Other than eventual death from brain cancer?

"I guess," I said. "There aren't that many things you can compare to my situation. There are kids that seem to be born with a really high fear threshold, maybe from brain damage sustained during difficult births. They do a lot of heart-stopping things on their bicycles or jump off rooftops. Afterward they don't understand why people are yelling at them. When people say, 'You could have broken your neck,' they say, 'But I didn't. What's the big deal?' "

"And you feel the same way," Serena said.

"Not exactly," I said. "I haven't had this problem all my life. I remember what used to frighten me, and I know what scares other people. That guides me."

"Hmm," she said, inspecting one of her thumbnails. "I guess it's good you say that."

"Why?"

"There's something we gotta talk about. It's Trippy." Her face was serious in the ambient city light.

"She hates us, yeah. This is not news."

"She hates you," Serena corrected quietly. "I hear things, Insula. She's been telling anyone who'll listen that she's going to kill you. She's saying this is still her neighborhood and she's not afraid to come onto my territory to put a bullet in you."

"Let her try," I said, shrugging. "She loves to wave a gun around, but she's a lousy shot."

"You're so full of s.h.i.t," Serena said. "You just said that what scares other people guides you, but I'm telling you this is something to be scared of, and you're, what, blowing me off?"

"I'm not blowing you off. It's just, I've had more dangerous enemies than Trippy Ramos, and I'm still standing. Grudges like Trippy's, it's kid s.h.i.t. She's just blowing off steam."

"Whatever. I had something to say to you-now I've said it. I'm going to bed." She turned and left.

The truth was, she probably had a point about Trippy. Grudges could be deadly in the ghetto and the barrio. This wasn't "kid s.h.i.t" to Luisa Ramos. I'd taken her place and dealt a terrible blow to her ego. In antiquity, in the present, in organized crime, in corporate boardrooms, these kinds of clashes played out everywhere. Loss of position, loss of face: one of humanity's most primal wounds. Why was I still here, making myself a party to it? Because of Serena. My loaded gun.

I looked inside to see her standing in front of the dresser where she'd stashed her money. Now she pulled from the top drawer a bottle of pills, not one of the little orange ones that patients get but a larger wholesale one that she'd kept after a pharmacy heist. I didn't have to watch her spill the little white oval pill into her palm to know what it would be: Ambien.

She washed it down with Corona and, still standing in front of the open drawer, crossed her arms and pulled her T-shirt over her head. The dog tags she wore as a necklace caught briefly in the collar, then fell back to bounce against her hard breastbone. Usually the tags were out of sight under her clothes, but Serena never took them off, in honor of the past life she believed she'd lost in Vietnam. I'd once encouraged her to travel over there, to see the country that occupied her dreams, but it didn't seem that she ever would.

In the dim electric light of the bedroom, she was thin enough to count ribs. Weight loss, stomach pains, Ambien sleep-the glamorous gangster life.

The bottle of Corona I held was still half full, but I didn't want any more. Briefly I considered letting it drop from my hand, three stories down to the sidewalk, just for the nihilistic pleasure of seeing shards of gla.s.s and white foam explode against the pavement. No. Reckless was one thing, but pointlessly antisocial was another.

I got off the railing and went inside. Stripped down to her panties, Serena had climbed onto the bed, wrapping the spread, but not the sheets underneath, around her; it'd been ninety-nine degrees at midday and would likely stay warm all night.

"You want me to look for a movie or something?" I asked, but then saw that Serena's eyes were already closed. Ambien is quick.

I began getting undressed as well.

Home, right now, was an apartment in the Crenshaw district. Like Serena, I understood the virtues of being NKA; the apartment was my compromise. My name wasn't on the rental contract nor any of the utilities. Instead I paid cash to a young woman as white as me, who was a schoolteacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was gaming a federal program that gave teachers in "underserved communities" a sizable tax break to live where they worked. So she'd taken the modest second-story apartment, then immediately rented it off the books to me and moved to Hollywood.

It took me a little while to get used to living in the land of ay yo instead of orale, but I was accustomed to outsider-hood. And Crenshaw was the last place that Serena's enemies-by extension my enemies, the ones who spray-painted SUCIA KILLER on walls-would look for me.

It wasn't home, but I hadn't had a real home for some time now.

4.

