Birds of Paradise: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber Read Free Book Online Page A

work?”
    “Off Seventeenth.”
    “You’re a model, aren’t you? I knew it.”
    She rolls her eyes and steers around a couple of men in business suits who turn when Emerson says model . “I’m not a model -model,” she drawls. “Obviously. I don’t stay in their little palaces. I model, like, tattoos. Or other crap—watches and sandals and shit.”
    There’s a section toward the north end of Lummus Park called the Cove where Felice and Berry and Reynaldo and some of the other kids go. They’ll lie out or sit near the beach entrance with Frappuccinos and sometimes a gig will come along. Sometimes they won’t feel like doing anything. It gets so hot out there, the sun melting the thick bright air into orange honey, she just wants to curl up and sleep out her life. Exactly what Micah, one of the modeling scouts, is always harping on: You want to throw it all away? That’s great, that’s your own damn choice.
    When she was still at home, Felice ran around with boys and tried pot and stayed out late: she’d thought she was wild—but she’d had no idea what wild was. She knows that now. By the time she got to the beach, she was dried up inside like a cicada husk. The thing that happened to Hannah had done that to her. It was like there was nothing left of her; she slept outdoors all the time back then, with her legs cinched in a knot against her chest, like she’d dried in that position and one stiff breeze off the water would sweep her away.
    Sometimes she can’t help it and she sees Hannah in the east field, sweeping her hand through the grass, saying, “Basically, your choices are you can be smart or pathetic. And you can be good or truly evil.”
    “Then I want to be smart and good.” Felice sat cross-legged in the grass.
    “Possible, but that hardly ever happens in nature.”
    “So what are you?”
    She smiled a long, slow, tipping smile. “Smart and evil. Like my dad. And my mother is pathetic but good. That happens to mothers a lot. Which is why you should never be one.”
    “Not my mom,” Felice said. “She’s the least pathetic person I know.”
    Hannah just kept looking at her with that subtle smile, her lips bitten and dark and her eyes like seawater.
    Now Felice is almost eighteen, and she’s tried so hard to turn into something new. But every day there’s dancing and drugs spread hand to hand—silver pipes, tabs that melt away on the tongue, medical-looking hypodermics, capsules and all the names, letters—E, H, MDA . . . And Felice knows she’s lucky because she’s afraid of needles—fear like a part of her circulatory system—a source of shame and protection. She needs money now if she’s really going to get out of the Green House. So perhaps one of the stores on Lincoln Road, one of the blaring European boutiques, will need a website model, or possibly some people from Benetton, or Ton Sur Ton, or Boden will come out on the beach combing for their scruffier “real life” catalog models, and she’ll land a gig that pays $750, maybe a thousand bucks a day for a couple of days.
    Maybe her mother will give her some cash. Maybe she’ll let herself ask this time.
    “Really, I gotta get going,” she says to Emerson, though she stays at a slow roll.
    “Can I come?”
    She feels irritated again. “You want to come?”
    He smiles again—the expression so restrained it’s almost conspiratorial—and says, “Yeah. Please. I’d really like that.”
    SHE’S NOT WILLING t o admit that they’re together—even for a walk. He’s too big and odd and ungainly. So she stays onboard, skates at a crawl—which would’ve driven her crazy in the past. She abruptly cuts away from the crowds, veering right, passing the edifices of Eden Roc and the Fontainebleau, turning south on Collins’ coral-pink sidewalk. Across the street, the narrow blue cut of Indian Creek glows with a crinkled sheen. Felice tries to roll ahead of Emerson, but he’s surprisingly good at keeping up and