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  The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.

  —Robert Bloch

  NELL SULLIVAN WAS a mouse.

  A square.

  A big fat nobody.

  Sitting at her desk with her head bowed and her gaze fixed on the keys of her IBM Selectric, she didn’t need to glance at the clock to know the hour had arrived. She’d been ticking away the seconds until quitting time in her head—one Mississippi, two—having spent the last five minutes putting her desk in order, the same as always. Never making small talk. Not once looking up.

  She squared her typewriter so it lined up with the edge of her desk, fanned out the pencils in her smiley-face mug like the feathers of a peacock. Have a nice day! Even the heavy glass ashtray she’d never used was meticulously placed at the corner, leaving exactly two inches around two of its four sides. Smoking, in Barrett’s opinion, was a sin reserved for the weak. But Barrett’s opinion didn’t matter to the staff of Rambert & Bertram. Every desk in the office sported the same ashtray, as if inviting the devil to mingle within the office pool. Nell had considered removing the ashtray from her desk, if only to tell Barrett that she had. Heeding his warning would make him happy. Not happy enough to spur conversation . . . but the act was rebellious, one that the other secretaries would notice. And while Nell dreamed of being “one of the girls,” she was no dummy.

  Everyone knew Nell was a drag. She’d been thinking about taking up smoking for that very reason. Maybe a few puffs would make her cool like all the other girls. The ones who congregated around the water cooler, the lunch area, and on the crowded sidewalk outside the building’s revolving doors. If Nell started smoking, she’d have a reason to stand around right along with them. She’d breathe the noxious fumes while listening to cabbies honk their horns. Watch hundreds of busy businesspeople march through intersections—men in pressed suits, women with their hair done up and their lips painted red. She’d inhale exhaust-laced nicotine five days a week if it meant fitting in . . . even a little.

  But Barrett . . .

  Her attention flicked to the ashtray. A sliver of sun shone there, lighting it up like a firework, turning cheap glass into crystal. She looked away, stared down at the extension buttons numbered one through seven beneath the dial pad of her office phone.

  Rambert and Bertram, how may I direct your call? One moment, please.

  Rambert and Bertram, how may I direct your call? One moment, please.

  Rambert and . . .

  Her coworkers, having suppressed their desire for socialization since lunch, were bubbling over with pent-up energy. They’d abandon their desks the moment the clock ticked away the last seconds of 4:59 p.m. Their voices would rise above the din of dwindling telephone conversations and the muffled blare of New York City rush hour. Five o’clock: when the people Nell wished to be a part of were at their most glorious. Excited for happy-hour cocktails. For evening reunions with husbands, boyfriends, fleeting lovers. It was the hour that reminded Nell just how little she was like them. Because no matter how hard a good Irish Catholic girl prayed, God wasn’t in the business of granting good looks or social grace or—dare she even think it—the burst of passion associated with a one-night stand. Twenty-two years old and Nell had more in common with the Virgin Mary than she did with any girl on the inbound call-center floor.

  Five o’clock. The girls unraveled in front of their typewriters. Some fell back in their desk chairs with muffled moans. Others pulled bobby pins from their hair and shook out their tresses in cascading waves. Nell never had much success in getting her dull hair to look remotely as good. She’d watched the Breck commercials, bought the shampoos and conditioners and dry oils that Farrah Fawcett swore by. It broke the bank, but she purchased them anyway, hiding them in her bedroom where Barrett wouldn’t look. She didn’t dare speak of her silly, girlish desires. He’d strike them down with a single dubious look of irritation, a look that always made her feel as stupid as she knew she was.

  Brigitte Bardot.

  Jacqueline Bisset.

  Like she had any chance of that.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself, purging her mind of the thought as she straightened her sweater, grabbed her purse, and rose from her desk. With her head bowed, she made a beeline for the elevator and, coincidentally, for Mary Ann Thomas as well.

  Hail Mary, full of grace.

