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chin. To balance it out, I snipped a line of
short bangs that fell high above my too-thin eyebrows. The black dye that
Rabbit had left for me on the counter was already soaking my hair the color of
gunpowder. 
    “Where did you get this hair dye so
quickly?” I called into the next room, where Rabbit was sprawled out on his
four-poster bed.
    “I know you well enough by now to
keep a stash. I mean this is what, your third hair change this month?”
    “Variety is the spice of life,” I
hollered back.
    “A life you came very close to
losing tonight.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic. If I wanted
a parental lecture I would just get on a flight back to America and show up on
my parent’s doorstep.”
    “You can’t do that, Alice. Your
parents think you’re dead.”
    “They don’t know I’m dead, they
just know I’m missing.” I pulled a tube of red lipstick from my bag and
carefully drew it over my mouth. It ripened my lips to something that resembled
cherries dripping in syrup. Anything to distract myself. Thinking about my
parents was a too jagged a knife in my heart. I didn’t let myself go there,
ever.
    “You look a little too vampish to
be the girl on the milk carton,” Rabbit said, pushing his head through the
bathroom door. An annoying asthmatic breath was pushing from his nostrils.
“Your hair looks good. How’s the wound on your arm doing?”
    I looked down and saw that the
bandage was tinctured with pinkish blood. “I think I’ll live,” I answered. “Do
you really think my hair looks good?” I pushed my plastic-shine hair behind my
ears.
    “You don’t look like the same girl
that got shot on the Eiffel Tower and that’s what’s important. Especially if
the guy who shot you comes lurking around. Who the hell was that guy anyways?”
    My cell phone rang. “Great,” I
said, lifting it to my ear, “it’s probably Motley, and you know he’s going to
be pissed. Hello.”
    “Alice.” It was Motley. Rabbit
backed up a step.
    “It’s me, in the flesh,” I rallied
some fake pep in my voice, “and with a flesh wound.” I hoped acting cute would
help the situation, but Motley was a hard guy to push a laugh out of.
    “I heard about the flesh wound
already, Alice. I also heard that the deal didn’t go as planned.” I knew I
would need a cigarette to endure the phone call so I grabbed one from my bag
and blew pale smoke at the mirror. Motley finished his thought, “Rumor has it
you fell out of the Eiffel Tower.”
    “Don’t be crazy, Motley,” I
crooned, followed by a pause for a nervous laugh to twist its way out of my
throat. “I did not fall out of the Eiffel Tower.” I switched the phone to my
other ear and tapped my cigarette ash into the sink. “I was shot out of
the Eiffel Tower.”
    “That wasn’t part of the plan, now
was it, Alice?”
    “Screw the plan,” I said. “The plan
went horribly. The plan went worse than horribly. The plan was an apocalypse.”
    “You know how much I hate it when
we experience a failure.”
    “There is one success that came out
of all this. I’m alive and I’m a brunette now. I know how much you like
brunettes.” And redheads and blondes and every type in between . I
squeezed my eyes shut and prayed my voice wasn’t shaking.
    “Alice,” Motley said coldly, “I
don’t want to deal with your antics at the moment. You messed up a very big job
for me. That makes you a liability right now.”
    Everything about Motley was numbers
and dollar signs, and being in Motley’s liability column was not safe. That was
the column with the big red X’s. I was pacing the bathroom now. “Motley, you
know I would never intentionally screw something up for you.”
    “If that’s true, I can only wonder
if you’re slipping, Alice.”
    I dropped the lid down over the
toilet and curled into a ball on the seat. Rabbit was watching me, so I leapt
up and shut the door on his nose. “Motley, I have to tell you something.”
    “What is it, Alice?”
    “I know