hard to make out beneath curls of disintegrating newsprint—banks of flowers, mostly, and stiff faces with eyes closed beneath poised coffin lids, and one photo Haley wished she’d never seen (but yet again she didn’t close her eyes in time) of a woman jackknifed across the top of a convertible in front of the Chelsea Hotel, her head thrown back so that you could see where it had been sheared from her neck neatly as with a razor blade.
“Dead. Dead. Dead,” Aurora sang, her finger stabbing at them until flecks of paper flew up into the smoke like ashes; and then suddenly the book ended and Aurora closed it with a soft heavy sound.
“They’re all dead,” she said thickly; just in case Haley hadn’t gotten the point.
The girl leaned back, coughing into the sleeve of her T-shirt. “What happened?” she asked, her voice hoarse. She knew the answers, of course: drugs, mostly, or suicide. One had been recent enough that she could recall reading about it in the Daily News.
“What happened?” Aurora’s eyes glittered. Her hands rested on the scrapbook as on a Ouija board, fingers writhing as though tracing someone’s name. “They sold their souls. Every one of them. And they’re all dead now. Edie, Candy, Nico, Jackie, Andrea, even Andy. Every single one. They thought it was a joke, but look at it—”
A tiny cloud of dust as she pounded the scrapbook. Haley stared at it and then at Aurora. She wondered unhappily if Linette would be back soon; wondered, somewhat shamefully because for the first time, exactly what had happened last night at Kingdom Come.
“Do you see what I mean, Haley? Do you understand now?” Aurora brushed the girl’s face with her finger. Her touch was ice cold and stank of nicotine.
Haley swallowed. “N-no,” she said, trying not to flinch. “I mean, I thought they all, like, OD’d or something.”
Aurora nodded excitedly. “They did! Of course they did—but that was afterward—that was how they paid—”
Paid. Selling souls. Aurora and her weird friends talked like that sometimes. Haley bit her lip and tried to look thoughtful. “So they, like, sold their souls to the devil?”
“Of course!” Aurora croaked triumphantly. “How else would they have ever got where they did? Superstars! Rich and famous! And for what reason? None of them had any talent—none of them—but they ended up on TV, and in Vogue, and in the movies—how else could they have done it?”
She leaned forward until Haley could smell her sickly berry-scented lipstick mingled with the gin. “They all thought they were getting such a great deal, but look how it ended—famous for fifteen minutes, then pffftttt!”
“Wow,” Haley said again. She had no idea, really, what Aurora was talking about. Some of these people she’d heard of, in magazines or from Aurora and her friends, but mostly their names were meaningless. A bunch of nobodies that nobody but Aurora had ever even cared about.
She glanced down at the scrapbook and felt a small sharp chill beneath her breast. Quickly she glanced up again at Aurora: her ruined face, her eyes; that tattoo like a faded brand upon her neck. A sudden insight made her go hmm beneath her breath—
Because maybe that was the point; maybe Aurora wasn’t so crazy, and these people really had been famous once. But now for some strange reason no one remembered any of them at all; and now they were all dead. Maybe they really were all under some sort of curse. When she looked up Aurora nodded, slowly, as though she could read her thoughts.
“It was at a party. At the Factory,” she began in her scorched voice. “We were celebrating the opening of Scag—that was the first movie to get real national distribution, it won the Silver Palm at Cannes that year. It was a fabulous party, I remember there was this huge Lalique bowl filled with cocaine and in the bathroom Doctor Bob was giving everyone a pop—
“About three a.m. most of the press hounds had left, and a lot of the neophytes were just too wasted and had passed out or gone on to Max’s. But Candy was still there, and Liatris, and Jackie and Lie Vagal—all the core people—and I was sitting by the door, I really was in better shape than most of them, or I thought I was, but then I looked up and there is this guy there I’ve never seen before. And, like, people wandered in and out of there all the time, that