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beside the couch where Jordan slept, her brother’s pink prick hovering over the soles of Jordan’s bare feet.
    “Did he jizz on you?” Sarah asks him. “Gross.”
    We are silent as the car climbs the steep, cobbled hill in West Philadelphia where Jordan’s father was last seen. He takes hard drags on one of my cigarettes and picks at the black ringlets of hair on top of his head.
    “Your head looks like an octopus,” I say, and he blows smoke in my face.
    Jordan needs money—for food or drugs, or his own goddamn cigarettes, that’s for sure. The tip regarding his father’s whereabouts came from his aunt, whom Jordan had stayed with briefly when he was fifteen and his mother had first kicked him out of her condo. It was a good thing, though, because management would evict Jordan’s mother just a few weeks later and, the aunt had told him, she was naked and high when the manager came to serve the notice. So high she threw a frozen hot dog at him . She left all of their stuff behind, including Jordan’s broken bed frame and the cat, Snickers. Jordan does not care to know where his mother went and assumes that she is staying with one of her drug dealers. For a while, we would sneak into the condo through a basement window to give the cat fresh food and water. Snickers hid every time we came in, which forced us to clamber over boxes of clothes and unused exercise equipment to find him. We tried to avoid eye contact with the mannequin heads, Styrofoam models his mother had once used to hold the wigs she styled for beauty school. The heads, white and stoic, lay helter-skelter on a metal shelf like dejected parts in a doll factory. After a few months, we stopped showing up and the condo sold. Nobody knows what became of its contents, or the cat.
    When we find Jordan’s father he is in front of an open garage, slouched in an old metal wheelchair like a lifeless marionette, a dirty, white puff of a dog curling in and out of the rusty wheels. His pink scalp is chapped and flaking and heis fiddling with something on his lap. A few old men sit in folding metal chairs inside the garage. They smoke and pass around a bottle of brown liquor. They watch a television set that is rigged up in a corner on top of some cardboard boxes. A younger man, maybe in his fifties, stands against a wall and rubs his forehead back and forth, back and forth against the coarse concrete. I stay in the car while Jordan gets out and moves toward his father. I notice that his walk is stiff and awkward, a feigned masculinity. His father hands him a twenty-dollar bill that Jordan stuffs into his jeans pocket. He turns around and rushes to the car, gets into the passenger seat, and slams the door.
    “Go,” he says, sliding another of my cigarettes from the pack.
    How many nights have we spent in this basement? A hundred? More?
    Angel’s mom is crazy. Everybody knows that. So is Angel, for that matter, all of five feet nothing, her tiny, olive feet jammed into shimmery stiletto heels, shoes built for a steadier gal—but here we are. Angel is like a wind-up toy, fueled by booze and prescription pills and countless joints, wholly reliant on boys who will pick her up from the floor and toss her little body over their shoulders. They take her to bed. Her black skirt slips high over her hips, delicate as wishbones. And her ass, compact in the requisite G-string, is warm against their cheeks.
    We all use her, this sixteen-year-old girl, for her house and her drugs and the entertainment she provides. Her mother’s negligence is a boon, her father’s absence merely a convenience.Some say he died a couple of years ago. Others say he moved to Las Vegas and runs a casino. We don’t feel bad; few of us have fathers anymore. We like to watch as the self-awareness drains from her eyes. It is so tangible, that moment, composure puddling around her ankles like a silk slip. Jordan passes her the joint and she inhales greedily, desperately.
    “Jesus, Angel,” he