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He was relieved when Breakfast suggested they go on a beer run. Dustin offered to do it himself and bring Taz along for company. He needed to figure out if he could be held responsible. He checked for Biesty on the way out, but he'd disappeared somewhere with the hash smoker.

“You
like
this shit?” Taz asked, pointing at the tape deck. Getting her in the car had been psychologically complex, achieved in the end by the promise of cigarettes.

“It's X. The best band in the world.” He turned it up.

“It's, like, stomping on my buzz.”

“What do you listen to?”

She shrugged. “The Buttholes.”

“The Butthole Surfers?” He laughed. “You just heard that at the party.”

“Probably because it was my tape.”

Dustin wondered whether she was telling the truth. They stopped at a red light, under the glow of a streetlamp. She was definitely less attractive than Kira. She had fuzz between her eyebrows and there was a little mole, like an errant crumb, on her upper lip. Plus the scabby ears, which she kept picking at with her fingernail. There was something about her face—its unreadable smirk—that made him unhappy.

“Is there, like, an unperverted reason you keep staring at me?”

“What's that in your hair?” he asked. “Peroxide?”

She turned her face away quickly. “It's a witch's forelock.”

“What?”

“I thought Kira only dated smart guys.” She kept her face turned. “Like a birthmark. They used to burn people at the stake if they had it.”

“Does your family know you're here?” he asked.

“Right. Ha-ha. They packed me a lunch.”

Dustin frowned. “Just so they don't think I have anything to do with it.”

“I won't tell a peep. A person. Don't get your panties in a wad.” Taz tried to roll her window down, struggling with the lever. It came off in her hand. “Piece of shit,” she said, tossing the lever into the backseat.

“Hey!” Dustin said. “That's a hundred-dollar part!”

“And it doesn't work? I'd say you got majorly ripped off.” Her eyes surveyed the front seat before settling on the steering wheel in Dustin's hand. It was his favorite part of the car, wine-colored and big as a yacht's. “Do you have some of those, like, fuzzy dice?”

“No.”

“I thought only people with fuzzy dice drove cars like this.”

At the 7-Eleven, Taz insisted on coming inside to pick out her
cigarettes. Kira was right: she was a major pain in the ass. Who did she think she was? Girls loved the Dart; just last weekend someone on Hollywood Boulevard, a chick with a
mohawk,
had asked him for a ride. The 7-Eleven was as bright as a toothpaste commercial. Sweating on their little Ferris wheel, the hot dogs looked sad and immortal, as if consigned to hot dog hell. Dustin found himself wishing he had never left the house. He glanced at the mirror above the beer section and saw a friendly-looking surfer kid in a ridiculous belt buckle. His face flushed with shame. A guy wearing one of those travel vests with all the pockets on them came over and stood beside Taz.

“To beer or not to beer,” the man said, “
that
is the question.”

Taz looked at him. “Did you really just say that?”

“What?”

“‘To beer or not to beer, that is the question'?”

“I'm trying to decide.” The man winked at them, checking his watch. “It's getting late.”

“Congratulations,” Taz said, shaking his hand. “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

Dustin bought the beer with his fake ID, annoyed at his envy. He wished he had the balls to tell someone they were stupid. They headed back to the party, cruising down Western with its grubby-looking mini-malls, all of them the same Pepto-Bismol pink. He'd have to remember to put that in a song. “Pepto Abysmal,” he'd call it.

“Kira said you got kicked out of boarding school.”

Taz scowled, lighting one of the cigarettes he'd bought her. “Kira doesn't know anything.”

“Actually, she's very smart. She's worried about you like your parents are.”

“
Actually,
they couldn't give two shits.”

Dustin shrugged. What did he care? “If that's true, then you must be a real fuckup.”

“Or maybe they're just, like, total hypocrites.” She yanked up a sock. “Everyone knows Kira smokes dope. She's going out with
you,
for crap's sake. She smokes out, screws to her heart's content, but of course they treat her like some virgin-ass Teen for Christ.”

“Well, they're half-right,” Dustin mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He felt his cheeks go warm again.