  Mary Ann was the girl. The goddess. The gold standard. The perfect brand of slender, graceful in the way she carried herself up and down the call-center floor. Her calf muscles were smooth and powerful beneath the hem of her Halston skirt. Her hair, freshly bleached from a light chestnut to an almost shocking white, rested on the shoulders of her tunic blouse in buoyant waves. Mary Ann’s red pumps—red for sexy, for dangerous—were a proverbial stop sign: back away, forget about it. Girls like Mary Ann Thomas didn’t cavort with people like Nell.

  But Nell didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Mary Ann was in her path, chatting away, surrounded by a group of women not quite as pretty as her, but pretty enough for Nell to fantasize about just the same.

  Nell’s heart leaped into her throat when Mary Ann made eye contact. Nell forced a smile, a victory for a girl who could hardly hold a conversation; a tiny win for someone whose reflex was to pull her shoulders up to her ears and look away.

  Mary Ann wasn’t impressed by Nell’s weary triumph. She narrowed her eyes and returned Nell’s smile by way of a sarcastic red-lipsticked grin.

  “A little warm, Nell?” Mary Ann asked, her tone tinged with disgust, dripping with sarcasm. Dripping much like the sweat that was already starting to bead up along Nell’s hairline.

  It was hot—the hottest summer on record in what felt like forever. So hot most people walked around half-naked, in search of relief from the heat. But not Nell. She wore her grandma’s Aran sweater like a pregnant girl trying to fool her mother. She needed to lose a few pounds, sure that every single girl in the office was keenly aware of that fact. Every sideways glance convinced her all the more.

  “Gross.” Mary Anne uttered the word beneath her breath, but Nell heard it as clear as a Chinese gong.

  Hope splintered into anger.

  A flash of pain lit up behind her eyes. The seed of another migraine.

  Floozy, she thought. Tramp.

  She stopped in front of the elevator, her gaze fixed on the glowing button beside the polished steel doors. Those doors cast back a vague reflection—featureless, little more than the shade of Nell’s dark-brown hair and taupe bell-bottomed slacks.

  Librarian, the voice of reason chimed in. Plain Jane. Old maid. Timid white-bread mouse.

  Anything Nell could fault Mary Ann for, Mary Ann could fire right back. Which was why Nell never stood up for herself in any situation. Whatever she could say about others, they could say about her twenty times worse.

  The elevator dinged above Nell’s head. The doors yawned open. She shuffled inside, pressed herself against the corner, watched chunky heels and wedge sandals congregate around her penny loafers, which were missing the pennies. Even a bit of shiny copper was too flashy for Barrett’s taste.

  Too poor to afford them, she’d heard a girl say on one of her first days there.

  Maybe if she didn’t spend her entire p
aycheck at McDonald’s, suggested another.

  Stupid bitches, Nell had thought. She hadn’t been to McDonald’s in years.

  After overhearing that particular conversation, Nell had considered quitting this job the way she had left all the others. But she was determined to push herself to be better, to be less of a hermit, to be more like Barrett, her confident and artistic older sibling. He was sure to find the perfect girl, and then who would she have? Nobody. She’d be left to weep herself to sleep in her crooked shoebox of an apartment. Hey, look, Brooklyn, Nell’s crying again.

  Of course, Barrett insisted she was crazy, that he’d never leave, that he couldn’t. He’d leave her sunshine-yellow notes around the house:

  I love you, Nell.

  You’re my best friend, don’t forget.

  Our blood is our bond.

  But his promises made no difference. His love for her was keeping him in place, but a grown man could only love his sister so much. Someday, his affectations would take him in a different direction, and that’s when the notes would change.

  Gotta go, found someone else.

  Sorry Sis, but you know how it is.

  The elevator reeked of day-old hair bleach. It plunged to the ground floor, taking Nell’s stomach with it. Nobody spoke to her. Nobody glanced her way. They turned their bodies so that not a single one of them faced her. She was invisible as they chattered among themselves, not an arm’s length away. They talked about a new dress shop opening up on Fifth. Code, Nell was sure, for how great they’d look in their new frocks, while she was doomed to live out her life in ugly bell-bottoms and boatneck shirts.

