do kinky stuff, either. Laura did things Tania never would; Laura took chances all the time.
But Laura was a lot tougher than Tania.
You’d have to be tough to take what she did. Getting raped by your stepdad, then thrown out of the house for telling . . . her mom saying she was a slut, and that she lied about it all. . . . I guess she figures she hasn’t got a lot to lose. Except Jamie, I guess.
Laura spilled the same story every time she came home drunk, which was about once a week, even though she wasn’t more than sixteen. Jamie didn’t talk about his past. Tania figured it must have been worse than Laura’s; sometimes she’d wake up and hear Jamie crying, hear Laura comforting him. She’d seen him nude a lot, and there were scars all over his body.
Tania was getting all wrinkly, like a raisin; she got out of the water reluctantly, and pulled the plug. As she watched the water run down the drain, making a little whirlpool, she remembered the PBS show bit about how you could tell what hemisphere you were in whether the whirlpool ran clockwise or counterclockwise.
Gravity, Coriolis forces . . . her life was running out like the water. It was so hard to think of anything but the next trick, hard to plan past making the rent.
She used to have dreams, plans. When she first ran away, she was going to get a job, maybe learn to be a model . . . or get into a tech school and learn computers . . . or maybe see if her art teachers were right about her being good at drafting. These days, she watched the SCAD students with a kind of dull hatred. They had it all, and they didn’t even know it. How dared they pretend they were so tortured, so tormented by art? They didn’t know what torture was.
Torture was coming home with cigarette burns on your arms, like Laura; having scars all over your body, like Jamie.
Torture was running fifteen blocks with a guy chasing you, hoping you knew a way to get away from him before he beat you up and took your money. Torture was not having enough to eat, ever; worrying about getting kicked out onto the street because the junkies in the next room couldn’t afford their share of the rent.
Tannim had talked about having dreams. What had happened to hers?
She