Then there was the loud sudden crack of a slap and a high female yelp of pain.

I burst out of the bathroom in time to see Becka sprawled on the floor with a pink splotch spreading on one side of her face. She leaped to her feet with a shriek of inarticulate fury and went for my brother with her nails in front of her like an irate cat. Without thinking I jumped between those bright red claws and my brother's face and threw up my arms to stop her.

"Get out of my way!" she screamed. She grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me against the nearest wall. I fell heavily and grunted in pain. Before I knew what was happening I was covered in Becka, enraged and vicious: her nails at my eyes, her hands in my hair, her tiny sharp shoes stabbing my thighs as she kicked at me.

Then Jack was on her. I heard two more slaps in quick succession, and then he tore her away from me and held her back by her upper arms.

Becka's nose was bleeding. "I want you out of my house," she spat at me through the blood. "I want you out of my house now. This is my house."

"Becka," Jack said, his voice cruel and composed. "Calm down."

She wheeled around to face him. "You too! Out! You think 'cause you're a good f.u.c.k I'm gonna let you walk all over me? You snake! You a.s.shole! You hitter!" Her face was purple with rage.

"You're right, Becka." Jack was still calm. "I shouldn't have hit you. But you shouldn't have said that about Josie."

"Oh, I know. She's just a kid, isn't she? Innocent as can be, doesn't know nothing-well, I know exactly what she knows, I know enough to know that-but she's just a kid, she's not a cheap twisted little wh.o.r.e-"

Then he hit her again, with his fist this time. She fell to her knees, holding her face, and burst into a storm of tears.

"No," he said. "She's my sister."

Then he came over and helped me up. "Okay?" His voice was gentle.

I rubbed my thighs where they were beginning to bruise and nodded numbly. Becka was howling, letting loose great violent wails of frustration and pain. She sounded as if her heart was breaking. Maybe it was.

"Get your stuff." Jack's face was grim.

Becka jumped up and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door hard behind her.

"Get your stuff," he said again.

Outside of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, the bus that we were riding to New York began to make sick coughing noises. When we got to the bus stop, a wretched little cubicle tucked away in a sprawling, almost deserted strip mall, the driver told us that we were going to have to wait for a replacement bus, which would come from Harrisburg. It might be a while, he said. It might be hours.

The dingy little waiting room had two rows of hard plastic chairs that faced each other in one corner. The air was chilly and stale with air conditioning. We sat down to wait. We'd only been sitting there a few minutes when Jack got up and went to the restroom.

When he came back, he dropped back into his chair. "Eleven hundred, including the three hundred Michael gave me last night."

I knew he was talking about the fat roll of money that he'd saved while he lived with Becka. He'd gone to the bathroom to count it. "That's not so bad," I said.

"It is in New York," he said. "You know what we got the most for? That charm bracelet of yours. It was vintage, or something."

"You sold it?"

Jack nodded. "Hungry?"

I was too full of mine it was mine you sold it and it was mine to think about food. "I guess so," I said.

"Tough luck. We are embarking on hard times, my darling. You want a candy bar out of the machine?"

Mine, I thought. It was mine. "I'll pa.s.s," I said, "but thanks loads." My voice sounded normal.

"Anything for you." He stretched out across a row of lime green chairs and rested his head on my thigh. Throwing an arm over his eyes, he didn't say anything else for a long time.

The waiting room was air-conditioned, but the sun streaming in through the smeared plate-gla.s.s windows was hot. As the afternoon wore on, the squares of sunlight on the floor came closer and closer to where I was sitting until they were directly on top of me. Soon the backs of my thighs were sticking to the plastic. I was stiff and sore where Becka had kicked me.

I wasn't sure if Jack was really asleep or pretending, so I tried to keep still. I started to count flecks. There were flecks everywhere I looked. Blue flecks in the green chairs. Yellow flecks in the orange chairs. Gray flecks in the white linoleum. The windows were streaked and spotted with brownish grime. A man in uniform came in and talked to the woman behind the counter for a long time. I listened to the way that they flattened and twisted their words out of shape, and I tried to ignore my legs.

Eventually I couldn't sit still anymore. My legs were aching and buzzing for motion and I needed to move. I shook Jack's shoulder until he woke up.

Irritated, he wouldn't answer any of my questions about New York-where we were going to stay, or how long we were going to live there. I told him that his personality was improved by unconsciousness and he said, "Next time don't f.u.c.king wake me up then."

I quit talking to him. He stared straight ahead, out the plate-gla.s.s windows. There was a vaguely disgusted look on his face. I'd never felt so lonely.

