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comes down to teeth,” and made a gnawing gesture at his arm. Food. Teeth. I pictured a pyramid of soup cans with their labels torn off, these silver bundles of energy, like batteries, like giant bullets. I pictured a tumbling pyramid of cans, filled with energy, organic electricity. Falling cans, falling bullets. Every so often, there’s a report on the radio about crowds at New Year’s, or Mardi Gras, or the Fourth of July, and someone shoots a gun in the air and people die from falling bullets. Every so often, someone drops a coin from the Empire State Building and the coin, by the force of the earth itself, is a weapon. Story goes it could fall right through your skull. Food. Teeth. Ted, a kind of cannibal, eating himself. Wolves chewing their arms off in iron traps in the snowy woods.
    Then I was back to the bug, trying to imagine tearing at veins in my arm, imagining myself bite and how my arm would bite back with pain, and my teeth would jump away, and that’d be it. I could imagine leaning toward my arm, and I could imagine an arm torn open, but connecting the two was unimaginable. I could see it like a movie, away from me: me, in a gruesome photo with my arm, I could see, but add the notion of the pain and I’d shrink. I could not actually let myself imagine it.
    Ted’s girlfriend was CiCi, and when CiCi swooped into town with her great blowing hair, I wouldn’t even stop off at the triplex; I’d leave a note on the kitchen table in the morning before I left for school, which was hours after my mother was at work at the track. “CiCi’s in town,” said my note, each time. After school I ran right by the triplex; I wouldn’t even bring my horn home to practice so I wouldn’t be slowed down, and I ran by as if it wasn’t even where I lived, as if triplex had not become the word that meant I lived in only one of three parts. I passed it and then walked some, so I wouldn’t arrive breathless. Along the way I pulled a leaf from a eucalyptus tree, cracked down its vertebrae, smelled it. I thought about the scorpions that lived in the crevices of the bark of those trees, so I plucked leaves quickly, teasing out the danger of it, the thump in my stomach that went along with tugging at the branches.
    I walked past the stucco church and then past the sprawling one where boys from my bus stop gathered on the expanse of sidewalk and pulled their cardboard boxes from their hiding place. Boxes must have been stashed all over town, everywhere boys went. I walked through the stand of eucalyptus that shaded the picnic tables in the park, cut through the kids’ playland, which had a dumpy little merry-go-round and a pretty good sandbox, and one of those tall shiny slides that got so hot you couldn’t use it in the summer, and through a flap in a corner of the chain-link fence that separated the park’s property from the apartments’.
    â€œHey, baby,” CiCi said when I walked through the door. She wore blue overalls and sneakers and she looked great. She sat on the counter that divided the kitchenette from the eating area, and Ted sat at the table, in the chair. She made him look even older than he was, but at least he wasn’t ugly and bald. Ted had a beer and CiCi had a big plastic cup with a bendy straw. She leaned against the wall and held the cup between her knees. She smoked a cigarette with one hand and held a magazine with its pages folded back in the other.
    â€œI have ten dollars,” I said. “I want to buy Julie a birthday present.”
    â€œI know where let’s go,” said CiCi. “Finish your beer, Ted.”
    CiCi and I rode together in the back of the Chevette and Ted drove, our chauffeur, CiCi said. In gestures like that I could feel her including me, I could feel a tiny relief at not having to decide whether to ride like an extra jacket in the far corner of the backseat or lean up between them and try to hear their