The Stud Book

Nyla went to the school, found the vice principal’s office, and explained how Crystal Light wasn’t crystal meth and never had been. It was all pretty much a game! Kids’ stuff. The vice principal was a dark-haired woman in the middle of filing papers, bent over a cabinet. She straightened up with a groan. She adjusted her wool skirt at the waist and said, “The report was detailed and specific.”

“But it’s wrong,” Nyla insisted. She felt about twelve years old. The vice principal let her in to see Principal Cherryholmes.

Mrs. Cherryholmes was petite and beautiful, maybe even younger than Nyla. She had frosted hair and frosted fingernails and tipped her head sideways as she sat behind her desk and listened.

Nyla said, “When you saw it, did it look more like baking soda or salt? Did it smell like cat urine or more like lemonade?”

A look of disdain flickered across the principal’s face, then she was back to her polite composure. She said, “Our security personnel worked with the police. I don’t know what it looked like. I certainly didn’t smell it.”

“It wasn’t drugs,” Nyla tried, one more time.

Mrs. Cherryholmes took a deep breath. She reached a hand halfway across her desk—not far enough to touch Nyla, but diplomatically far enough to make a gesture of communing. She said, “Understandably, many parents fall into what we call a truthfulness bias. They need to believe their children tell the truth.”

“And that’s wrong?” Nyla’s voice broke. She knew her daughter.

“The police have tests for substances.”

“Then they must not have tested it.” Nyla felt her nose grow congested and tears well up, but she blinked the tears back and hid it—stoic! She’d be stoic. Nobody could tell. She’d cry later, on her own.

Mrs. Cherryholmes slid a box of tissues closer to Nyla’s side of the desk.

Okay. So she could tell. Nyla wasn’t stoic!

“If you really feel there’s been an error, I encourage you to revisit this with the police. They have the evidence. They’ll sort it out.”

Nyla coughed to clear her grief-choked throat. “There’s still a chance?”

Mrs. Cherryholmes shook her gleaming hair. She smiled. Her lipstick was frosted, too, in a sheen of confidence. That was probably the actual lipstick color: Administrative Confidence.

Nyla asked, “How come nobody here followed up on it? Nobody noticed or investigated?”

The principal tightened down on her smile of success. She said, “Please. We have twenty-four hundred kids in this school. We have five security guards a day rotating through. Our job is to curtail any culture of drug trafficking or other problematic behavior, and maintain a quality education. When there’s a problem, we shut it down. We don’t test drugs ourselves. If there’s an error, the police will find and fix it.”

It sounded so easy. So rational. And so very impersonal.

“Understand this—we can’t afford a situation like they’re having in Washington right now.”

A sexting scandal going through a southern Washington school district had been all over the news. A photo of one girl’s naked body, forwarded through the whole school system, left every child involved charged with distribution of porn. It was a nightmare. Parents had filed lawsuits against the district, citing a hostile learning environment. The lawsuits had started piling up on top of one another.

“Your daughter will be fine,” Mrs. Cherryholmes offered. “The support of a concerned parent like you makes all the difference in the world.”

The principal stood up, and Nyla stood with her. They nodded their heads in unison. It’d all be all right. And in that way, the principal silently convinced Nyla to leave. She walked her out of the office and down the hall to the school’s front door.

“Good luck with it. Let us know,” Mrs. Cherryholmes said. “You’re doing everything right.”

Nyla was happy for the talk. It felt like they were friends. It almost made her want to volunteer in the school again, though she’d given that up years before when she got in trouble for letting kids play with matches in the name of an art project, working with burnished driftwood and melted paraffin.

Back then, one of the girls had long, curly hair. They were supposed to tie their hair back! But anyway, Nyla had put the fire out fast, using her own wool jacket even, and the girl had only a few singed bits, and she looked good with her new short hair the next day. She did! It could’ve been worse, and it wasn’t, because Nyla knew what to do in a crisis, and that was something they needed around schools.

Nyla didn’t want to remember that scene too much but knew if she’d been there when Arena was accused—even if it was someone else’s daughter who had been caught selling a mysterious powder—she would’ve seen the project through and had the substance in question tested. Definitely.

The truth was, Nyla hadn’t given up volunteering back when Arena was in grade school—she’d been banned. Maybe they’d forgotten. For now, though, she wouldn’t volunteer anyway because she had her own project, and that project was her daughter.



