out the window more.
âYou run that check for us, Billy?â
ââCourse, man. âCourse. You owe me big time on this one too, Iâll tell ya.â
I raised my eyebrows. âBilly, remember who youâre talking to.â
Billy thought about it. Thought about the ten years heâd be doing in Walpole, fetching cigarettes for his boyfriend, Rolf the Animal, if we hadnât saved him. His yellow skin whitened considerably, and he said, âSorry, man. Youâre right. When youâre right, youâre right.â He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and tossed a somewhat greasy, very wrinkled piece of paper on my desk.
âWhat am I looking at here, Billy?â
âJenna Angelineâs reference check,â he said. âCopped from our Jamaica Plain office. She cashed a check there on Tuesday.â
It was greasy, it was wrinkled, but it was gold. Jenna had listed four references, all personal. Under the Job heading, sheâd written, âSelf-employed,â in a small, birdlike scrawl. In the personal references sheâd listed four sisters. Three lived in Alabama, in or around Mobile. One lived in Wickham, Massachusetts. Simone Angeline of 1254 Merrimack Avenue.
Billy handed me another piece of paperâa Xerox of the check Jenna had cashed. The check was signed by Simone Angeline. If Billy hadnât been such a slimy-looking dude, I would have kissed him.
Â
After Billy left, I finally got up the nerve to take a look in the mirror. Iâd avoided it all last night and this morning. My hairâs short enough to make do with a finger comb, so after my shower this morning, thatâs exactly what I did. Iâd skipped shaving too, and if I had a little stubble, I told myself it was hip, very GQ .
I crossed the office and entered the tiny cubicle thatsomeone had once referred to as âthe bathroom.â Itâs got a toilet all right, but even thatâs in miniature, and I always feel like an adult locked in a preschool whenever I sit on it and my knees hit my chin. I shut the door behind me and raised my head from the munchkin sink and looked in the mirror.
If I hadnât been me, I wouldnât have recognized my face. My lips were blown up to twice their size and looked like theyâd French-kissed a weed whacker. My left eye was fringed by a thick rope of dark brown and the cornea was streaked with bright red threads of blood. The skin along my temple had split when Blue Cap hit me with the butt of the Uzi, and while I slept, the blood had clotted in some hair. The right side of my forehead where I assume Iâd hit the school wall was raw and scraped. If I wasnât the manly detective type, I might have wept.
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. Itâs a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well. But I have a scar the size and texture of a jellyfish on my abdomen already, and youâd be surprised how your sense of self changes when you canât take your shirt off at the beach. In my more private moments, I pull up my shirt and look at it, tell myself it doesnât matter, but every time a woman has felt it under her palm late at night, propped herself up on a pillow and asked me about it, Iâve made my explanation as quick as possible, closed the doors to my past as soon as theyâve opened, and not once, even when Angieâs asked, have I told the truth. Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but theyâre also the first forms of protection I ever knew.
The Hero always gave me a dope slap upside the head whenever he caught me looking in the mirror. âMen built those things so women would have something to do,â heâd say. Hero. Philosopher. My father, the Renaissance man.
When I was sixteen, I had deep blue eyes and a nice smile, and little else to take confidence in, hanging around the Hero. And if I was still sixteen, staring into