slow-moving confusion among her own chaos of mistakes and hopes. Now she was taking on size. She was talking about California.
“Maybe your mother would buy it for you,” Zoe said.
“Right,” Trancas answered.
“You could ask her.”
“She doesn't have any money.”
“Your father must send her some.”
“She won't cash his checks. She wiped her ass with the last one and sent it back to him.”
Trancas had fallen in love with her mother's bad behavior. Some of the stories were true.
“Why don't you ask your father, then?” Zoe said.
“For money for a motorcycle? He wants to buy me ballet shoes. He keeps telling me it's not too late to start.”
Zoe took her friend's hand as they crossed Hudson Street. The night sky was filled with tight little fists of cloud, bright gray against the red-black.
They went to one of the bars Trancas liked, over in the East Village. The bar burned a damp blue light inside its own stale darkness. Men danced in leather cowboy clothes, and no one ever seemed to notice or care that Zoe and Trancas were sixteen. It was the kind of bar you could walk into with a snake draped over your shoulders. On the jukebox, James Brown sang “Super Bad.”
Trancas and Zoe sat on the broken sofa at the back, near the pool table and the reek of the bathrooms. Trancas lit up a joint, passed it to Zoe.
“Crowded in here tonight,” Trancas said.
“Mm-hm.”
“Look at that guy with the tattoos.”
“Where?”
“Right there. Playing pool.”
A sinewy, feline-faced man leaned into the puddle of brighter light that fell onto the pool table, took aim at the seven ball. His arms swarmed with hearts and daggers and grinning skulls, the snaky bodies and alert, hungry faces of dragons.
“Cool,” Trancas said.
“Mm-hm.”
“I'm getting a tattoo.”
“What kind?”
“Maybe a rose,” Trancas said. “On my ass.”
“You'd have it forever,” Zoe told her.
“I'd like to know I was going to have something forever. Wouldn't you?”
“Well. Yes, I guess I would.”
They smoked the joint, listened to the music. Time didn't pass in the bar, there was just music and different kinds of dark. Zoe was afraid and she liked it. She liked night in the city in bars like this, all the little dangers and promises. It was like going to live in the woods. Back in Garden City, the food stood on the shelves in alphabetical order.
“Maybe a lightning bolt,” Trancas said.
“What?” Zoe was getting stoned. She could feel the music moving in her. She could see that the worn brown plush of the sofa arm was a world unto itself.
“A lightning bolt instead of a rose,” Trancas said. “I think maybe a rose'd be too, you know. A rose.”
“I like roses,” Zoe said.
“Then you should get one.”
“Maybe I will.”
“You can get a rose, and I'll get a lightning bolt. Or a dragon. I like the one dragon that guy's got on his arm.”
“You can get a lightning bolt and a dragon,” Zoe said.
“I will. I just have to decide which I want first.”
Trancas took out another joint and then a man was sitting on the arm of the sofa. Zoe hadn't seen him sit down. She wondered if he'd been there all along. No, a few minutes ago she'd been staring at the bare brown plush.
“Hey,” the man said. He smiled. He was haloed with hair. He had a brittle storm of black hair on his head and he had prickly black sideburns and an electric little V of beard. He was dark and blurred, like a tattoo.
“Hi,” Zoe said. She got a buzz from him right away, this compact smiling man ablaze with hair. Dope made her languid and prone to sex.
“What's up?”
“Nothing. Sitting here.”
She offered him the joint and he took a hit. His face pulled in cartoonishly around the joint, eyes squeezed shut and lips puckered. Zoe laughed.
“What's so funny?” he asked, handing back the joint.
She shook her head, took another hit. There was something sexy about this sweet little cartoon man. There was something alert and lost, canine. He wore black motorcycle boots, a black velvet shirt. He could have been a figure who popped out of a black cuckoo clock to announce the hour.
“You're very pretty,” he said. “Do you mind me telling you that?”
“I'm not really pretty,” she said. “I wish I was.”
“You are.”
“No. Maybe I look pretty in this light because I want to, I mean you're probably not seeing me, you're just seeing how much I'd like to be a pretty girl sitting on a sofa in a bar.”
She