Rain started to fall down in drenching sheets, and the wind picked up speed. The long-sleeved black bodysuit I had put on after Mitch dropped me off at Violet’s that morning clung to me like a second skin. My high-waisted jeans that flared out at the bottom were saturated with water and had turned black.
I shimmied a bit to loosen the bodysuit from my behind. As my grandmother used to say, I had a goat in the garden and was too self-conscious to get it out. The suit kept riding high. At least leotards stayed put.
The wind picked up strength and my hair pelted me with wet anger. A chill ran up my spine and a shiver tore over me. The weather was as bitter as my feelings, apparently.
I ran to the door, shoulders hunched, head trying to hide in the leather’s protective layers like a turtle in its shell. I zipped the jacket up, just realizing I hadn’t done so before. I knocked three times in a row.
The music seemed to grow louder. Instead of waiting to drown, I tried three more times, this time with enough force that my knuckles burned with the impact.
“Hello!” I put my lips to the door and yelled. “Anyone home?” Knock, knock, knock, knock until my hands turned red.
In response to my banging, the music reached a crescendo. I rather doubted that Marilyn had ever reached a high enough chord to consider it a crescendo, with how soft her voice was, but standing in the rain, I really didn’t feel like arguing the point with myself.
The music paused for what seemed like only a second before “A Little Girl from Little Rock” swept under the door in place of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” I took advantage of the lull by banging, but either the person inside was studiously ignoring me, or they honestly didn’t hear me—or wasn’t paying attention.
Raising my bag over my head, I turned toward the street. Violet had gone, and with her, a dry ride home. Tapping my boot against the saturated ground for a moment, I considered my options, or lack of.
“Shit,” I muttered, batting away rogue drops of rain that had adhered to my lashes. The droplets that had drifted to my lips were stalled there by the waxy texture of the lipstick. I rubbed my lips together, trying to absorb the moisture. “Looks like walking in the rain is the way to go.” The only way to go.
My heart sank and then rose—the jacket was mine for a bit longer. But then my heart sank once more. The entire time the jacket was in my possession, it had never been rained on, or if it had, not for this long, and not with this substantial amount of water.
I was fairly certain the jacket was old, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to handle the abuse. Instead of taking the chance of seriously harming its fibers, I decided to wait under Brando’s small porch, just until the rain subsided a bit. In Louisiana, it could be raining one minute, sunny the next.
The door opened with such abruptness that I jumped high in the air, my hand to my heart. The breath that I was going to take stuck painfully in my windpipe, along with the gum.
The bag over my head crashed to the cement, the hot-pink lipstick inside probably in many pieces, probably highlighting the inside of my bag and my books with neon streaks. While I tried to get down the ball of air lodged in my throat with the wad of gum, I blinked fast and furiously, attempting to figure out if the woman standing in the doorway was a figment of my imagination.
“Helloooo,” she said in a sultry voice, and then she smiled a great big, bright smile at me. She fluttered her lashes. “I would have answered sooner, but I thought you were thunder, Doll.”
I looked to the left and then to the right before settling on her again. Doll was exactly what she was. Or more precisely, a showgirl. It seemed like the music inside had created this woman and spit her out on the doorstep.
From the top of her head to the bottom of her feet, she shimmered crimson, except for her stockings and high heels and whatever she had in the way of plumage. For the most part, she was a sequin incarnate. Each and every one of the sparkling entities fused to