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and tattoos up and down each arm. One was sweeping clumps of hair in slow circles around the floor.
    “Yeah?” Guy on a stool looked up from a tiny computer he was balancing on one knee.
    “How much for a haircut?”
    The manager—if that was who he was—looked over Avery’s head. “First time here?”
    Avery nodded.
    “Forty,” the guy said, turning back to the screen.
    “Any one of these?” Avery looked at the three empty chairs. Not one of the tattooed kids made a move. No sign of whether they worked there or were just hanging out.
    “NONA,” the manager yelled. Nothing happened. The guy with the broom hoisted it and whapp ed the handle against a back door. A woman stuck her head out, angrily.
    “I’m on the goddamn phone ,” she said. “You take him, Trevor.”
    “On break,” Trevor said, and brandished a pack of cigarettes for proof.
    “Jesus fuck,” the woman said, and disappeared. Avery made himself comfortable in the chair closest to the window. The mirror he faced was scratched and cloudy, and covered on all sides with stickers, taped-up photos, and Magic Marker graffiti.
    Then she was there, standing behind him. Nona. She finished tying on an apron and pushed at his head, this way and that, roughly.
    “Maybe shorter on the sides and—” Avery began. The music changed to that song by the Killers that had been everywhere last summer.
    “Yeah, I’ll take it from here,” Nona said, not meeting his eyes in the mirror. Avery grinned and shut up. He watched her razor up the back of his neck and scissor-snip the top into a wild, spiky tangle. She worked her mouth as she bent to check how even things were on the sides, and muttered something to herself, her warm breath puffing against his earlobe.
    Avery checked her style—the beat-up, half-laced work boots, a cheap silver snake thing clamped around her upper arm—and recognized it, of course. She was one of his kind. But there was something else: Nona’s face, pale, and faint lines on her forehead. Purple skin under her eyes. Her hair, a mess of twisted black dreadlocks, had streaks of gray growing out from the roots. Why did that set his heart humming? Avery wondered. The way her strong bare arms did, and the heavy softness of her breasts under the apron front.
    The whole cut took less than ten minutes. He thanked her, and she nodded, wiping her hands on a small towel after flicking it down his shoulders.
    Avery paid the guy on the stool his forty bucks and checked his wallet for a tip. All he had was another twenty. “I don’t have any change,” the manager said, shrugging. He slipped an earpiece in, unconcerned.
    Avery turned to Nona. “Just my luck,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “This you?” he asked, reaching over to touch a battered postcard stuck in one corner of her mirror. He’d been staring at it during the haircut, a grainy black-and-white image of a woman bent forward and howling into a microphone. He pulled it out. Dates and clubs were printed on the back.
    Nona looked up into his face as he studied the card. “It’s my last one.”
    He handed her the twenty. “I’ll take this as change.” One of the Mohawk dudes snorted, a hooting laugh that both Nona and Avery ignored. One half-turning-up of her mouth, that’s all Avery allowed himself to savor, standing there, one beat of perfectionpassing between them. Then he pushed back out onto Thompson with the postcard stuck in his pocket, hands shaking in a powerful kind of jones, grinning at everyone and no one, just like your basic village idiot.
     
    Enough of Hartfield, already. Somewhere in the dark tangle of streets in this little town was the train station that could get him back to Manhattan. But where exactly, and how would he get there? What time did the trains run? Avery had none of the answers, but he wasn’t too fazed. He’d figure it out. On his way to the door, though, he was stopped by a commotion in the country-club foyer.
    A cluster of