Felice does some brisk calculations: it’s possible he’ll just hassle her awhile if she plays along. But playing along carries its own risks. At that moment of hesitation, he gives a wild bark of laughter, grabs her free hand, and fake-bites it. She feels his teeth graze her knuckles, the slime of his tongue: she yanks her hand away. “My boyfriend won’t like that!” she says breathlessly, resisting the urge to wipe off her hand. Her heart pounds in her voice, but she keeps going. “He’s super jealous. He doesn’t like men touching me.” She used the word “men” deliberately, as a kind of flattery: she doesn’t know if Axe is smart enough to call her bluff or if he’ll just view this as a challenge. He seems to connect with some thought that lifts his features. His shredded lips part, and again, she sees the gray gleam. “What fucking bullshit boyfriend is that now?” he asks loudly enough that one of the other skinheads stirs and groans.
“Emerson,” she says quickly.
He scrutinizes her face for a long moment. “Emerson doesn’t have any girlfriends.” But his voice lowers. “Especially not you.” He releases her crushed hand. The cigarette pack bounces on the floor as she folds her hand against her chest, a furtive slide along her eyes. She backs away, stepping over a fat skinhead sacked out on the floor, his throat vibrating with a snore. She picks open the door and doesn’t look back as she slips out of the room.
Her mouth is dry, her stomach cramped with hunger, though she’s used to that old pain. She stops in the kitchen — more cigarette butts reeking in the sink, empty bottles with their own sour yeast stink — a few shriveled oranges in the fridge: she grabs one, unearths her board from its hiding place in one of the cavernous pieces of furniture — a carved mahogany armoire — too cumbersome to cart off and sell or someone would’ve done so years ago.
The outdoors kids told Felice that a wealthy family used to live in the Green House, back when rich people moved out to the beach to party. Supposedly it was one of the first houses ever constructed on the beach. The owners left it to their kids, it got passed down for, like, generations. It used to be full of priceless art and chandeliers. But then eventually, there was just one old lady living there — the Green House kids called her “Myra.” Hanging in the front entry was an oil painting of a fat, pink-cheeked lady in a blue dress. The canvas was streaked with grime, but it was still up there in its gold frame bristling with curlicues and rosettes, and might even be worth something. The kids said Myra had lived there all alone and one day the skate punks and street rats who’d been noticing the weeds and the St. Augustine grass getting wild in the big front yard and the scabby cats and the increasing chirr of bugs — they just tried the front door and the handle turned.
“She was probably about three-quarters crazy, sitting there, bunched up in that same old blue dress, watching TV right on that couch,” Douglas told her. He was seventeen with a narrow, handsome face and ghastly, rotten yellow teeth. “She saw those guys come in and she started screeching, Hey you kids get outta here! Get outta here!” He gulped with laughter, displaying those teeth.
“When was this? How long ago?” Felice asked. She was fifteen years old then, already skeptical of most stories like this.
“Fuck. I don’t know. Like back in the 1970s or something?”
“So what happened?” Felice folded her arms over her chest. “After the kids came in and she yelled and all?”
He smirked. “They ignored her. What was she gonna do? They moved in. She didn’t even have a phone anymore. She didn’t know anyone and no one wanted to know about her. I mean none of the neighbors or anybody. She was so fat, she couldn’t get out of her chair or anything.”
“Damn.” Felice stared at a big bald gray spot in the middle of the ratty Persian carpet. “Poor lady.”
It seemed to be a true story. More or less. The details changed depending on who told it. Some kids said that Myra lived upstairs on the third floor — where Felice liked to sleep — while the street rats lived downstairs. They said they brought in like squirrels and cats and slaughtered them on the hardwood floor in the living room, just for fun. They said there were all kinds of gangs that moved in and out, a meth lab in one of the parlors. Everything. Every surface of the house was scarred and rutted and burned as if a wagon train trail had rolled through. Even the police ignored it.