At home, Nyla called the nonemergency police number. She went through the hoops, pushing one button to indicate her precinct, then another to tell the computer it wasn’t a stolen vehicle problem. No, it wasn’t domestic violence, which would mean pushing two. It wasn’t assault, corporate crime, a traffic incident, or a food poisoning grievance. They had a whole menu of options.

It wasn’t a mass cult suicide. She thought of the Temple Everlasting, that creepy dive, and hoped to never push button six.

When the option came up, she chose “evidence room”—“press eight”—and then listened to Muzak for a tooth-grindingly long time, but toughed it out. She listened to that shitty excuse for hold music because this, the phone call, was about Arena.

The Muzak cut. A man said, “Case number and date of complaint.”

It caught Nyla off guard. She fumbled. “What?” She’d expected something more like a conversation.

He said it again. “Case number. Upper right hand. Sixteen digits, two letters.”

She dug through her purse for the folded yellow paper they’d given her the day it all started. She read her case number off the slip. This was the path to the solution. She’d do it their way. Eye on the prize.

There was the light click and tap of a keyboard on the other end.

She asked, “Can we revisit evidence without bringing in lawyers?”

The man on the phone coughed. Then, in his tired voice, he said, “We show no evidence on hold associated with that report, ma’am.”

She said, “None?”

He said, “Sorry. Nothing listed. Maybe it’s still in processing.”



The legal system and the school system both had their own paperwork, their own rules. Nyla made phone calls, memorizing the pattern of buttons to push to move through electronic instructions. She had a constant sound track of Muzak in her head. Out of all her calls, nobody could come up with “evidence,” and at the same time, the school wouldn’t agree to let Arena off the hook.

It was like she’d fallen, her feet moving in two different directions, all of it tangled. The paperwork was in process, Arena’s name was on it, and there was a gap between the humans who worked at the school, the paper pushers in the district’s legal offices, and the law, which was inhuman, disembodied, and looming.

Somebody, somewhere along the way, had made a human error. Somebody operated based on an assumption. Maybe it took more than one person, but nobody was willing to step up and fix the error, which could, at least theoretically, involve laying blame.

Another day, another call, a man from the local district attorney’s office said, “The report says she was selling a controlled substance, ma’am.”

Nyla said, “I know it does, but she wasn’t.”

She heard the crunch of food on the other end of the line, as though the man was eating chips. He took a deep breath. He said, “You’d want to get yourself a lawyer.”

His words sunk to her stomach like rancid fat.

She’d worked with court-appointed lawyers after the wreck that killed her husband. Lawyers like that? They’re budgeted for a limited amount of standard paperwork. You can’t even talk to a lawyer without accruing a bill. To ask a lawyer to read a single sentence of e-mail could cost more than a hundred dollars. To send three lawyers the same short note was a fortune.

She wouldn’t contact a lawyer if she could help it.

The DA’s office man said, “I’d recommend you let your daughter go through the process. It’s a small thing. It’ll be like water running its course. She might even learn from it. You can have it expunged from the record later.”

Nyla asked, “Does expunging take a lawyer?”

“It does.” The man’s voice was forgiving, but his facts stayed the same. After a pause, he said, “I’ve seen people spend more time and money fighting the law than it takes to just participate in it.”





On a porn shoot, you’d call it the “C-light” and use it to cast a cunt or a cock into the brightest glow. The C-light directs a viewer’s eye, leads the way like the yellow brick road right to the moneymaker. Dulcet had one hand on the black casing of what would be her C-light. She gave the piece a twist and a tap, and aimed the beam. She said, “Stand on the X.”

Georgie, with Bella in her arms, shifted uncertainly to an X made out of duct tape on the floor.

Dulcet’s photography studio was a rented room on the first floor of a warehouse building in southeast Portland. There was a black cloth backdrop rolled down and ready. The windows were covered with poster board and silver duct tape. Bitchy Bitch slept curled up in a well-worn overstuffed armchair.

Dulcet said, “Taking photos is about creating a relationship between the subject and the photographer. And we already have that. This’ll be fabulous. Ready to strip?”

Georgie adjusted one of the nursing pads lodged in her cotton bra, cradled Bella, and looked around. “It’s cold in here.”

It wasn’t that cold, though, really.

