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’ludes. ’Ludes wouldn’t hurt you. But getting caught writing ’scripts could. Like fry you. Like Big-Time Trauma. Like, puhleeze, who needed the grief?
    Especially if you were a smart little girl like Zoe who could figure things out.
    What Zoe had figured out a couple years ago, well, actually she hadn’t figured it out—it was more like she fell into it, but that was a trick in itself, wasn’t it? Like, some people could fall into a pot of gold and think it was just another pile of shit. Zoe kept her eyes open. She knew the diff.
    It all started at her friend Chloe Biedenharn’s first tea, the announcement party for her debut. Zoe was in the ground-floor bathroom behind the stairs in Chloe’s grandmother’s big old house over on St. Charles, honking up two or three stellar lines of coke by herself like a greedy porker, when Dr. Cecil Little came barging in.
    “Why, excuse me, darlin’,” he’d said, all flustered-like. He turned away, but she saw him sneak a peek. That’s ’cause he thought she was taking a pee and thought he might see something. You’d think they’d get used to it, seeing something, since they were doctors, but they were all like that, all her father’s friends and her friends’ fathers—who were all the same people really. Trying to sneak peeks and cop feels and then pretend they weren’t. It was enough to make you puke.
    But then he caught her act, zeroed in on what she was doing.
    “Why, Zoe darlin’,” he’d said, easing back into the room with his long, skinny arms like a praying mantis and shutting the door.
    Locking it. For a minute there Zoe thought she was going to have to yell fire! fire! that was what old Ida over to Ma Elise’s house had told her to do when rape was in the air.
    “You got some more of that sugar to share with your uncle Cecil?” he’d asked.
    Boy, was she relieved. That was all he wanted. Why, sure, she’d said, reached in her little evening bag, hauled out her stash, and cut him two lines on the mirror of the solid gold compact her daddy’d given her for high school graduation.
    Sure as shooting he’d dug out his wad of hundreds and peeled off one for tooting, then wiped off the damp end and tucked it down the front of her blue party dress.
    “Don’t guess you got any more where that come from, do you, sugah?”
    “Why, Dr. Little”—and she truly was surprised—“I’d of thought you’d have plenty of access.”
    “Oh, no, Miss Blue Eyes. You ought to know doctors are very careful about that. Don’t ever like to be holding.”
    “You don’t say.”
    Zoe had turned back to the vanity by then, checking out her mess of curls, her lipstick, and brushing around her nose. There was nothing more embarrassing than coming back from the Ladies with coke all over your face. But all the time she as thinking.
    “So what do you do for blow?” she asked.
    “Grub. Like I did just now.”
    “That’s not exactly grubbing, Dr. Little.” She grinned, deepening her dimples.
    She knew that trick always caused a man like Dr. Little to want to stick his tongue in them. It was smart—to distract a man when you were doing business. ’Course, they just thought she was a dumb little twat they were chatting up, so they never figured that out. She’d learned the bit from watching old Bette Davis movies on the VCR. Girl didn’t have a mama grabbed her role models wherever.
    “I wouldn’t call a C-note grubbing,” she said.
    “Well, hell!” He laughed his hearty there’s-lots-more-where-that-came-from-little-girl laugh.
    Then, like it was an egg she could hold in her hand, it came to her—oval and perfect and self-contained—her plan.
    But right now, this very minute, the doorbell was ringing. They were here, the Mardi Gras army. Zoe threw on a pink silk robe and ran down the stairs.
    Leading the troupe were her great-grandmother, Ma Elise, and Ida, who’d been with her a hundred years, the two little old ladies toddling in, leaning on each