The next day dawned bright, promising to be as hot as yesterday, and I was out of the apartment at ten, before Serena or Diana had risen. I was thinking of two things: one, that maybe the Blind Guy was at his bench in the park, and two, how good a chocolate-filled roll from a favorite panaderia would taste.

I'd first seen the Blind Guy several weeks ago and still thought of him that way, even after learning his name, Joe Keller. He'd drawn my attention the first day I'd seen him, for two reasons. First, he'd looked enough like CJ-young and tall and loose-limbed, with curling red hair-that my heart had briefly skipped, until I'd realized it was highly unlikely that CJ would be sitting around an East L.A. park by himself. Second, I'd seen the white cane that immediately marked him as blind.

The cane was the reason I went over to talk to him that first afternoon.

"Hi," I'd said. "My name's Hailey."

"Joe," he'd said.

"Look, I could lead up to this by making small talk first, but I won't. The thing is, this neighborhood is one where maybe you want to bring a friend if you're going to hang out. I know it probably seems like a lot of nice people, kids and mamis with strollers, but there's a lot of gang activity here, too. In fact, the bench you're sitting on is pretty marked up with gang graffiti."

I'd gone on, "And while I'd like to say that g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers have scruples about jacking the elderly or the disabled, mostly they don't. They see someone like that, by themselves, and it's like the rest of us feel when seeing something we need in a store marked half off. It's like, 'Hey, I can't pa.s.s that up.' "

His face had been inscrutable, with the dark gla.s.ses adding to that impression. When he didn't respond right away, I'd said, "I've offended you, right?"

"No," he'd said. "You might have, but then the a.n.a.logy, the half-off discount, really redeemed it." A small, sardonic smile had lightened his expression, and then he'd said, "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"You're young, female, apparently alone, and, from the sound of your voice, white. How much are you discounted for those guys?"

I'd smiled privately, wanting to say, A piece of me is gonna cost them, but I hadn't. Instead I'd said, "You have a good ear. I am white. Blond, even."

"Oh, good. I like blondes."

"But you're blind!"

"Just on principle."

I'd laughed, even though my act of Good Samaritan-hood was going very differently from how I'd expected it to. "Well, great," I'd said. "The world can always use another man of principles. By the way, you personally? Very much red-haired."

"I'm a redhead? Jesus, n.o.body tells me anything."

I'd taken a seat and stayed awhile, long enough for him to tell me that he had an elderly, chronically ill uncle in the area whom he came around to care for, and that he liked to walk out and get a little sun while the old guy was napping.

He'd asked me how much I knew about the gangs in the area-did I have friends in the life?-and so on. I'd evaded his questions, just telling him that I came around to visit an old friend from junior high, not elaborating. I'd had a suspicion that he was leading up to asking me for a source to buy marijuana from, but then he never did.

The second time I'd seen him, I'd asked him if he was a student-he dressed very casually-but he'd said, "I'm done with school," somewhat flatly, so I hadn't pursued it. Nor did I ask him what he did for a living. He was clearly able-bodied, and I heard both intelligence and a certain amount of education in the way he talked. Yet he seemed to have a lot of free time, and I wondered if he was on disability. But again I didn't ask, afraid again of offending him.

When I arrived at the park today, I saw the Blind Guy from a distance, red hair like a flag, eyes hidden as always behind the shades, his face tipped up toward the sun. His skin was pale; he didn't freckle, like a lot of redheads would have.

When I was close enough that I knew he could hear my footsteps, I said, "Hey, it's Hailey."

"Morning," he said. "Have a seat."

I maneuvered around his outstretched legs to get to the open s.p.a.ce on the bench. He had long legs; I figured him for about six-three, standing. "Have you eaten?"

"Yeah, but I can always eat. What've you got?"

"Something from the bakery," I said, opening the bag. "You like cinnamon rolls?"

"Because you want the chocolate for yourself?" he said. "You thought I wasn't going to smell that, did you?"

"You want the chocolate one instead?"

"No, it's fine, whichever." He held his hand out in my general direction.

I reached into the bag and drew out the cinnamon roll but then stopped, distracted. On the back of the bench, just between us, someone had scratched the message INSULA 187. The exposed wood looked pale and splintery, therefore fresh. It was new.