Taz laughed. “Kira's a
virgin
?”

“I didn't say that.”

“I don't believe it!”

“Hey. I never said that.”

“Holy crap,” Taz said, grinning. “She must be, like, the only one in her class.”

This wasn't true, of course. How could it be? And yet he had a vision of the rest of the incoming seniors at PV High, doing it all over campus while he groped and fondled under the maddening threat of the Grip. Dustin began to drive recklessly for no reason, whipping between lanes and braking suddenly at a red light. They rocked forward in their seats, the beer clinking at Taz's feet. “Whoa,” Taz said. The light changed and Dustin veered onto a side street, fast enough that the tires squealed. “Big man,” Taz said, raising her hands in mock fright. Dustin felt ridiculous but couldn't stop himself. He flew down the narrow street doing sixty; a man stepped off the sidewalk into a strip of hydrangeas, shaking his fist like someone in a movie. “
Very
impressive,” Taz said as they screeched up to the party.

He couldn't look at her. His face burned. When he finally did glance at her, gripped by loathing, he was surprised to see that she was no longer smirking. Or rather, she was still smirking at him but it was as unpersuasive as a mask, her eyes large and childlike. He'd actually frightened her.

Inside, there was something going on. A group of people were huddled in the living room, cheering at the floor. Dustin nudged into the circle to see the attraction. The lobster was backed against the wall, reared up with its claws raised like boxing gloves, cornered by a hissing gray cat standing a few feet away. The cat was arched into an omega, as though being sucked helplessly to the ceiling.

“Get some Raid,” the guy next to him said.

Dustin went into the kitchen to put the beer in the fridge. He did not like this party quite so much anymore. Biesty was hanging out by the poster of “Afrosexual Positions,” writing something on the wall; Dustin looked closer and recognized the lyrics to “All Tomorrow's Parties.”

“Can't you see it?” Biesty said, shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes behind his glasses were red as a rooster's.

“What?”

“The writing on the wall!”

Ordinarily Dustin would have laughed, but he kept thinking about Kira's sister. Somehow she'd made everything he did seem like a joke. It wasn't only the smirk: just the thought of that witchy streak in her hair, dangling stupidly into her eyes, was enough to make him feel like a fraud. Dustin drank one of the Budweisers he'd bought while Biesty worked on a hash-inspired rendering of a Keebler elf. The girl named Suzie was passed out against the wall, in the same position as before. On the wire sticking from her mouth, threaded like beads, were several olives. Looking at her, Dustin felt sad. There was some elemental contradiction in his dream of himself. He wanted to live in a world where people did drugs all day and said what they were thinking and took off each other's braces if they felt like it, but where doing these things never seemed bleak or depressing. He could have his beach and his fucked-up parties, too.

Breakfast came in the back door, grabbing a beer from the fridge. He failed to offer Dustin any money. “You better tend to your girlfriend.”

“What?”

“Taz le Raz.”

“She's my girlfriend's sister.”

Breakfast shrugged. “Whatever. She's out there entertaining the guests.”

Dustin went out to the back deck, where Taz was standing near a potted cactus, several people watching her with the same guilty enthrallment he'd seen on the faces cheering the lobster inside. The only one not watching was the guy in the top hat, who sprayed some PAM into a plastic bag and then stuffed it up to his face. He blinked his eyes wide when he was finished, like something hatching from an egg.

“You're fucking AWOL,” the beautiful girl in the cowboy hat said to Taz. The girl turned to Dustin, laughing. “Tell her it's not funny.”

“What?”

“She's got some glass in her mouth. She's going to swallow it.”

“It's her meager power,” the guy with the top hat said.

Taz grinned at Dustin and stuck out her tongue. Sure enough, there was a shard of glass on it, green and hooked like a claw. Part of a beer bottle. The word
EXTRA
was written across it in white
letters. Dustin tried to grab Taz's arm, but she flinched and backed away, clenching her teeth.

“I'm a witch,” Taz said. Her voice was strange, lispy and garbled. “It won't hurt me.”

“She's already eaten a little piece,” the girl said.

