“Qué te pasa, qué quieres?”
There was something about the eyes that struck her as a kind of perfection: she couldn’t look away. “Un hombre — quiere matar a mi amiga—please — he’s got a knife I think—tiene un cuchillo.”
“Fuck, man! No fucking way.” This came from the backseat. “No coño, vámonos de aquí ahora, vete, coño, vámonos!”
There was a quiver of motion within the car and for a terrible second Felice thought he was about to pull away. A light rain had started like static. She put her hands on the partially lowered window: she didn’t care if he buzzed it back up; she wouldn’t let go. She’d caught an accent in his Spanish. Haitian? She’d known a Cuban-Haitian boy in her school — Andres. Once, he’d walked up to Felice in his low baggy shorts and polo shirt and asked her, You know what they call the color of those eyes? She’d shrugged. “Violet,” he’d said in his lilting voice. “Those are violet.”
The perfect black eyes kept staring back at her: in that moment, Felice began to feel that he knew about her, that he knew that all of this was part of her obligation. After several seconds of that gaze, fine and clear as a sheet of glass, the eyes turned toward the corner where she’d pointed. Felice held still. She could no longer hear Bethany’s cries, only the booming from the car.
The eyes flicked back to her: the driver said, “We take care of it. You get out of here.”
Felice stepped backwards, watching as four young men with cinnamon-colored skin climbed out of the car, moving casually as if they were going to a party. One man reaching behind to the back of his waistband. She turned and walked straight up the road without looking back. She walked all the way to the Cove, where the beach rats and outdoor kids hung out. She knew she’d be safe there. It was possible that Bethany would get away. And Alma would eventually stumble home to her mother. For one night, at least, Felice hoped the judgment was over. Sometimes the most important thing was just staying safe, and knowing and being among the right kinds of people — so you didn’t get anyone into trouble. That was the most important thing of all — not getting anyone else into trouble.
FELICE CONTINUED DROPPING ACID, loving the delicious, curling sensation of the drug sinking into her system, the sense that she was afloat within her own body. She and Berry lay side by side on the sand, giggling and listening to the trickle of the ocean. Their hands swam back and forth in front of their eyes, leaving contrails. The girls whispered, murmuring, “Wishh, wishh, wishhh…” It all seemed hilarious: Felice enjoyed the shifting, transitory feelings.
They slept out on the beach, but Felice’s life improved with her new friend. They’d met in a crowded hall on a go-see for Gap and shared Berry’s caramel Frappuccino. Berry had grown up in North Jersey in a three-story pale blue house with black shutters and gables and gingerbread trim (Felice had seen the photograph) and she knew all sorts of valuable things. Berry and Reynaldo came with their own problems of course, like their bulimia. Reynaldo’s habit (or profession) of following men out of the bars. So you never knew what he’d look like the next morning, covered in bruises that turned black, bruises the size of eggplants on his chest and neck, and once his eye bulged and leaked blood and he had to have part of his eyelid sewn back on.
But they were also smart. Berry, for example, taught her to shoplift at nicer places, like the Lord & Taylor or the Saks Fifth Avenue at Bal Harbour. Berry and Felice were careful not to return to the same store, never to steal more than an item or two at a time. The salesgirl would ring up new jeans, a silk tank top, and baby doll dress — snipping off the alarm tags — then suddenly Berry would decide that she needed to try everything on again: she’d sneak out of the dressing room while Felice sent the clerks all over the store on errands for matching belts and handbags and scarves.
“They expect you to shoplift at Swim N’ Stuff and the secondhand places — those guys’re just waiting to catch you,” Berry explained. “Not as much at Lord & Taylor.”
The staff in these palatial stores did seem resolutely disinterested, swanning around, all lethargic elegance. Felice sometimes had the impression that they were in on a grand collusion — the sales staff masquerading as wealthy women, Berry and Felice masquerading as shoppers.
Each night around 1 a.m. they’d walk over to one of the cavernous places like Mansion dressed in new jeans and heels that they kept in a locker at the Nineteenth Avenue Y. First Berry, then Felice ducked under the velvet rope, flashing silver leather wristbands that Mauricio — the head bouncer — had given them. They never paid for cover or drinks. Felice wasn’t modeling much — but that was even better, Berry told her — she was pre-discovered. Overhead, images of singers and volcanic landscapes and smoking cars splayed across fifty-foot screens; the space rang with an industrial, metallic din, and the girls’ throats ached from screaming into each other’s ears. The best part of those places was that only silver wristbands were allowed on certain floors. It was as if the desires of the earth had been boiled down and Felice and Berry were part of it — the best thing anyone could ever be. They danced on the mobbed gleaming floor, while regular people could dance only on the stairs and upper levels, staring down at them.
It was fun to go to shoots when she was fourteen and be a sort-of model (the only real ones appeared in certain magazines — on the covers). People gave her clothes from new designers and paid her with hundred-dollar bills, all for letting them do stupid things to her hair and face. But she hadn’t counted on how much she would hate modeling. The soul-suck of standing around, of sets and steaming lights and fussy stylists and the photographers barking commands: More life in the eyes — no—intelligent life. Give me something! And that one designer — his horrible, thick, old-fashioned clothes — rayons and orlons that stuck to her skin, crackling with static. He walked onto the set in the middle of shooting (Felice was supposed to look like she was pumping gas), grabbed the flesh of her upper arm, and announced that she was “heinous.” She couldn’t be a real model, because she was 130 pounds and only five feet nine. Both the New York scouts wanted her to lose at least ten pounds. She refused to even try. Her life was precarious and she didn’t like the confusion she felt about dieting and just not having enough to eat. The scouts also wanted to take endless Polaroids of her, to fly her to New York or Milan, to paint streaks in her hair, and make her go live in one of those retards’ palaces off of Collins — three-bedroom apartments packed with ten other skinny, starving, tall girls. Bulimia ballrooms. It was just another version of the life she’d left behind in schooclass="underline" pretty spoiled girls and too much money. She started to dream about Bethany, about the seraphic eyes watching her from the driver’s seat, the one night she’d passed through judgment. Felice didn’t want to lose that moment.