bunch of narcs in the liquor stores who’ll call him if anyone from Ellingham shows up. They make things hard but not impossible. Plenty of people on the street will buy for you for five bucks. But don’t get caught by Larry. He’ll bust your ass. Okay! Next point.”
She poured herself a little more.
“Curfews. This one is easy. You can handle it a few ways. One, you can have someone take your ID back to the house and fake tap you in for the night. Works sometimes, but if Pix is in the common room and sees it isn’t you, that’s bad. Better solution, come back and go out the window. Again, Larry will bust your ass, but it’s not as bad as drinking. The other security people, they vary. Depends on how hard Larry’s been riding them. Having people in your room, not too hard. Pix doesn’t really check very much. She’s cool. She’s also easily distracted. She’s super smart but her mind is always elsewhere.”
The way Ellie was holding her arms, Stevie got an eyeful of her tattoo. In fact, she was pretty sure that Ellie was holding her arm in the universal “ask me about my tattoo” position. It was composed of elegant script. The ink was very dark, and while there was no redness, there was just a bit of white scarring around it if you looked carefully. It was new, and it extended from the inside of her elbow to her wrist:
Mon coeur est un palais flétri par la cohue . . .
“It’s Baudelaire,” Ellie said when she saw that Stevie was fully engaged. “I got it over the summer in Paris. Do you speak French?” she asked.
“I do,” Janelle said. “Well, some. I think it means . . . my heart is a palace . . . something . . . ?”
“. . . debased by the crowd.”
Stevie had no idea what the hell that meant, but she nodded.
“I was reading this poem one night in Paris over the summer,” Ellie said, elegantly turning her arm, “and it just hit me, and I said to my mom, I’ve got to get it on my arm. My whole arm. And she agreed. We had some wine, and we went and found a place in the Canal Saint-Martin. My mom’s new lover is a street artist down there and he knew a place.”
Stevie reflected for just a moment on how she’d spent the summer. The majority of the time she was working at the Monroeville Mall in the knockoff Starbucks. When not working, she read. She listened to podcasts. She walked down to the ice cream place. She bought mysteries cheap from sale tables in front of the library. Doing everything she could to drown out the politics. Her life was the opposite of hanging around Paris with your mom and your mom’s lover getting tattoos.
“Another thing,” Ellie said. “The cell service up here sucks. The Wi-Fi goes out all the time.”
“How do we watch TV?” Janelle asked.
Stevie had the feeling that Ellie was about to say she didn’t watch TV.
“I don’t watch TV,” Ellie said.
Stevie gave herself a point on her mental scorecard.
“You don’t watch TV?” Janelle said, in the same way you might ask, “You don’t breathe oxygen?”
“I make art,” she said.
“I make machines,” Janelle replied. “And I keep the TV on while I build. I need TV. It’s how I focus.”
Janelle looked to Stevie in a kind of panic. Stevie knew from their summer conversations that Janelle was not joking. She seemed to know every show. Janelle was nature’s finest multitasker, someone who could talk, build a robot, follow a show, all at the same time.
“Can’t help you,” Ellie said, proffering the bottle again. When Stevie and Janelle declined the refill, she topped up her mug. “I don’t watch TV at all. Never have. We never had one growing up. My house was always about making art. I grew up in an art colony in Boston, then in a commune in Copenhagen, and then in New Mexico, and then we went to Paris for a while.”
“Where did you go to school?” Janelle said.
“Wherever we were. The commune had a good school. If I could do anything—got rich or something—I’d start a commune. This place would make a good commune. So, tell me about your love lives.”
Ellie punctuated this command by setting the bottle on the floor with a clunk. Stevie felt a queasy chill. This was not her favorite topic.
“I broke up with