pointed. “Auntie Barbara brought me, and she bought me a new two piece, and…” I told her the rest of my story but got no reaction. Umm, two pieces are a big deal. Hellooooooo. We walked the last piece of the way in silence, checked into a hotel, and went about the business of settling in. Finally.

We spent the next five and a half years on the island, still moving constantly, of course. But this time there wasn’t far to go. There was one public school, one post office, one Chinese food place, and two pizzerias called Antonio’s. Whatever insanity we’d experienced to get there got swallowed up by the ocean.

Two decades later, through the blast of a hair dryer, I found out why.

What had happened was a grammatical error, a misinterpretation of synonyms. Before we left for Spain, one of my mother’s ex-lovers asked if she was taking me along too. My mother replied, “Of course: Lena is my biggest asset.” Frances had gotten a job as a nanny to a rich American family in Madrid. I’d be raised up with their kids, go to an international school, eat tapas, and be exotic. What Frances meant by “asset” was that I was like a prototype—the most important bullet point on her mommy résumé. This ex of hers thought that by “asset,” Frances meant something more along the lines of goods for sale, the liquefiable kind. So then this asshole called up my grandmother, and my grandmother called my aunties, and my aunties called each other, and a few days later, Frances would end up alone in an airport parking lot. In a really crazy twist, my grandmother had my mother arrested. So we were both in prison. Frances could have me back, Effie promised, only after marrying a man named Herbert, staying in California, and raising me up right. After five days of stubbornness, she was freed and we sailed away.

I learned all this at the hair salon.

“And do you know Barbara and them never apologized?” Even with singed ears, I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

Three

THE BEATITUDES OF ST. CLAIR

It was in Catalina at the house on Whittley Avenue that I got the courage to ask her.

I was in sixth grade by then, with a head streaked blond by the summer and a soul that belonged to The Cosby Show. A bottle of Sun-In might’ve solved things—bleaching out the black and covering up the gay—but I wanted something more permanent for us.

Every Thursday at eight, I had an impossible choice—pedal up Country Club Road to hear parents-cum-preachers talk about how blessed we were to be saved so early, or have a night in with Cliff and Clair. Eternal damnation had never been so prime-time.

For almost two years I’d been going to Awana Club meetings with all the other kids who needed Jesus, memorizing Precious Moments Bible verses for a chance to win plastic crap with “Sparky points.” “Awanas” is for parents who think Girl Scouts are the devil and juice boxes save. We met once a week at the K–12 and got brainwashed into believing. Every meeting began with the Awana official battle hymn, which goes, “Hail Awa-nas, marching for the youth (hey!) / Hail Awa-nas, holding forth the truth (hey!) / Buil-ding lives on the word of God / (falsetto) Ahwaaah-nuuuh, stands.”

Everybody went. Frances figured the cost of me being a double outcast (black and heathen) was more than that of her having to reeducate me in the sanity of our own home on Friday morning. Really, she just didn’t understand the awesome power of plastic crap. Plus, I was one of the fifteen kids that went to the exclusively cultish Avalon Christian Academy, where I’d been convinced more than once that yes, I was, in fact, a bastard (no offense, just officially) but also mercifully redeemable. So looking back, it’s understandable that one day I would point her attention to Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 20: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

No one had showed me this particular passage beforehand in an effort to sneakily gauge our wickedness. Frances’s status was like the sixth finger that gets yanked off otherwise perfect babies: people see the small but noticeable bump on your pinkie, but no one says, “Hey, you’re technically mutated.” Everyone knew. Once, before bedtime at my new best friend Melissa’s, her mother nailed an addendum onto the Lord’s Prayer that Frances would “find a man, oh