I dewn't knew what your per—ob—lem is." I excused myself from the TV room.

Fortunately, not everyone hated me quite so much. This new girl, Roxanne, seemed very mellow. She and I found ourselves walking to the A train together one morning, and somehow we started talking about books. There were no books at the shelter except some old coverless Michener paperbacks, a World Fact Book from 1973, and a beat—up copy of the Bible, which failed to grab my interest the one time I deigned to skim it.

"Who do you like to read," Roxanne asked. "Who's your favorite author." I had to think about it so I didn't say Jackie Collins. "I guessed Kurt Vonnegut, or Kahlil Gibran."

She nodded. "My favorite author is James Baldwin, you know him?"

"'Sonny's Blues,'" I said. "He's really good."

"You know he's gay," she offered.

Ah hah. I should've figured. "That's cool."

Roxanne smiled wide. She had a broad face with a big, cheeky smile, which was purple and white against her dark brown skin. She had earring holes, but no earrings. Her hair was short and natural, and she wore a blue workman's coat. "You all right, Jane."

I didn't correct her on my name.

Roxanne and I went to the laundromat together on the weekend, traded stories. She was from the Bronx, where she said she used to be a "Five Percenter."

"What's a Five Percenter?"

Roxanne rolled her eyes and shook her head, like I didn't want to know. "Girl, Five Percenters is the blackest black people there is. They're Islam, and they preach that the white man is the devil." She broke into her wide smile. "You don't want to come visit me in my neighborhood."

We watched our laundry turn in the dryers, all the clothes we owned except what was on our backs — my black sweater, purple with wear; the jeans and t—shirt I got from the donations room at the shelter. Everything else had been left in a bag on the curb in front of my mother's apartment.

"So, what are you doing here," asked Roxanne, curious, but not critical. Everyone else who asked seemed a little critical.

I gave her the short answer: "Stepfather." Roxanne nodded. It was a common answer. "How about you."

"Mother," she said, sighing. "And father."

Yeah.

There was a pause where the next question would go, if the next question were said out loud. So...how bad was it?

"Your stepfather ever try anything with you?" she asked, raising her eyebrows like she was amused.

"No, he's mean, he's definitely crazy, but no." Another pause.

"My father's been trying to have sex with me for years now," she said. "But he and my mom got divorced when I was little."

"Jesus." She was so nonchalant, I didn't want to overreact, but � Jesus. I mean, say what you want about my own crazy dad; at least he never tried to have sex with me.

"Yeah, he's always coming around my school, trying to talk to me. Telling me he wants to take me to a hotel, buy me things." She made a flapping puppet mouth with her hand. "Talking all this crazy stuff."

"That's crazy. They're all..." I shook my head.

She shook her head too. "...Yeah."

Roxanne liked to keep a low profile at the shelter, where her "gay ass" was not embraced. She wanted to spend evenings downstairs in the quiet kitchen doing homework, and I was only welcome to join her if I was going to be totally quiet, and not clowning, or kicking her ankle. Sometimes I managed to calm down enough to work alongside her, with the hiss of the brownstone's steam heat shushing me. Other times the lure of the TV room was too great, I wanted to smoke or use the pay phone. I got restless, shuffled my papers too loud, and got a scowl that sent me upstairs.

What can I say. I was bored. In between being scared, and being angry, and feeling sorry for myself and deprived, and then feeling really proud of myself and full of adrenaline, I was bored. The shelter was dull, it was ugly, it was uncomfortable � wherever you sat was saggy and smelly. There was no privacy. There was nothing to do. It was like waiting at a bus station for days at a time. People lolled around, enervated and cranky and hungry, hoping something or somebody interesting would distract them until it was their time to get shipped off someplace else.

Vondell was a distraction. She was one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, and she was only twelve years old. When she came into the Minors wing, she lied and said she was seventeen, and she looked like it � she had a woman's face, full, round breasts, and a curvy waist and ass � but the counselors eventually came up with her legal name and birth date, and Vondell was busted. She was furious � she could have had a nine thirty pm weekend curfew. Instead, she had to be home by seven every night.

Baby Vondell was a sensation in the house. She was everywhere, hanging off people's arms, laying front and center across the couch in the TV room, sucking her thumb, and I quickly became her favorite, well, one of her favorites, at least. She called me Mamma, as in "Mamma, you love me? Am I pretty? You gonna give me thirty cents?" Asking was she pretty like she didn't know. She was a living, breathing plum, and she smelled like cocoa butter, sprawled out there on my lap.

