‘I said I was sorry!’
Ezrah eased up off my gut. His pyjama pants looked weird, like a button was pushed out. He lay down beside me and kept crossing and uncrossing his legs. He pulled the covers up over our heads again and stood the flashlight between our faces.
‘Let’s stay up all night,’ he said.
All I felt like doing was looking at his face. The haze in the blanket made his eyes huge and grey. Ezrah was catching his breath, letting me stare. Right between his eyebrows, his face started changing. First his eyes got bigger, then his eyebrows pointed up. Ezrah looked like a fox. Then he looked like a clown.
Ezrah complained that I’d never stay up all night with him.
‘No, I’m awake,’ I told him. My eyes were half-open.
It bothered me that I could never remember the second I fell asleep. I wanted to memorize that exact click. I knew people died in their sleep and that meant going to sleep without ever waking up. I thought that if I remembered the exact second before falling asleep, I would know for sure I wasn’t ever going to die like that. There was a prayer that I heard some kids say at school that always freaked me out: ‘If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ Those words kept going over and over in my head. I did not want to die before I woke up.
‘Mira, you’re falling asleep.’
Ezrah set the flashlight at the top of our heads. A soft yellow circle touched the ceiling through the blanket. I asked Ezrah to tell me what was happening on my face.
Ezrah reached out and touched the spot above my left eye. ‘It’s okay to go to sleep,’ he said. He stroked my eyelid down.
My face felt so hot. I reached out my finger to do the same thing to him: a little, light stroke in the space above his one eye. We each had one eye open, one eye shut. He kept touching my eyelid and I kept touching his. Our thin purple skins there rippled together.
As I woke up, I felt Ezrah’s breathing, humid on my lips. I rolled on my back and took the blanket off my head. From the blueness in the room, I knew it was near morning.
I think I can remember every moment when I touched him or he touched me, because something always happened afterward. It was as if I could feel more things under my skin, as if there were a night light searching inside me. I liked it when Ezrah touched me, but I just didn’t always want it to get started. I think maybe the difference between all those times is lost in a pile in my head. Or my thoughts are too lazy to keep my brain clean.
Still, I know the best times happened when nighttime pressed us together, sweating.
Then Ezrah started wanting his friends to hug me, too, and we all started looking at these books, then magazines – two naked people on top of each other, three naked people inside of each other, his head there and her head there, his legs up and her legs down, tits and pussies, cocks and dicks, Ezrah’s hands on top of me, more hands underneath. What other girl played these kinds of games? And who else didn’t say anything after? I thought I was the only one.
Nadia worked at Carousel’s. She’d been there as a bartender since she’d turned eighteen and she always served all of her underage friends. Because of her dad, she said to me, the cops didn’t care. I still had no idea what he did. But I’d been hanging out at Carousel’s since I was sixteen and Nadia always fed me double rum and Cokes.
The very first time that I met Adi, it was the summer after I graduated from high school. I remember that night how I didn’t want to go home because I knew my parents were just going to ask me if I’d gotten a summer job and why didn’t I have a job yet. There were a few cute roadies wandering around with cigarettes and beers, a bunch of kids from our school too. When Nadia saw me come in, she flapped her hand sort of frantically at her nose like something stank. Nadia’s hair wasn’t braided like it usually was; it was full of static, down to her shoulders, not brushed. She wasn’t wearing her silvery lipstick either. She looked so rattled, I thought, because she was drinking too much Coke or something. I knew that my parents would be happy if I just got my old job back at the Second Cup to save money for university. They would never want me to work at Carousel’s.
‘Mira, fucking help me god,’ Nadia whispered, lighting up a cigarette. She grabbed my hand too tight, dug her nails in. ‘This girl my dad brought in today is fucking crazy. She’s in the bathroom right now. She’s here on one of those exotic things.’
‘What exotic thing?’
I was thinking about eight hours standing behind steaming coffee pots, the tuna-fish stink of grinding beans. John.
‘I mean exotic dancer, come on, the exotic dancer visa thing. What the fuck, I don’t need you to jew me out right now.’
‘I’m not jewing you out, you Rusky! Who is she, I’m just asking.’
Nadia motioned behind me. The roadies were watching. I turned around in my seat and watched too. The girl strutted out from the bathroom in these fat plastic shoes, Alice in Wonderland shoes, like a cartoon or something. Maybe it was her short white fur coat, too, which was shaggy like a goat. I started to laugh. Nadia hissed at to me to stop. The girl kind of shimmied onto a bar stool. She threw her short white fur coat on the floor.
‘Most of them are Romanians,’ Nadia whispered. ‘But that bitch over there, she’s this notorious Volgograd whore.’
I started to laugh again and Nadia couldn’t stop me. Volgograd whore. It sounded so comedy-ominous. I knew Volgograd was Nadia’s hometown and I shouldn’t laugh. But that Russian girl who was at the opposite end of Carousel’s leather-bumpered trough started laughing too.
‘Stop it, I’m serious.’ Nadia knifed me harder with her nails. ‘I don’t know why my dad left her here.’
That girl kind of reminded me of Nadia at twelve: the albino bunny hopping on our sidewalk. Maybe it was her fur coat.
The Volgograd whore was watching me.
‘Don’t even look at her, Mira. She’s a fucking terrorist.’
‘Can I get a rum and Coke?’ I asked. ‘Please? Double-shot me, Rusky.’