7.

MANY HOURS LATER I opened my eyes and found myself staring at a half-naked, too thin girl with incredibly dirty hair that might have been blond a long time ago, when it was clean.

Ah, I thought, only a little surprised by my lack of surprise. Mirrors on the ceiling. Trust my brother.

I had only faint memories of the night before, of climbing off the bus and walking for what seemed like miles along brightly lit streets until we came to a dimly lit stairway. I remembered standing behind a man in a silver shirt and a woman whose high black boots shone as brightly as her sequined dress, and I remembered telling Jack, as we followed a soiled carpet down the hall to our room, that they must have been to a costume party that night. He told me that I had a lot to learn; I told him I'd learn it tomorrow; then I used the bathroom, took off the clothes I'd been wearing for the past thirty hours, and went to sleep.

We were in New York City, in a hotel room. The shower was running.

I sat up in bed and examined my surroundings. The shade on the room's one window was pulled all the way up, but the light in the room was dim and pale. I could barely make out the only other piece of furniture in the room, a combination TV/VCR standing on a metal cabinet. There wasn't room for anything else. There was barely room to walk around the edges of the bed.

The shower stopped running and Jack came into the room, wrapped in a towel so small that he might as well have skipped it. "Like the room?"

"Great."

He sat down on the edge of the bed. Of course he did; there was nowhere else to sit. "Don't panic. It's not permanent."

"Great," I said again. "What's the permanent solution?"

"We look for a place. Like we've always talked about doing."

"Then what?"

"Then we hope we find one before our money runs out. This place only looks cheap."

"When we find a place. Then what?"

"Christ, Josie, don't nag," he said. So I knew that there was no "then what."

"I'm going to take a shower," I said.

Jack was propped up against the wall, with his legs sprawling and the towel cast casually across his lap. He picked up the remote control and said nothing.

There was an impressive collection of small plastic bottles lined up on the side of the bathtub. Although there were several brightly colored bottles of ma.s.sage oil and lubricant to choose from, there was no shampoo, so I washed my hair with bubble bath, which didn't work very well but was better than nothing. My wet hair smelled like the lake, which made me think of Michael. When I walked back into the bedroom, Jack had the TV on and was watching languidly while three grainy women standing by a grainy swimming pool peeled their clothes off. "Look at that pool," he said as I wrapped myself in the towel and sat down on the edge of the bed. "We should have gone to Los Angeles."

The three naked women on the videotape were surprised by a workman, presumably there to clean the pool. There was hardly time for introductions before the workman slipped and fell into the crystal blue water, forcing the three women to fish him out and take off all his clothes.

"Cla.s.sy," I said.

"Comes free with the room." Jack and I watched as the three women started to lick at the pool man's wet body, which was skinny and too pale.

I felt a finger slide up my spine and the TV said, "There, aren't you glad we got you out of those wet clothes?"

Later Jack and I sat together in a diner booth, our cheeseburgers pushed to one side as we pored over the apartment ads in the free newspaper spread out on the table in front of us.

"Here," I said. '"Beautiful two-bedroom in East Village. High ceilings, great light.' That sounds okay."

"Josie. We have no jobs, no friends, and less than a thousand dollars to our collective name. Deduce."

"No beautiful two-bedroom in the East Village?"

"Clever sister."

"I thought we had more than that."

"Hotel room is two-fifty a night," Jack said absently and turned the page.

"That is the most depressing thing I've ever heard."

"Here." He slid the paper over to me.

The ad that his finger pointed to said only that there was an apartment available immediately and listed a phone number. No high ceilings, no great light.

"That's good?"

"Very good." He dropped a ten on the table to pay for our meal.

Nine hundred and forty, I thought, give or take.

Jack called the number from a pay phone and got the address. During the hourlong walk, I kept expecting to be impressed and excited by New York, and at first I was. We walked through a part of the city where the buildings were tall and beautifully wrought, covered in fine carved stonework or gleaming gla.s.s that reflected the clear summer sky. The people around us walked fast; they wore tailored suits and talked into wires that snaked from their ears to the sleek mobile phones they held in their hands. All of it, the buildings and the people and the limousines idling in the street, seemed part of something indefinable yet vitally important. Making my way through the crowds with my brother, I felt blissfully anonymous.

But as we walked, the buildings became smaller and the people slower. The fast walkers were still there, but now they looked overdressed and uncomfortable, and they were interspersed with people who ambled slowly and obliviously along, as if there was nothing in life that was worth hurrying to do. There was too much traffic, and everything was too loud. I kept a tight grip on Jack's hand. I expected him to complain about it but he never did.

