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his eyes. “I wonder—isn’t that robe part of the costume you wear on your job? Isn’t that the same thing except that you wear clothes and I take them off to help tell our stories?”
    He didn’t say anything to this but I saw several people in the audience—the courtroom was packed—nod and smile.
    â€œLet’s move on. The complaint says you allowed your son to make pornographic sketches of naked women.”
    Al shook her head. “That’s a judgment call that, frankly, Your Honor, no one here is qualified to make.”
    His smile vanished. “Oh?”
    â€œNo. Number one, most important, they weren’t pornographic, not in the least, they were artistically done and I have at least two witnesses who will state so for every one you find who says they were pornographic. Number two, they weren’t naked women. They were nude, or one of them was nude, and the rest were wearing varying degrees of clothing.”
    â€œVarying degrees . . .” He paused, seemed to consider her words.
    â€œI graduated from college and began graduate school years ago,” Al said.
    â€œThen why dance?”
    She looked at me and her look softened and then she looked back at the judge. “Because I am privileged to be raising my son alone, with no help from the government or the father, and I can make hundreds of dollars a week dancing. I would love to pursue my doctorate in English literature but it wouldn’t pay as well.”
    He nodded. “Still, there is the question of assault and resisting arrest.”
    So I had been listening and watching Al do it all and I thought, All right, it’s time for me to pull my weight and I stood up from the lawyer’s table where I’d been sitting watching and I was going to tell the judge that Al didn’t allow people to touch me and that when the cop grabbed me it triggered her Target Response and that was why she hit him with the lamp except that the lawyer next to me, the same one who’d asked Al how she’d abused me but was now watching her with admiring eyes, grabbed on to the back of my shirt and pulled me back down into the chair I guess so I wouldn’t interrupt the judge. Which might still have been all right except that just as my butt slammed into the chair, Al turned around and saw that yet another person had their hands on me and her eyes got very glittery again which we were all starting to recognize as a danger sign. Mrs. Preston, who was especially edgy and high-strung, seemed to panic when she saw Al get upset and yelled something else I’d heard the biker say which I think is physically impossible and grabbed her Mace from her purse and ran over to our table and started shooting but got the lawyer instead of Al, who started screaming, the lawyer I mean, about suing somebody or maybe everybody and then the whole courtroom blew up.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    M s. Providge would call this part the “epilogue,” which kind of means the part that comes after the main part but I think it’s more like a way to tell people how the character arc goes after the story is done and they want to know how everybody turns out.
    Al is still Al. Except that she doesn’t dance any longer. The lawyer who got maced turned out to be a little pit bull—or at least that’s what Al called him—and he threatened to sue everybody in the court system for himself and for us and in the end it turned out that Mrs. Preston and the cop had exceeded their authority when they came to visit us in the first place, not by visiting us but by assuming that Al was bad without checking first and the system, although I never did find out exactly who that was, offered to settle with us for enough money so that Al could stop dancing and go after her doctorate which is of course going to be on Dickens. Charles Dickens the writer. She says she discovered that he used the idea of dance and the Glass Café concept when