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and they're assholes. Happy?"
    "Completely."
    "Good. Real good."
    "Jimmy, we don't want to live in any crummy house with this bunch of assholes that are making you an asshole, now do we?"
    Jimmy didn't quite grit his teeth. "I guess not."
    "Can you climb through this window?"
    Silence. He looked at her strangely.
    "Are you deaf? Can you climb through this window? Answer me that, can an asshole like yourself climb through this window?"
    "I can do that."
    "You want to climb through?"
    "You say so, yeah."
    She stood up, pulled her shirt over her head. Unfastened her bra. Her breasts small, dark and firm bounced free.
    Jimmy got through that window in record time.
    She had her pants off now, her underwear.
    Then they were in bed and he was pounding her for all he was worth, and she was getting about as much pleasure out of it as the bag down at the gym that the prizefighters train on, when suddenly the bedroom door opened and the light came on and her mother shrieked, grabbed the old teddy bear off Angela's dresser and began pounding Jimmy briskly about the head and ears.
    Jimmy rolled off the bed, scooped up his clothes and like a seal leaping off a rock, dove through the window and out into the night.
    Still clutching the stuffed bear, Angela's mother turned on her, breathing like an asthmatic hippo.
    "Know what, Momma?" Angela said. "You won't have to check this time. Take my word for it. The cherry's gone, nothing left now but the box it came in."
    Angela got the whipping of her life; beat half to death by an elderly, outraged, Puerto Rican mother with a teddy bear for a club. If it hadn't hurt so bad, it might have been funny.
    When her mother finally quit there was nothing left of the bear but a floppy brown rag of cloth. Its cotton guts lay strewn from one end of the room to the other.
    "Get out of my house," her mother yelled, "you're no daughter of mine."
    "Works for me," Angela said.
    She got dressed even as her mother sat on the edge of the bed, occasionally screaming, "Get out, whore!"
    She grabbed some extra clothes, the money they had saved, and went out to look for Jimmy.
    That was the falling of shit-brick number one.
    Brick number two fell when she found Jimmy. They didn't get married right away ("soon," Jimmy kept saying), but they did rent an apartment in the sleazy section of the city. And the "friends" he had told her about, the guys from The House, as it was called, came to live with them—at least two of them.
    She thought: Now isn't this the shits? I get kicked out of the house with my mother thinking I'm the local amusement ride, and two assholes I never wanted to live with, never wanted to meet, have moved in with me.
    There was a positive side. Jimmy told her that there had originally been four assholes.
    Thank the Blessed Virgin for small favors.
    But the two guys scared her, made her flesh creep around her bones. There was that wild laughing one who was always sniffing glue, "doing the bag" he called it. And then there was Stone, never speaking, just watching with razor-blade eyes that stripped away her clothes and ripped her flesh.
    She wanted Jimmy to make them leave, but he wouldn't,
    Or it seemed that way at first. After a time she realized it wasn't that he didn't want them to leave, but, like her, he was afraid of them. Their "friendship" had shed its skin to reveal something considerably less tasteful—a kind of cancer that dominated him.
    Then came the third shit-brick: Brian Black-wood.
    After that, the bricks began to fall like rain.
    So, here they were, with Brian and his two crazy pals, parked in the woods, stopping for a while before they . . .
    God, she didn't want to think about it.
    The things she and Jimmy had seen them do.
    The way they killed in cold blood. The way they had ...
    No. She would not think back on it. She could not.
    But she did. The candy bars and cold drinks she had eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner turned to acid and she felt weak. She bent forward and