I had to wonder if maybe Roxanne's tendencies were rubbing off on me, or if I was really this pathetically happy just to be liked by another girl in the house, even if it was insincere. Either way, I was acting like a chump. Roxanne came with me to buy a Klondike bar at the corner store, then laughed at me when I threw in a bag of BonTons for Baby Vondell. "Oh, no. That little girl is playing you."

I scoffed. I knew full well what Vondell was up to. I chose to let her play me, so I wasn't getting played. "She's not playing me. I offered to buy her some chips."

"Oh, you offered. After she went on for twenty minutes about how she's dying of hunger, and won't somebody bring her chips." Roxanne did an apt impression of Vondell, with her lower lip pouted out, and I cracked up.

"Shut up, you're just jealous."

"Of who? Vondell? Pshoo." She punched my shoulder, grinning. "Get over yourself, girl, you ain't all that. And besides, I know you always love me the best."

"Friends," rapped Whodini over the radio. "How many of us have them?"

I'd given the number to the residents' pay phone to some people from school, but the phone never rang for me. Which was fine, whatever they were new friendships, most of us were new sophomores at the school that year. It wasn't like we'd all been friends since the seventh grade. I didn't even have any friends since the seventh grade I was a pariah in middle school, and my freshman year at Competitive High hadn't been much better. But this year, since I'd started at this new school in Chelsea, things were significantly different. I'd dropped into a decent—sized crew of new—wave party kids skateboarders, art punks, potheads, and mods that covered a full two tables in the lunchroom. The girls wore tight, pegged purplish—black pants and shirts with cut—out necklines; the guys doodled checkerboards in pen on their white hi—top canvas sneakers. After school, we slouched around Washington Square Park, trying to mooch each others' pot; on weekends, we went to keg parties or dive bars or nightclubs like Danceteria. This was all recapped at the lunch tables on Monday.

"We stayed out so late on Friday," said my friend Alice, flipping her long, famous black hair. "We were having such a good time, we did not want to leave."

"That sounds fun," I said, over a mouthful of school lunch. School lunch was a shameful thing, but it was free with my voucher, and I was hungry.

"It was really fun," added my friend Hope. "Totally."

Alice continued playing with her mesmerizing hair, which fell straight down like waterfalls from both sides of her perfect part, like the Chinese girls' over in their corner of the lunchroom. Guys loved Alice's hair. They loved Alice, even though she was only a gawky sophomore, baby fat still apparent under her sharp chin she acted way older than fifteen. Hope sat next to her at the chipped formica table, chewing absently on her raggedy nailpolish. She was shorter and curvier than Alice, with a strawberry—blonde bob and a sweet, kittenish face, usually set in a look of jaded disdain.

Alice and Hope and I were in the same homeroom together, and we shared the belief that everything about school was beneath us, so we had grouped up pretty quick. We ran around to parties and bars together, cut first period and got bagels, kept up on who the others hated and liked. On paper, Hope and Alice were my best friends. Sometimes, though, it was like they weren't even thinking about me.

"You should have come out with us," said Alice. Was she laughing at me? It was hard to tell with Alice; she had a habit of pursing her lips in a little pout when she came to the end of a sentence. "We missed you."

"Yeah...I have that curfew."

"That's right, oh my god. What is it, like nine o'clock? That totally sucks."

"Totally sucks," Hope agreed. Hope was more empathetic, she got grounded by her mom all the time. She usually went out anyway and suffered for it later. Sometimes I thought Hope was tougher than me, because she stayed at her mother's, while I ran to the shelter for protection. Her mom was at least as bad as mine.

Alice grabbed Hope's wrist. "I can't believe Ollie Wythe was there, he is so gorgeous."

"Oh my god, Ollie Wythe is so gorgeous."

Hope and Alice had a little shudder and whinny over gorgeous Ollie Wythe, a member of this pack of hot, alcoholic upperclassmen who called themselves "the Boyses." Coming in contact with any of the Boyses for any reason made Hope and Alice neigh like horses "I saw Leland Banks in the stairway after fourth, bbbrrrrrrr!" "Ollie Wythe almost ran me over with his skateboard before first, huhhhhhh!" I had no encounters with the Boyses to report. I just kept shoveling in the Salisbury steak.

"So, what'd you do this weekend, Janice?"

NununUNununun, Nanice? I didn't want to be extra—sensitive, but suddenly I was in a shit mood. I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to sound casual.