“What happened to Myra?” Felice asked.
“Oh.” Douglas shrugged. “They killed her.” He laughed his big galumphing laugh again. “No. They tried to be nice to her at first. They brought her food and shit. But they didn’t know what an old lady likes to eat. She probably needs stuff you don’t chew or something. And she just kept yelling at them to get the fuck out and shit. So after a while they killed her.”
Other kids said that wasn’t true at all. That social services finally showed up and carted her away and the kids just stayed, like they were her actual grandkids. But they all talked about hearing “Myra’s ghost” in certain rooms at night and some of them liked to touch the corner of her painting, “for good luck,” so that corner was smudged mossy and black. Felice liked that painting — old Myra with her sour purse-strings mouth, but something sweeter in her eyes — like a mother’s eyes.
Every time Felice comes back to the Green House, the painting looks less and less human and she finds fewer kids who’ve even heard of Myra. Once, she’d asked one of the thirty-year-olds about her, a spooky guy with matted hair and whirly blue eyes named Cartusia who slept up in the stifling attic. Some of the kids said that he’d inherited money, that he was the reason the Green House still had any electricity or running water. When Felice asked him, he’d hummed and smiled and said only, “Myra’s my mother.”
SHE SLAMS OPEN THE FRONT door and, once again, Felice is free of the Green House. She drops her board and pushes off; the board is the best place for her to be, her head empty and clear and the only thing is tilting and steering, the air brushing her face and the street rumbling through the wheels under her feet. She will never go back there again. This time for real. Her eighteenth birthday is coming: time for things to be different.
She has to make a plan, she thinks. And she has to get money.
The air is sweeter than usual today, a rich, undulant, lanolin, heavy with ocean minerals; she’s not so anxious to work. Felice kicks and rolls to the raised, wooden boardwalk behind the mid-beach hotels; she passes joggers, strollers, people in workout clothes taking their power walks; some of them squint at her, hating skateboarders. She drifts past a homeless guy she knows named Ronnie. He looks, at first, with his long hair and cutoff jeans, like a regular person. But then you notice his too-dark tan, the way his eyes seem too pale for his skin, his face weathered, a desert nomad’s.
“Hey man,” she says, rolling by, slow as fog.
His eyes flicker at her, a dimensionless khaki color.
After rounding a bevy of plump women in petaled bathing caps, she stops to watch some children and a young woman playing in the skirt of the water. The woman could be a college-age nanny, but she has the same yellow hair as the children. The water is almost hot in August, and the children shriek and kick up a froth; their transparent laughter barely reaches Felice. She stands there, board under one arm, watching the play, feeling alone and sad and hopeful, when someone says, “Hi? Felice?”
“Felix,” she says automatically, annoyed. “Oh.” It’s one of the skinheads from the House — Emerson. She swallows her breath and steps back. “Hi.” Her voice sounds like an eight-year-old’s.
Emerson’s hair is so pale and close-cropped she can make out his scalp in the sunlight, prickling with sweat. The color in his face is high and pink, as if he’d been running. His mouth is small, possibly cold, but he’s so strong and healthy that he emits a natural attractiveness. She’s a bit afraid of him. On more than one occasion, she’s noticed his translucent eyes following her across the room: perhaps why she said his name to Axe. He places his hand on top of his head, then removes it. She remembers now — when he first appeared at the House, the other shaved boys made fun of his measured pace and demeanor. They sat around in the living room once, flicking cigarette butts at Emerson in improvised torment, until he burst up from his place on the carpet, upending the mahogany coffee table crammed with half-emptied beer bottles, crashing the whole foaming mess to the floor. He grabbed one of them — a vicious boy named Damon — and knocked his head against the floor so it made a hollow thump. For a while, the boy laid there without moving, eyes open, staring. Emerson tossed a cigarette butt at him and walked out. The next day the boy had an egg-sized lump on the side of his head. They treated Emerson differently after that.