By the time we found the apartment building, the bottoms of my feet were burning and sore. The front door was propped open, so we didn't bother ringing. The inside of the building was dark and stiflingly hot. The black and white ceramic tiles on the floor, the carved banisters, and the molding near the ceiling were regal in a dingy, exiled sort of way, but the paint was flaking and there was broken gla.s.s mixed with the small drifts of mysterious filth collecting in the corners. The apartment was on the fourth floor, the door painted bright blue. When Jack knocked, it was opened immediately by an impossibly tiny girl with tawny skin and a metal stud in the middle of her lower lip.

"Where the h.e.l.l have you been?" she greeted us, fluttering brightly striped eyelids in consternation. "I expected you to be here, like, half an hour ago. I'm going to be late for work. What did you do, walk here from Midtown?"

I felt Jack's grip on my hand tighten, but he only smiled his winning Jack smile. "Actually, we did."

"It's such a nice day," I said like an idiot, standing in the oven-heat of the hallway in my sweat-soaked clothes.

The girl made a disdainful face and moved back to let us into the apartment. "Yeah, whatever. Here it is." She made a sweeping gesture with her arm that managed to convey her contempt for the apartment, the world in general, and us in particular. "Look fast. I gotta get to work. "

While we checked the place out, she dashed around angrily, pulling pieces of clothing from corners and covering her lips with coat after coat of thick red paste. The rug on the floor was worn but brightly patterned; the walls were painted a deep rich red and mostly hidden behind huge canvases with blackish purple bruises smeared across their surfaces. The cabinets in the tiny kitchenette were the same bright sky blue as the door. There was only one window, which opened onto a brick wall and was covered in iron bars. Someone-presumably the artist-girl-had candy-striped the bars with red and sky blue paint and woven a string of white Christmas lights through them.

"Are you on the lease?" Jack asked her.

"f.u.c.k no."

"Who is?"

"Like I give a s.h.i.t. I give my rent to the guy downstairs. n.o.body's ever come to evict me."

"How much?"

"Six hundred. Look, I've got to get to work. You want the place, I'll be out tomorrow and I'll tell Louis you're coming."

I looked around at the cramped one-room apartment and hoped Jack would say no.

"Yes," he said.

"Fine," the girl said. "I'll throw in the futon for an extra fifty. You want it, pay me now. Otherwise, rent was due on the first, so you're late."

"But it's the eleventh," I said.

She shrugged. "Louis is a nice enough guy. Plus, we sleep together sometimes. So why pay if I'm moving out?"

That night, Jack wanted to celebrate. He bought a cheap bottle of champagne, which we drank in the hotel room out of plastic hotel cups. We watched another p.o.r.n video. It was even cruder than the first one had been. We could laugh at it this time.

"I'm glad you came with me," Jack said, dipping his finger in champagne and tracing our initials lazily on my stomach. "I guess I can be a pretty lousy brother. But I need you. You're good."

He bent over me and slowly licked the liquid from my skin. His tongue sliding across me was hot and alive.

If I'd been unenthusiastic about the apartment that first day, I loathed it the following afternoon. Without the paintings, the colorful rug, and the Christmas lights in the security gate on the window, the apartment seemed a lot less bohemian and a lot more like a prison cell decorated by the criminally insane. The mysterious filth in the corners of the hallway outside had escaped from the artist-girl's rug, I guess, because there were places on the apartment floor where it was an inch thick.

The cheerful blue cabinets were cheerful, all right, but they were also painted shut. When Jack finally managed to cut one of them open with a razor blade (cutting his thumb badly in the process), we were greeted by a burst of hot, stale air, ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of mouse droppings, and two cans of what we guessed was tuna fish. We had to guess, because the labels had been chewed off long ago.

"How long do you think this has been sealed up?" I asked, trying to keep my face out of the stench of the cabinet and sweep mouse droppings into a garbage bag at the same time.

"Don't ask," Jack said grimly, sucking on his cut thumb. He threw down the T-shirt he was using as a rag. His face and shoulders were coated with a thick layer of sweat and grime. Last night's good humor had vanished. He walked over to the window, which was standing open against the heat, and slumped down below it with his head in his hands.

I watched him. I didn't like what I saw. "It's not that bad."

"It is." Jack rubbed his face hopelessly with both hands. "It absolutely f.u.c.king is."

I sc.r.a.ped the last of the mouse droppings into the garbage with a folded newspaper and sat down next to him, trying not to touch anything, including myself.