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derailing and everything spilled out along the tracks, broken bodies in tangled, smoking wreckage, and that’s exactly what it feels like, to be here, alive and alone and no idea how she will be able to stand waking up tomorrow.
    “Stop it,” Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes. “Jesus, just fucking stop it,” but she’s crying again, and her eyes burn, and she’s so goddamn sick of the sound, the smell and saltbland flavor of her own useless tears. She covers her face with one arm, hiding from no one but herself, making a little more dark, and in a few minutes she’s asleep again.

CHAPTER TWO
    Dancy
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    T HE albino girl is reading National Geographic, alert pink eyes scanning the bright and sparsely worded pages—Ethiopia, Taiwan, Cro-Magnon cave paintings in France. She’s been coming here for almost two weeks now, only a few blocks from the shelter, and the librarians usually leave her alone, as long as she doesn’t fall asleep, as long as she doesn’t forget where she is and start singing or whistling or put her feet up on the tables. They stare at her, when they think she isn’t looking, scorncold faces for her dirtywhite hair and ragged clothes, the old women in their cat’s-eye spectacles and the young gay men in their cheap suits meant to look expensive. But the teenagers are worse: black kids hiding from the projects one block east, all snickers and pointing fingers, mean whispers, hey freak, hey, white girl, how’d you even get so white? and she’d rather have the librarians’ sidewise glances and dirty looks, thank you very much.
    Dancy Flammarion turns another page, and there’s a big photograph of some place very, very far away, brooding, bruisedark clouds and foamwhite waves crashing down on a rocky beach, jagged rocks farther out to sea, and a few gray gulls wheeling against the stormy sky—Ireland, Oregon, Wales—someplace she’s never been and will likely never go, so it’s all the same. At least she has the pictures. At least someone bothers to take pictures of faraway places so she can know that this isn’t the entire world, the summerparched streets of Birmingham, Alabama, the swamps and pine thickets of Okaloosa County, Florida, the wild and worn-out places in between—what she’s been given of the world. And she might have been given less, she knows that, might have spent her life like her grandmother, like her mother, never going far enough from home to know that there were places without alligators and Spanish bayonets.
    And then the sudden certainty that someone’s watching her, that someone is very close, and she looks up, and it’s one of the gay boys, blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose, nervous hands playing with themselves. Nervous boy standing at her table so she has to look away from the stormshadowcool beach on the magazine page, squints up at him even though the fluorescents make her eyes hurt, make her wish she hadn’t lost her sunglasses. The nervous gay boy looks like he wants to say something, but he’s just standing there, staring at her.
    “Is there something you wanted to say?” Dancy asks him, voice low so no one can shush her for talking in the library. And he looks over his shoulder, guiltyquick peek back towards the stingy corral of desks, and Dancy figures he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble for whatever it is he’s about to do, maybe just for talking to her, and for the moment that’s more interesting than the magazine.
    “Did I do anything wrong?”
    “Oh, no,” he says, reaching into a pocket and out comes a fancy leather wallet, leather the color of chocolate milk, and “I just, well,” and he’s opened the wallet, is fumbling around inside, and she can see the ones and tens and twenty-dollar bills tucked in there, can see the credit cards, and maybe this is her lucky day. Maybe McDonald’s or Taco Bell tonight instead of the shit they’ve