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she turned and squinted at a bulge on her backside.
    To anyone else it would have been the beginnings of a cute behind.
    She reached for the Ex-Lax. Chocolate. Radical. Yummy-yum.
    Well, hell, what was a girl to do when she was, like, practically force-fed for an entire debutante season at one breakfast, brunch, luncheon, tea, cocktail party, dinner, supper, a grand total of five hundred disgusting party meals one right after another?
    After all, this was New Orleans, where hostesses couldn’t show their faces in public, not to mention polite society, if they didn’t lay on buffets of oysters and shrimp and crawfish floating in béarnaise, béchamel, beurre blanc, cream, hollandaise, lemon-butter, mushroom, mustard, remoulade, and veloute sauces. And that was for starters.
    Just the thought of the food she’d faced since the deb season began made Zoe want to puke, or, as her friend Chloe would say, talk to Ralph on the big white phone.
    Zoe stepped into her pink and white bathroom and did that very thing, smartly.
    Zoe was very good at praying to the porcelain goddess, or, as her father would say, vomiting.
    It was one of her talents that Ma Elise, her great-grandmother, had failed to enumerate when catching Sam Adams up to speed on the family. No, Ma Elise hadn’t talked to Sam, who was visiting Ma Elise and her aunt Kitty a couple of blocks away in the house where they lived together on Third Street, about Zoe’s daily vomiting.
    But, yes, Zoe actually did do a few things other than sleep, try on endless clothes (size three) that she wore to all those parties, and look at herself in the mirror—not that Ma Elise knew about them all.
    For one thing, she was quite a little entrepreneur.
    Her father, Church, was a doctor, right? Which meant he could write prescriptions, right? And left lots of those cute little ’script pads lying around, right?
    Zoe had been able to fake his signature since she was eleven years old and began forging notes to her teachers down the street at McGehee so she could skip school and hang out smoking cigarettes in Lafayette Cemetery.
    Actually, she got very good at signatures, so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before she was writing notes for anybody who had five bucks.
    Another thing about Zoe—she was very careful with all that green. She didn’t spend her earnings, but had it changed into silver dollars and built towers of gilt, castles, and silos of coins, all over her bedroom. They beat the hell out of dollhouses, except she had to dismantle them every day before the cook or housekeeper came sneaking around. No matter how many KEEP OUT—THIS MEANS YOU!!! signs she posted on her door, no one ever did. They had orders from her father to lurk—standing in for her mother, who had run off and left her long before the silver skyscrapers began.
    It was very complicated, Zoe thought, this business in life of acquiring and losing. You could earn all the silver dollars you wanted to, and then, poof! someone could break in and steal them. Or you could have a mom one day, and then, shazam! she’d flown the old coop before her little biddy was even half grown. So much for all those stories about mother hens. And then there were pounds—as in fat. They were the opposite of money and mothers. Once you collected them, you couldn’t ever get shut of them. They’d hang around for the rest of your life like glop on your waist and hips and thighs. Disgusting.
    Some things you couldn’t hold on to. Some things you couldn’t lose. It was all very random. Very complicated.
    But back to the ’script pads. By the time Zoe was twelve, she and her friends were serious devotees of uppers and downers. One of their all-time favorites was ’ludes. It was, like, so funny to watch people ’lude out and fall down, especially at those dumb dance parties their mothers (her father) made them go to, you could die laughing when people went kaboom.
    Though after a while that got dangerous.
    Oh, no, not the