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cheek and walked around the corner, into the lounge. We watched the door swing open and then close. I turned back to Nanny.
    “So what’s the big secret I can’t tell Liz?” I asked.
    “Me and Voodoo did it the other night.”
    “Wow,” I said. I meant it; it wasn’t just something to say.
    “He saw the hickeys,” she said, her voice dipping. “We were fooling around, you know, bullshitting in the sand, and I turned my head the wrong way. I forgot to put on foundation and he saw them.”
    Nanny really liked Voodoo. We all liked Voodoo because he was kind and easygoing and fun and affectionate. His real name was Dennis Kelly, but he was a Jimi Hendrix freak whose favorite song was “Voodoo Chile,” which he listened to every morning before leaving the house and when he smoked a joint before going to bed. He wanted Len, the bartender, to put it in the jukebox, but Len refused; he thought Hendrix was nothing but empty noise. Voodoo wore a blue bandanna around his albino curls, which he’d trained into a white-boy Afro. It was a hard thing to pull off, but somehow he did it. Nanny really liked him, but she was crazy about Tony Furimonte—we called him Tony Fury—who was not kind or easygoing or fun and had a temper that stretched and snapped equally over big and little things. He’d been thrown out of school three weeks before graduation for punching Mr. Diamond, the history teacher, for giving him a failing grade for the quarter, even though he rarely went to class and frankly wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. To punish him, his parents had sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Providence, Rhode Island, to work construction and finish his senior year. They thought his chances were better in a place where nobody knew him. The night before Tony left, he and Nanny did everything-but in the attic of his parents’ house, and still he wouldn’t call her his girlfriend. He’d been home the first week in July because his grandmother had died, hence the hickeys on Nanny’s neck. It was like he had to leave his mark on Nanny for Voodoo and everyone to see. Since Tony left, she’d been covering the hickeys with Max Factor makeup.
    “So did he, like, freak out?” I asked.
    Nanny tried to widen her eyes but her lids were like little logs, rolling downward. She stood there for a minute, nodding, her eyes closed. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded broken. “He just turned my head this way and that, and then he dropped his hand and he looked at me with thosebig, droopy eyes. And then he said, ‘You know, you are one sweet little heartbreaker, foxy lady.’ Made me feel like shit.”
    I could hear laughter from inside The Starlight Hotel. The jukebox was playing “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. It was the song I listened to under my headphones late at night when I got home from Comanche Street. It was the song I’d always imagined would be playing while Luke and I made love.
    “What was it like?” I asked her. I wanted to know what it was like to make love to someone you weren’t in love with.
    Nanny kept swaying. She put a hand on my arm to steady herself. “Katie, man, swear to God, it was about as exciting as drinking an ice-cream soda,” she said. She had always loved kissing Voodoo. She said he was a great kisser. They liked walking with their arms around each other, Voodoo’s arm hooked around Nanny’s neck, hugging her close. They’d be walking down Comanche Street, bumping into people coming from the other direction, because they were too busy laughing into each other’s eyes to notice.
    “Like maybe a strawberry ice-cream soda, not even a black-and-white,” she added. “With no whipped cream.”
    “Were you high?” I asked.
    Nanny tried rolling her eyes but they were too heavy, so she closed them again. It
was
a pretty stupid question. “What do you think?” she said. “We were in his room, no one was home. The sheets were dirty, I could smell them. I didn’t think