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I.
    Always?
    Always, Melissa, always.
     
     
    — | — | —
     

Five
     
    “How has it been going for you?”
    At ten o’clock Tuesday morning, in an office on the eighth floor of the Hamlin Building on Michigan Avenue, Kristin Heidmann sat in a Danish modern arm chair, chewing gum and saying nothing. Her hair, bleached blonde, dyed red and black, was a spiky punk nightmare that might have been the comb of a prehistoric rooster. Her lower lip was painted blue, the upper carmine. Though she had on a light blue dress that her parents had ordered her to wear, the smirk on her face and even her posture were a defiance not of any authority in particular but of the existing order, no matter what that order might be.
    “Nothing you feel like talking about today, Kris?”
    Kris popped her gum.
    Kristin Heidmann was 14. When she was 12, she’d run away from the Malling Academy, an exclusive boarding school where she had been on the high honor roll, and hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where she became a prostitute.
    “Look,” Selena Lazone said, “if we’re going to get anywhere working together, you’re going to have to do your part.” Seated in a matching chair, angled so that her clients could look at her or not as they chose, Selena tapped her ballpoint pen on the pad of paper on the clipboard on her lap.
    A tall woman, with the slender toned grace of a dancer, Selena Lazone was 28 and had two masters degrees, one in social work, the other in psychology; she planned next summer to begin working on her PhD at the University of Chicago. Until she was 15 she had been completely illiterate.
    Kristin glared at her.
    “Let’s try it another way,” Selena said. “This is our fifth visit and nothing is happening. Next week your parents are going to want a progress report, and I’ll have to say ‘No progress.’ Then they’ll do what they planned in the first place-lock you away in a private sanitarium where you’ll be under 24 hour observation. You’ll have to ask every time you need to go to the bathroom. How does that sound to you, Kris?”
    Kristin shrugged. In a breathy monotone, she said, “So I can always run away again.”
    “Uh-uh.” Selena shook her head. “You won’t even see the outside, let alone have a chance to get there. You work with me or that’s what will happen, and you know it.”
    “Okay, okay.”
    “Okay, what?”
    “Okay, so you want to talk, so okay, I’ll talk.”
    “Fine,” Selena said. “Talk.”
    “About what?”
    “You, Kris. The subject is Kristin Heidmann. What makes you happy? What makes you sad?”
    “You know what makes me happy? Fucking. That’s why I started turning tricks, you know. I like to fuck. Is that what you want me to talk about?”
    Selena frowned. With her high cheekbones, burnished gold complexion, and features that were more rightly called noble than beautiful, she seemed to be registering almost regal displeasure. Several years before, a drunken advertising account executive at a party had tried to make a move on her with, “You remind me of a wild Gypsy princess.” She had told him, “I’m no princess.”
    She was a Gypsy.
    “Is that what you want to talk about?” Selena said.
    “I don’t give a shit.”
    “What does matter to you?”
    “Nothing,” Kris said.
    “Then let’s talk about this. You’re unhappy,” Selena said. “You’re miserable. You’re hurting and you think you’re the lowest, most worthless creature that ever got up in the morning or went to bed at night.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “No,” Selena said, “the truth, and we both know it.” Tshatsimo, she thought; the Romany word meant “truth” and a great deal more than that. Though much was lost in translation, tshatsimo meant “that which truly is, the Great Truth to be found even under black lies, white lies, seeming truths and little truths.”
    “You don’t know anything about me!” Kristin raged. “What the hell do you think you know, anyway?”
    “I know girls