“An appetizer,” the guy with the top hat said. “As it, ahem, turns out.”

“You'll slice up your throat,” Dustin said, stepping closer.

Taz looked at him through her creepy forelock. “What are you going to do about it?”

He had no idea. Frankly, he was beginning to understand why they historically burned witches at the stake. Taz flipped the forelock out of her face, like a dare. Without thinking, he snagged the sleeve of her T-shirt and she sprang toward him suddenly and mashed her face into his own, trying to force his mouth open with her lips, not a kiss so much as a retaliation, a physical attack, Dustin opening his lips until he could feel the glass at the end of her tongue, the cool claw of it, smooth and warped and razory, and then she was pushing it into his mouth, transferring it like a harmless bit of candy. They pulled away. Dustin plucked the shard from his mouth with two fingers, as if it were alive. His hand was trembling. He could taste some blood on his tongue. Taz smirked at him triumphantly, ignoring the other people on the deck. Only then, seeing that she was trembling as well, did it occur to him she wasn't as crazy as she seemed: she'd been planning her attack, waiting for him to come and find her.

“Who is this guy?” someone asked. “You know each other?”

“My future brother-in-law,” Taz said.

At Nordstrom, Camille wandered the aisles with the vague feeling of oppression that always accompanied her visits to the pleasantly air-conditioned department store. The handbags were particularly oppressive. Something about their sleek leather forms, displayed like jewels in their little glass cubbies, made her feel lost and frumpy and unloved. The man playing the piano nearby seemed to understand this, tinkling out “The Lady Is a Tramp” to the arriving shoppers. Even the salesclerks, who smiled dutifully at Camille but failed to approach her in any way, seemed to wonder why she was here.

She wondered this herself. She was supposed to be at the post office, sending in her check to Oxfam International. There was a famine in Ethiopia; close to a million people had died. Instead she was wandering around a store selling $400 purses, drawn here mysteriously after dropping Lyle off at work.

She was preparing to leave, heading through Coats toward Beauty and Fragrance, when she saw it. The shawl. It was black and elegant and exotically Western-looking, fringed with little tassels. Even the mannequin it was draped over seemed more glamorous than the rest, one hand raised in the air as if hailing a cab. Camille touched the lovely black fabric, soft as down, hanging from the mannequin's arm. Before that moment, the word “shawl” had been a powerless clump of letters. She checked the price tag dangling from its shoulder: $295.

“Gorgeous, isn't it?” one of the saleswomen asked. She was smiling politely, though her eyes simmered with boredom. “Would you like to try it on?”

“It's awfully expensive.”

“Well, it's cashmere. From Italy. That's actually a fairly good price.”

Camille stared at the tassels. “It's not the sort of thing I usually wear.”

The saleswoman glanced at her mint green shirt, embroidered at the hem with tiny pink and blue flowers. Camille recalled that the precise color was “seedling.” Turning to a rack near the mannequin, the saleswoman removed an identical shawl from its hanger and held it out to Camille. Camille shook her head and fled the store. When she got to the Volvo, taking refuge in its leathery heat, she found she was actually trembling.

She took the pack of Camel Lights from her purse and lit up a cigarette. She hadn't known what kind to buy at the Shell Station, so she'd asked for the brand she'd once found shoved in the back of Lyle's underwear drawer. The first puffs put a stitch in her throat, the tremor of a cough, but soon enough the stitch seemed to loosen and the smoke filled her lungs as naturally as breath. She blew a cirrus stream of it out the window. She'd smoked three cigarettes from the pack already. She blamed the family planning clinic for her nerves: if they'd fit her in earlier today, instead of asking her to wait until four, she wouldn't be in such a state. She'd know one way or another. Instead she'd had to pee in a jar first thing this morning, as per their advice, and then hide the still-warm sample at the back of the fridge.

If she were actually pregnant, the cigarettes would be unforgivable.

A jet climbed the sky like a rocket, spinning a long thread of smoke that feathered in the sun. She thought of Bobby Wurzweiler and his callused hands, touching her in his boathouse. All week, she hadn't been able to see a plane without thinking of his face.