  Nobody mentioned Sam.

  Nell kept her head down as she spilled onto the street, marching toward the subway station and the train that would take her home. She waited on the platform among a sea of professionals, art students, musicians, and homeless. She watched a group of tall black kids occupying too much space in the crowded terminal. They were taking turns spinning a basketball on the tips of their fingers. They dribbled it on the concrete, tossed it back and forth while ignoring the stares and snorts and high-brow eye-rolling of people “just trying to get home.” Nell admired people like those basketball boys—guys who did what they wanted to do no matter how unbecoming it was to others. She inched closer to the group, taking small sidesteps to the left to close the distance. Maybe if she got close enough, a little of their unabashed passion would rub off on her. Perhaps touching that basketball, even if it was by walking into its path during a pass, would transfer some of that confident magic from them to her.

  The B train arrived before she could get close enough.

  Folks crammed into the cars and scrambled for available seats. Straphangers grabbed dirty strips of plastic and leaned into the upsurge of speed. Nell pressed herself into a straight-backed seat between an old Hasidic Jew and a fat man in a tiny damp suit. Both were as sweaty as she was. Both smelled like they’d been slathered in cumin and sea salt.

  Nell dipped into her purse and pulled a stick of Doublemint gum from its slim, green pack. She popped the gum into her mouth, then hovered the silver wrapper in front of her nose, inhaling peppermint to cut through their stink. She concentrated on the graffiti that covered the walls, some of it etched into the plexiglass of the car like a patchwork quilt. Most of it was unreadable—nothing but a bunch of loops and swirls and vaguely distinguishable lettering. Some was more distinct.

  REBEL SCUM.

  FUCK DISCO.

  YOU AIN’T SHIT, CORPRIT MAN.

  NEW YORK IS DEAD.

  The train screamed through the underground. The fat man and his tiny suit got off at Herald Square. The Hasid rode on to West 4th Street.

  Nell sped toward King’s Highway station. The side of an abandoned factory flashed a piece of urban art she read a dozen times a week: WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU’LL BE.

  She shuffled off the train behind a string of blacks and Latinos, the only white girl dumb or crazy or poor enough to live in this part of Brooklyn. Pulling her shoulders up to her ears, she braced herself for the routine dose of harassment.

  “Hey, bibliotecaria!” A Puerto Rican bicycle gang circled in the street just beyond the station like a wake of vultures. “Hey, you got any good books?” She didn’t dare look right at them, but she knew their voices well. There were five of them, shirtless due to the heat wave. They rode bikes too small for their gangly legs. They wore shabby Dr. Js on their feet, the white leather tattered by pedal spikes. They bothered her despite their lack of ammunition, because really, what did they want from a girl like her anyway? Once, she had told Barrett she’d give them something to remember her by, but her brother had shot her a look she had easily deciphered. Don’t. It would only make it worse. And of course, he was right. Fighting back would only make them bite harder.

  “Hey, hey, bibliotecaria!” There was out-and-out mirth in her assailant’s voice. “I heard about this book, it’s called the Karma Sutra.” More laughter. Nell clamped her jaw tight and hastened her steps. “You wanna come back with us to our place? Wanna teach us the ancient Chinese art of fucking?” An eruption of chortles, of boys speaking in fast, clipped Spanish behind her.

  She balled her hands into fists and continued to march, a trickle of sweat sending a maddening tickle down her spine.

  “Hey, don’t get mad.” One of them cruised next to her on his tiny single-speed bike.

  “Hey, Marco, you better shut up, man,” another advised. “You’re too loud, ey. You gotta be quiet in the library.”

  They burst into another fit of cackling, but they stopped trailing her down East 16th Street. By the time she turned onto Quentin Road, they were gone.