"Not much. Hung out. Went to the park on Saturday."

"Oh."

Yeah. Here's what I did that weekend: On Friday night, I ate a Klondike bar on a stoop with Roxanne. We sat outside in the cold December air until exactly nine pm, then we went back inside, where Baby Vondell smoked all my Newport 100s, and Sherri crossed her eyes and spat at me.

On Saturday I looked for a job. In the afternoon, I went to Washington Square in the cold, hoping someone would be hanging out and smoking pot. I watched the Rastafarians bounce soccer balls like hackey sacks, and envied their customers. On Sunday it rained and I stayed in. It was my turn to sweep and mop all five flights of stairs and the hallways. That took about an hour and a half. I even did some homework. That's how bored I was.

I needed a new boyfriend, or some guy to spend time with. Me and the girls aimed high in our dating careers, but there were only two or three really top status guys at school, and we couldn't all go after the same ones. Maybe, I thought, I should broaden my criteria. There was a guy from the swim team in my Computers class who was exceptionally well—built, though he had a skin problem. He was conservative and dull, with his collared sport shirts and his too—short hair, but he seemed interested in me, and he had that upper body.

I floated the notion by Hope over a cigarette in the fourth—floor bathroom. "What do you think of Andrew Winkler?"

Her nose wrinkled. "I don't know, dude...I guess he's got a nice body, but...he's not that hot...and he's not even that funny or anything."

"Oh, I know. He's totally in love with me. I'm like, 'No thanks, I only want to have sex with your shoulders and chest.'"

"Hah." Hope appreciated my toughness, as I did hers.

Despite the veto, I pressed on. I needed something to do after school. I was tired of sitting in the TV room at the shelter like a political protester, always passively resisting a beating. I deserved a little hands—on affection.

We should study together sometime, I proposed to Andrew via note.

His reply: I like to study naked.

And that was what we called foreplay.

It was quickly arranged that I would go over to Andrew's on Friday to study naked. "We have to go right after school, though, because my mom gets home at five."

I rolled my eyes at Andrew's mommy. People who lived with their parents were such suckers. They had even less freedom than I did at the shelter. When I got my own apartment, they would all be jealous. "Whatever," I said, dismissive.

"And we can't smoke pot or cigarettes or anything in the house."

"Okay." Some date this was shaping up to be.

Still, I went. The bell rang after eighth period, and we both left by the back exit, as agreed — better not to parade down the block, lined with friends who would just stall and embarrass us. We walked briskly back to his apartment in Chelsea. We didn't have anything to talk about on the walk. The only thing we'd ever really discussed was the logistics of this date, and now here we were, on it. Andrew was a nervous person, I realized, trotting beside him down Greenwich Avenue. Besides missing obvious answers in Computers, and taking teasing way too personally, he was also a little bit of a granny. Oh well. I didn't respect him, I didn't even like him, but I didn't dislike him yet, so here we were.

He hustled me into his building, then the elevator, then the apartment, then his bedroom. No grand tour, no orientation. His room was dark blue with white trim. A desk, a basketball, a pile of laundered and folded clothes. A big boy's room.

"So," I said coyly, sitting on his bed. "Are we going to study?"

He said something like, "Unh," and fell on me. This was the first kiss, the climax of all the waiting. It was wet and flabby. Our chemistry was inert, all the molecules dropping straight to the floor, refusing even to roll. I thought, Ugh. I wondered what he was thinking. He was in his own world, eyes squeezed shut, pimples pulsing. "Take off your shirt," I said seductively, as he blindly humped my upper thigh.

Ah yes, there they were, the pectoral muscles. The shoulders, the upper abs. Something to focus on while this nasty operation was underway. God, he really didn't know what he was doing. Stab, stab. "Here." I realized, He's a virgin. He's just using me to have sex for the first time, so he can say he did it. And why was I using him again? For the romance?

I thought, Let's just get this over with.

It didn't take long. It never did. The cleaning up was gross. I splashed water everywhere, trying to bathe in the sink like a pigeon in a puddle. Spruce myself up before I bolted up to the shelter. I caught myself in the mirror, eye makeup smudged, hair mussed, neck bitten, face red. Busted.

Here we are again, I said.

The regular, my reflection replied.

We smirked at each other, and turned away.

"The Regular," (excerpt) from GIRLBOMB — A Half-way Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum. Copyright 2006 by Janice Erlbaum. Reprinted by permission of the author.