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and bail-bond shops and storefront churches, sprawling parking lots and not parking garages so they could cruise the lots and side streets after dark and break into parked vehicles if no one was watching. The guys laughed how easy it was to force open a locked door or a trunk where people left things like for instance a woman’s heavy handbag she didn’t want to carry walking on the boardwalk. Assholes! Some of them were so dumb you almost felt sorry for them.
    All this while Lisette had been waiting, for Nowicki to be distracted. The beer-buzz was fading, she was beginning to lose her nerve. Passing a lipstick-kiss to J-C. like saying All right if you screw me, fuck me—whatever. Hey here I am.
    Except maybe it was just a joke—so many things were jokes—you’d have to negotiate the more precise meaning, later.
    If there was a later. Lisette wasn’t into thinking too seriously about later.
    Wiped her eyes with her fingertips like she wasn’t supposed to do since the surgery— Your fingers are dirty Lisette you must not touch your eyes with your dirty fingers there is the risk of infection —oh God she hated how both her eyes filled with tears in cold months and in bright light like this damn fluorescent light in all the school rooms and corridors so her mother had got permission for Lisette to wear dark-purple-tinted sunglasses to school, that made her look—like, cool —like she’s in high school not middle school, sixteen or seventeen not thirteen.
    Hell you’re not thirteen—are you? You?
    One of her mother’s man friends eyeing her suspiciously. Like, why’d she want to play some trick about her age ?
    He’d been mostly an asshole, this friend of her mother’s. Chester—“Chet.” But kind of nice, he’d lent Momma some part of the money she’d needed for Lisette’s eye doctor.
    Now Lisette was as tall as her mother. It was hard to get used to seeing Momma just her height—a look of, like, fright in Momma’s face, that her daughter was catching up with her, fast.
    They’d said she was slow. Slow learner. They’d said mild dyslexia . But with glasses, she could read better up close. Except if her eyes watered and she had to keep blinking and blinking and sometimes that didn’t even help.
    That morning she’d had to get up by herself. Get her own breakfast—sugar-glaze Wheaties—eating in front of the TV—and she hated morning-TV, cartoons and crap or worse yet “news”—she’d slept in her clothes for the third night—black T-shirt, underwear, wool socks—dragged on her jeans, a scuzzy black-wool sweater of her mother’s with TAJ embossed on the back in turquoise satin. And her boots.
    Checked the phone messages but there were none new.
    Friday night 9 P.M. her mother had called, Lisette had seen the caller ID and hadn’t picked up. Fuck you going away, why the fuck should I talk to you .
    Later, feeling kind of scared hearing loud voices out in the street she’d tried to call her mother’s cell phone number. But the call didn’t go through.
    Fuck you I hate you anyway. Hate hate hate you!
    Unless Momma brought her back something nice—like when she and Lisette’s father went to Fort Lauderdale for their second honeymoon and Momma brought Lisette back a pink-coral-colored outfit—tunic top, pants.
    Even with all that went wrong in Fort Lauderdale, Momma remembered to bring Lisette a gift.
    Now it happened—and it happened fast.
    Nowicki went to the door—classroom door—where someone was knocking and quick!—with a pounding heart Lisette leaned over to hand the wadded Kleenex-note to Keisha who tossed it onto J-C’s desk like it was a hot coal—and J-C blinked at the note like it was some weird beetle that had fallen from the ceiling—and without glancing over at Keisha, or at Lisette peering at him through the dark-purple-tinted glasses, with a gesture like shrugging his shoulders—J-C was so cool —all he did was shut the wadded Kleenex in his fist and shove it into