BACK THEN, SHE SLEPT outdoors all the time, legs cinched in a knot against her chest, like she’d dried up in that position, and one stiff breeze off the water would sweep her away. Felice saw outdoors kids everywhere. That’s what Reynaldo called them: “Like some pets are made for inside — little fluffy cats — but some you just gotta let run around outdoors.” Reynaldo’s dad kicked him out of the house. The police had their own name for kids like him—thrown-aways. Laughing, Reynaldo chanted his father’s words, bestia, perro, serpiente, maricón… “I called him a Colombian redneck. Asshole. He came after me with a machete. Lucky he was so fat — he couldn’t move fast enough to kill me.”
There were times she found herself about to confess to Reynaldo what had happened in school. But she believed silence might be part of the punishment — that telling would somehow lighten it. Anyway, the outdoor kids didn’t tell so much about where they came from — not unless they could make it a joke, like Reynaldo did.
Felice met Alma at one of the bonfire parties at the beach. Alma wanted to be a model and she said Felice could come live with her and they could be models together. It had seemed like a good plan. Alma lived with her mother in a tiny ground-floor apartment, so Felice slept in a battered recliner in the living room. Then the phone started ringing with modeling requests for Felice: Alma scowled and chewed at her nails while Felice chatted with booking agents.
Alma’s friend Bethany came around the apartment whenever she needed a shower or some food. Bethany was maybe fourteen years old: her face had a feral, foxy quality, her eyes full of glinting light, as if she could see in the dark. There was a thread of grime like a shadow along her jaw, her nails were lined with dirt. She talked about something she called her “baby” that Alma said was code for crack cocaine. Bethany ate candy mostly, clutched in her pointed, tiny hands, her face pinched in a nearsighted squint. She was pin-thin — the size of an eight-year-old — and had a stream of “clients.”
Felice couldn’t stand Bethany — her small teeth or her chatter. She couldn’t stand her furtive manner — the way her gaze roamed around, as if she were looking for something to steal. Lots of outdoor kids were like that: after a year on her own, Felice was also beginning to sense some of those qualities in herself. But Alma thought Bethany was “hilarious,” with her stories about seducible police, executives with fetishes, tourists with poisonous breath. There were her detailed, depressing dreams, and the way her voice sped up, clicking spit or stretched out like something unraveling, depending on the drug.
Alma’s mother cleaned houses in the afternoons, then worked a night shift in an imaging lab at Miami Beach Community, so Alma and Felice usually had the place to themselves. One night around 2 a.m., the girls were sitting around drinking Diet Cokes, watching a dumb reality show about people starving on a tropical island. There was a bang on the window and Felice jumped; she turned to see Bethany’s grubby face pressed to the glass. She wished Alma would tell her to get lost. Instead Alma giggled. “Oh my God — Bethany is insane.” They went outside: Bethany was so stoned she swayed from side to side, rippling with laughter. “I gotta take a leak, you guys!” she brayed.
It was a late-summer night, the warm air was filled with bugs like ruby dots in the darkness. Felice wished she weren’t there. She never would have hung out with anyone like Bethany in school. Though sometimes the girl’s slanted smile, the forced, splintered quality of her laughter, reminded Felice of Hannah, and a wave of dizzying sickness and guilt rushed over her.
“Go for it!” Alma sat on one of the squat cement posts that lined the building’s front entrance. “We’re all outside in nature. That’s what animals do.” Alma propped herself with a straightened arm and her brown hair swayed in a curve down her back. When Felice first met Alma, she was working as a temp in several of the Miami Beach modeling agencies and she had all sorts of friends and “contacts.” But Felice gradually came to understand Alma was just desperate for people to like her.
“You think I won’t?” Bethany’s laughter made her look old, wrinkles cracking around her eyes. She plopped down on the patch of grass in hysterics, kicking her legs, panties around her knees, peeing on herself and into the grass. Like a baby. Alma told Felice that Bethany hadn’t even known what her period was — she’d come to her, shaking and tear-streaked, and Alma’d had to explain everything, show her how to use a tampon, give her aspirin. “She left blood all over the toilet seat,” Alma said, rolling her eyes. “My mom shit a total brick.”
That night, Bethany (now smelling of pee) wanted to go out and Alma immediately agreed. Felice wasn’t sure if she was even allowed in the apartment without Alma. Alma’s mother put up with having Felice underfoot, but she muttered about her daughter’s “user-loser friends.”
First they went to The Sinker, then to Gerk’s, places where they wouldn’t be carded. The bars seemed interchangeable to Felice: starchy triangles of light suspended over pool tables, jukeboxes, waves of rancid grease, nicotine, and old beer. The men leaning against the bar automatically looked the girls over. Their eyes lingered on Felice, then slipped to Bethany. At the second bar, a man with an oily gray ponytail reached for Bethany, pulling her close; Felice watched Bethany turn pliable and childlike, pressed against the side of the man’s gut, her hands resting on his half-buttoned guayabera. The man tongued his cigar from the front to the corner of his mouth. “Esta es mia!”
After he’d bought them rum and Cokes, the girls moved on to another bar Bethany knew about, closer to the beach. It was in the basement of an apartment building and the only marker was a little acid blue lightbulb above the door. Felice didn’t like the look of the place. Alma said, “So leave if you want to, you big wuss.”
This place was the worst one yet — its sour old reek mingled with something chemical, as if it were built on a toxic waste dump. The bar had a flinty light, like that of an office in a nightmare, and except for a few hazy forms at the bar, it was deserted. Even Alma mumbled, “Fuck, Bethany — the fuck kind of place is this?”
The bartender nodded, his white cap of hair dimly visible. He had some sort of tattoo that crept up his temple, extending halfway onto his forehead. Bethany went over to one of the men leaning against the back wall. A few minutes later, Felice, Alma, and Bethany sat at a table in the corner with a dusting of white powder on a ceramic plate like the ones in her mother’s kitchen. They weren’t even going to hide it. No one — not even the bartender — seemed to pay any attention. The man crouched over the powder, chopping it up with a butter knife and scraping it into lines on the plate. Felice thought they looked like mathematical symbols — equal signs and minuses — a coded warning. He handed Alma a rolled-up twenty. His name was Gary. He had one clear green eye, and one murky green one that lazed in the wrong direction. Felice didn’t like his fawning manner or the way he put his hand on Bethany’s head while she snorted, as if holding her underwater. Most of the kids Felice knew couldn’t afford real cocaine. Felice snorted less than half a line, gulped back the chemical drip from her sinuses. “I’m good.”
Gary smiled, his teeth big as chalk. “You don’t like my present? That’s not crack, you know — that’s the real shit. You think it’s full of baking soda and Ivory soap?” He turned to Alma and Bethany. “I don’t see any soap bubbles coming out of the princess’s nose? Do you see bubbles coming out of her nose?”
Gary watched as Alma and Bethany finished the powder. Bethany straightened up, shivering and sucking air through her teeth. She waved her hands. “Mmm!” Alma rubbed her nose fiercely with the flat of her hand. “Everybody happy?” Gary asked. The girls collected their bags as if they were leaving a restaurant, and trooped out of the bar into the soft night. Felice still tasted the acrid drip. She wasn’t sure if she had a buzz or if it was sheer relief that made the air seem so feathery. “Finally,” she blurted. “God — did you ever think we’d get away from that slime ball?”