I had seen threats against the sucias in general and Serena in particular, but never against me personally. This was Trippy's handiwork, made all the more striking because the park was dead center in the middle of Trece territory, where a member of Tenth Street shouldn't have dared to go. Serena was right. This was a sign of true dedication to a grudge.

"Hailey?" Joe prompted me.

"Sorry," I said. "Distracted."

I took the cinnamon roll out of its wrapper and gave it to him.

"Thanks," he said, tearing off a small piece. "I thought maybe I hurt your feelings, teasing you like that."

"No, it was funny," I said. "How's your uncle?"

"About the same," he said.

He'd never been talkative about his uncle's illness, and I'd never pressed him on it. So we sat for a moment, eating in silence. The breeze played with his hair, and he brushed it back. His hair was redder than CJ's; my cousin could almost be called a strawberry blond.

"Joe," I said, curious, "what color are your eyes?"

Immediately, he put up a hand, palm outward and fingers spread in front of his face. "Hey, you're not reaching for my shades, are you?" He sounded alarmed.

I pulled back. "No," I said, surprised by his reaction.

He relaxed a little and put his hand down. "Sorry," he said. "It's a thing with blind people. Some of us are sensitive about our eyes, like deaf people are about their voices. I usually know someone awhile before I go without sungla.s.ses around them."

"Oh," I said. "I'm sorry."

"No, I am," he said. "I shouldn't have a.s.sumed you were going to try to take off my shades. The other thing is, blind people get used to folks touching us without warning. People think it's okay if it's well intended, like when someone just takes your arm and pulls to show you which way to go. I don't like it."

"I wouldn't, either," I said.

"I don't think you're like that," he said.

"Thanks," I said.

Then, for a minute, I wanted to tell him about my tumor. Because then I could say I understood what it was like to not want people to think of you as an "asterisk" person. If I told people about my cancer, I'd never just be Hailey again. I'd be the girl with the deadly little poison pill deep in her brain. Or maybe it'd come off like one-upmanship. So instead I said, "If we keep running into each other, eventually I'm going to say something stupid about you being blind. It's inevitable. I mean, you're probably giving me too much credit."

"Don't worry about it." He shifted position slightly, touched his white cane. "Listen, do you have a phone number? I'm not hitting on you," he added quickly, "but it'd be nice to know someone in the neighborhood, just in case I get stranded after the buses stop running, something like that."

I had a brief idea of his hands on my stomach, the way riders hold on to you when they're riding pillion. "Sure," I said. I dug into my backpack, found a pen. "Hold out your hand," I said. "I'll say it out loud, but I'm also going to write it on your palm."

"You do know how being blind works, right?" he said quizzically.

"I know, but this'll help you remember. It's tactile reinforcement. We learned about it in school." I ran the pen point back and forth across my own skin, along the base of my thumb, to get the ink to flow. "Hold out your hand."

He did, and I recited the numbers slowly as I wrote them. "There," I said.

"Thanks."

"I should get going."

"Are you going to work?"

"Not right away."

"You've never said what you do for a living."

"Oh," I said, "the usual dead-end wage-slave stuff."

5.

twelve hours later "Come on, girl! Harder! You can hit harder than that, babe!"

I wasn't sure who the guy with the clear, sonorous voice, intelligible over all the rest of the chaotic crowd noise, was yelling to, me or my opponent. I liked to think that I'd been fighting here long enough to have supporters in the crowd, but there was a good chance he was encouraging my opponent. Generally the men who came to illegal fights favored the prettiest girls, and "Kat" qualified. She had gold-brown braids and light olive skin; the men had whistled their approval at first sight.

Every week, beyond the mesh of the cage in which I fought, I saw many of the same faces in the crowd, and it was always heavily male. Some were motivated by the prospect of illegal gambling gains, others simply loved to watch fights. I don't know what drew them here when there was boxing and mixed martial arts on TV about every night of the week, as well as club fights at gyms around L.A. But some people need that thrill that comes from knowing it's illegal.

This was the Slaughterhouse.

It was Serena who'd gotten me into this line of work, in the early days after my return to L.A. One Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when neither of us had plans for the evening, she'd asked me, "Do you still like to watch fighting?"

"Sure," I'd said.

"Do you want to see some fights?"

"You mean, like on HBO?" I didn't think either of us knew anybody who had premium cable.

She said, "Not at all like HBO."