"We don't know what kind of filthy diseases you're bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight."
I remember I wanted to go out and get my clothes, iron then, fold them, and put them away.
Give me any sense of control.
Flash.
I remember how the front door just opened and shut, it didn't slam. With the light on in my room, all I could see was myself reflected in my bedroom window. When I turned out the light, there was Shane, standing just outside the window, looking in at me, his face all monster movie hacked and distorted, dark and hard from the hair-spray blow-up.
Give rne terror.
Flash.
He didn't ever smoke that I knew about, but he lit a match and put it to a cigarette in his mouth. He knocked on the window.
He said, "Hey, let me in."
Give me denial.
He said, "Hey, it's cold."
Give me ignorance.
I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane again.
Tonight, with the lights off, with the curtains shut and the front door locked, with Shane gone except for the ghost of him, I ask, "What parade?"
My mom says, "It's the Gay Pride Parade."
My dad says, "We're marching with PFLAG."
And they'd like me to march with them. They'd like me to sit here in the dark and pretend it's the outside world we're hiding from. It's some hateful stranger that's going to come get us in the night. It's some alien fatal sex
disease. They'd like to think it's some bigoted homophobe they're terrified of. It's not any of it their fault. They'd like me to think I have something to make up for.
I did not throw away that can of hairspray. All I did was turn out the bedroom lights. Then there were the fire engines coming in the distance. There was orange flashing across the outside of my curtains, and when I got out of bed to look, there were my school clothes on fire. Hanging dry on the clothesline and layered with air. Dresses and jumpers and pants and blouses, all of them blazing and coming apart in the breeze. In a few seconds, everything I loved, gone.
Flash.
Jump ahead a few years to me being grown up and moving out. Give me a new start.
Jump to one night, somebody calling from a pay phone to ask my folks, were they the parents of Shane McFarland? My parents saying, maybe. The caller won't say where, but he says Shane is dead.
A voice behind the caller saying, tell them the rest.
Another voice behind the caller saying, tell them Miss Shane hated their hateful guts and her last words -were: this isn't over yet, not by a long shot. Then somebody laughing.
Jump to us alone here in the dark with a casserole.
My father says, "So, honey, will you march with your mother and me?"
My mom says, "It would mean so much for gay rights.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jump to the moment around one o'clock in the morning in Evie's big silent house when Manus stops screaming and I can finally think.
Evie is in Cancun, probably waiting for the police to call her and say: Your house-sitter, the monster without a jaw, well, she's shot your secret boyfriend to death when he broke in with a butcher knife is our best guess.
You know that Evie's wide awake right now. In some Mexican hotel room, Evie's trying to figure out if there's a three-hour or a four-hour time difference between her big house where I'm stabbed to death, dead, and Cancun, where Evie's supposed to be on a catalogue shoot. It's not like Evie is entered in the biggest brain category. Nobody shoots a catalogue in Cancun in the peak season, especially not with big-boned cowgirls like Evie Cottrell.
But me being dead, that opens up a whole world of possibility.
I'm an invisible nobody sitting on a white damask sofa facing another white sofa across a coffee table that looks like a big block of malachite from Geology 101.
Evie slept with my fiance, so now I can do anything to her.
In the movie, where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible ... ? Like go into the guy's locker room at Gold's gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders' locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany's and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.
Just by his being so dumb, Manus could've stabbed me, tonight, thinking I was Evie, thinking Evie shot me, while I was asleep in the dark in her bed.
My dad, he'd go to my funeral and talk to everybody about how I was always about to go back to college and finish my personal fitness training degree and then no doubt go on to medical school. Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, I couldn't get past the fetal pig in Biology 101. Now I'm the cadaver.
Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.
Evie would be right next to my Mom, next to the open casket. Evie would stagger up leaning on Manus. You know, Evie would've found something totally grotesque for the undertaker to dress me in. So Evie throws an arm around my mom, and Manus can't get away from the open casket fast enough, and I'm laying there in this blue velveteen casket like the interior of a Lincoln Town Car. Of course, thank you, Evie, I'm wearing this concubine evening wear Chinese yellow silk kimono slit up the side to my waist with black fishnet stockings and red Chinese dragons embroidered across the pelvic region and my breasts.
And red high heels. And no jawbone.
Of course, Evie says to my mom: "She always loved this dress. This kimono was her favorite." Sensitive Evie would say, "Guess this makes you oh for two."
I could kill Evie.
I would pay snakes to bite her.
Evie would be wearing this little black cocktail number with an asymmetrical hemline satin skirt and a strapless bodice by Rei Kawakubo. The shoulders and sleeves would be sheer black chiffon. Evie, you know she has jewelry, big emeralds for her too green eyes and a change of accessories in her black clutch bag so she can wear this dress later, dancing.
I hate Evie.
Me, I'm rotting with my blood pumped out in this slut-ty Suzie Wong Tokyo Rose concubine drag dress where it didn't fit so they had to pin all the extra together behind my back.
I look like shit, dead.
I look like dead shit.
I would stab Evie right now over the telephone.
No, really, I'd tell Mrs. Cottrell as we placed Evie's urn in a family vault somewhere in Godawful, Texas. Really, Evie wanted to be cremated.
Me, at Evie's funeral, I'd be wearing this tourniquet-tight black leather mini dress by Gianni Versace with yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. I'd sit next to Manus in the back of the mortuary's big black Caddy, and I'd have on this wagon wheel of a black Christian Lacroix hat with a black veil you could take off later and go to a swell auction preview or estate sale or something and then, lunch.
Evie, Evie would be dirt. Okay, ashes.
Alone in her living room, I pick up a crystal cigarette box off the table that looks like a block of malachite, and I overhand fast-pitch this little treasure against the fireplace bricks. There's a smash with cigarettes and matches everywhere.
Bourgeoise dead girl that I am, I wish all of the sudden I hadn't done this, and I kneel down and start to pick up the mess. The glass and cigarettes. Only Evie ... a cigarette box. It's just so last- generational.
And matches.
A little tug hits my finger, and I'm cut on a shard so thin and clear it's invisible.
Oh, this is dazzling.
Only when the blood comes out to outline the shard in red, only then can I see what cut me. It's my blood on the broken glass I pull out. My blood on a book of matches.