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my sister. ‘Natty agrees with me, right?’
    Natty paused to give me a look before nodding. ‘Once everything is going well, you two should have a signal that means it’s time for Annie to leave.’
    ‘Something like this,’ Scarlet said. She winked in a ridiculous and cartoonish way that contorted half her face.
    ‘Really subtle,’ I said. ‘Win’ll never notice that.’
    ‘Come on, Annie! I have to stake my claim before someone else does. You have to admit that he’s completely perfect for me.’
    ‘Based on what?’ I asked. ‘You barely even know him.’
    ‘Based on . . . Based on . . . We both like hats!’
    ‘And he’s pretty,’ Natty added.
    ‘He is pretty,’ Scarlet said. ‘I swear, Annie, I will never ask you for anything ever again.’
    ‘Oh, all right,’ I grumbled.
    Scarlet kissed me. ‘I love you, Annie! I was thinking we’d go to that speakeasy your cousin Fats runs.’
    ‘Yeah, that might not be such a great idea, Scar.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Haven’t you heard? Mr Completely Perfect’s dad is the new top cop.’
    Scarlet’s eyes grew wide. ‘Seriously?’
    I nodded.
    ‘I guess we’ll have to pick somewhere legal, then,’ Scarlet said. ‘That pretty much eliminates just about everything fun.’
    The bus stopped on Fifth and the three of us walked the remaining six blocks to my apartment. Scarlet was coming over to study, as she often did.
    We entered the building and walked past the empty doorman cubicle (after the last doorman had been killed and his family had sued, the apartment board decided that they couldn’t afford to pay a doorman any more) and we rode the elevator up to the penthouse.
    Scarlet and Natty went into my bedroom while I checked on Nana.
    Imogen, Nana’s nurse, was reading to her. ‘ To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o ’ clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously .’
    Even though I wasn’t much of a reader, Imogen had a sweet voice that lulled me, and I found myself standing at the door to listen for a while. She read until the end of the chapter (which wasn’t very long), then closed the book.
    ‘You’re here for the start of this one,’ Imogen said to me. She held up the paper novel so that I could see the title: David Copperfield.
    ‘Anyaschka, when did you get here?’ Nana asked. I walked over to her and kissed her cheek. ‘I wanted something with more action,’ Nana said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Girls, guns. But this was what she had.’
    ‘It gets more exciting,’ Imogen assured her. ‘You must be patient, Galina.’
    ‘If it takes too long, I’ll be dead,’ Nana replied.
    ‘Enough with the gallows humour,’ Imogen reprimanded.
    I took the book from Imogen and held it up to my face. The dust stung my nose. The aroma was salty and a bit sour. The cover of the book was disintegrating. There hadn’t been new books printed (on account of the cost of paper) for as long as I had been alive, maybe longer. Nana once told me that when she was a girl there used to be huge stores filled with paper books. ‘Not that I ever went to any bookstores. I had better things to do,’ she’d say with longing in her voice. ‘Ah, to be young!’ These days, most everything was digitized. All the paper books had been pulped and recycled into essentials like toilet tissue and money. If your family (or school) happened to be in possession of a bona fide paper book, you held on to it. (By the way, one of the goods the Balanchine semya dealt in was black-market paper.)
    ‘You can borrow it if you like,’ Imogen said to me. ‘It really does get more exciting.’ My grandmother’s home-health-care worker was an avid paper-book collector, which seemed ridiculously old-fashioned to me. Why would a person want all those dirty paper carcasses around? Still, the books had value for her, so I knew it was a