  “It’s Kama Sutra,” she hissed beneath her breath. “And it’s not Chinese, you morons. Why don’t you go make out with your cunt girlfriends?” She muttered the question, the hushed profanity tasting sweet on her tongue. She pictured their leader canoodling with some Spanish girl just before taking a bullet to the head. That was why Mary Ann Thomas had bleached her hair from chestnut to white. It was why the entire call-center floor reeked of ammonia. Blond hair was one of the few lines of defense a girl had against the .44 Caliber Killer, the one that called himself the Son of Sam. He had sent a letter to the Daily News only a few weeks before.

  HELLO FROM THE GUTTERS OF NYC!

  Nell had read that letter, unable to shake the strange itch of envy. It was a letter written by someone who had had enough. Someone who had been pushed too far; shoved right over the line of civility and onto a path of blood-soaked freedom.

  Uninhibited liberation.

  A personal renaissance.

  She shoved her hands into the pockets of her sweater, felt the soft edges of one of Barrett’s crumpled notes.

  Ignore them. Don’t start trouble.

  Reaching her row-house apartment on Quentin Road, she climbed up the crumbling concrete steps and pushed open the front door. She had two keys on her vinyl Snoopy key ring. One for the building’s front door. The other was for the apartment. But the front door had been kicked in more than six months before, either by police or a drunk resident who had misplaced his key. Most days the front door flapped open and closed like a kid’s loose tooth. People came and went at all hours, whether they lived there or not. Homeless men had taken to sleeping in the front hall, sometimes blocking the stairs Nell had to take to get to her floor. Sometimes, when she arrived home late, she’d hear people having sex behind the stairwell—women moaning daddy and baby while men puffed You like that? like locomotives. It turned her stomach, and yet, those were the nights she couldn’t help herself. She’d wake up early the next morning and run to King’s Chapel to pray, unable to shake the smell of her own body on her hands, no matter how hard she scrubbed them with Borax and bleach.

  Filthy pig.

  Nasty whale.

  Today, there were a couple of kids pla
ying jacks in the lobby. Their clothes were dirty and half-soaked, most likely from a romp around a curbside fire hydrant. Nell gave them a faint smile, but they only stared with their wide, stupid eyes. Tempted to ask them what the hell they were looking at, she started up the stairs instead. She paused on the second-story landing to catch her breath, then continued to the third floor. Barrett would be waiting for her behind their dead-bolted apartment door.

  Barrett didn’t work, but Nell didn’t resent him for it. His joblessness had been her idea. He was creative, had a passion for books and words. He was a writer, and someday he’d be in print. Nell would make sure of it, even though he never let her read a single sentence he wrote.

  “Barrett?” Nell stepped inside the apartment, then fastened all three dead-bolt locks behind her. The place was little more than a handful of walls, thin enough for both of them to know everything about their neighbors without ever meeting them face-to-face. Yellowed wallpaper was peeling away in places like blistered skin. The ceiling was pockmarked with stains from where the upstairs neighbor’s kids regularly flooded the kitchen and bathroom. The floor, while hardwood, was so warped it was next to impossible to keep the secondhand kitchen table level. Nell had shoved two old paperbacks beneath one of the legs to keep it from leaning too far to the right. Lady Chatterley and Father Lankester Merrin were doing their best to keep plates and silverware in place. And the rest of the furniture wasn’t any better. All of it had come from the Salvation Army. All of it needed some sort of support.

  But despite the old furnishings and dilapidated state, the place was spotless. It held an air of scruffy hipness that lent it an almost cute quality, from Nell’s potted ferns balanced on the windowsills to the miniature herb garden on the fire escape. There were always two settings on that shabby kitchen table. Matching place mats and plates surrounded a small vase of the cheapest flowers the market had been selling on shopping day. Usually they were carnations, and Nell didn’t mind that one bit. Carnations lasted a long time, sometimes over a week if she kept the water fresh. Plain but hearty, just like her.