The walls were lined with pictures, a few framed and more un-framed, and then even more on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was one of a naked woman on a beach, her body echoing the planes of sand and driftwood. Another showed a curvy, nude blonde alone in her retro kitchen with a Wedgewood stove.

Georgie let her eyes rest on it and felt a pang of stove envy.

Even more, she had a hit of envy for the way all these women could stand naked and made-up and act casual.

Some of the photos were theatrical: There was a bare naked black-haired, ivory-skinned princess sprawled on a polished bar top, a cherry floating in an amber Manhattan, the tumbler tucked between her thighs; in another, the light hit a woman’s ass, close up, and the woman turned her head to look back at the camera and laugh, playing off an exaggerated angle between her narrow face, lower down, and her broad fanny, which loomed large.

Dulcet hauled out a space heater. The heater hummed its own song.

Georgie held her baby’s wobbly head close, glad for the cotton sling that kept her daughter’s gaze veiled. A newborn’s eyes aren’t strong, but a baby is wired to learn fast, and it didn’t seem right to let a two-week-old girl baby look far into Dulcet’s panopticon of female sex.

In one photo, a satin-skinned woman, dressed only in high heels, talked on an old-school phone with a long curly cord. She seemed to have gotten terribly tangled, fallen over in her tipsy shoes, then pulled a pillow under her stomach just enough to lift her rear and give a glimpse of an inner-thigh tattoo.

Georgie moved closer, inching away from the X on the floor. She said, “What’s the story here?” She looked for the narrative line, the rhetorical angle. She read a picture the way she’d read a book.

“Story? That was a blast. That’s the PE teacher.”

Georgie looked at Dulcet. “The one who got you kicked out of the schools?”

Dulcet laughed in a way that meant yes, of course, and no at the same time. “I got myself kicked out the schools.”

“The famous PE teacher.” Georgie smelled Bella’s head, her soft hair, the scent trapped and condensed inside the fabric of the dark, cradling sling.

Posing nude was esteem building. That’s what people said, anyway. The immergence of the gaze invests itself in the legitimation of the gendered body. The photo shoot was Dulcet’s postpartum gift to Georgie: a mother and child portrait, which sounded like a great plan back when Georgie pictured herself reclaiming her pre-pregnancy body, back when she still bothered to wash her hair.

She wanted pictures of Bella, so new and delicate. But photos of her own naked ass? That she could put off forever.

“All systems go,” Dulcet sang.

Georgie hesitated. How did other women do this? This was not self-esteem building. Not at all.

Dulcet said, “Stand on the mark. We’ll take a few test shots.”

Georgie kept her clothes on and held Bella in the sling in front. She walked over the sheet on the floor, stepped onto the X, and claimed her fate.

Dulcet snapped away, then squinted at the image on the back of her digital Nikon, checking light and composition. She took another. Georgie smiled into the lens and winced under the flash.

“I vote you get naked. At least get the baby out of that hammock. You’ll look totally hot.”

Georgie said, “Do we have to go for ‘hot’? Maybe something more Madonna-ish.”

Dulcet lowered her camera. “Madonna? That’s what you want?”

“Madonna-like.” Georgie nodded and lifted her baby from the sling. Bella was in a sweet pink terry onesie, with even her little feet covered.

Dulcet asked, “Like mid-eighties Madonna, when she was cute and round?”

Georgie gave her daughter a pat, as though to say “All good,” and the eco-unfriendly disposable diaper crinkled beneath her hand. She said, “I mean, like early AD Madonna, the timeless one. Mother and child?”

Georgie wore a pink, nearly skin-color dress that she imagined as a drape, a Grecian wrap, or maybe even the plain cloth garb favored by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the French painter at the center of her dissertation. Vigée-Lebrun was famous for making everyone look beautiful, even though she dared dress her subjects in muslin during the era of lace, the rococo days, in the Palace of Versailles.

In the photos around the room, Dulcet had made everyone look gorgeous. Still, Georgie wanted that muslin.

Dulcet put her camera on a cabinet. She came forward and lifted Georgie’s hair, and Georgie shivered. “If you want classical, definitely strip.” She unzipped the zipper on the back of Georgie’s dress. “Naked is as timeless and sacred as it gets.”

The synthetic material gave no protest. The dress slithered down Georgie’s shoulders. She still had the baby sling on, like a beauty queen’s sash, and the dress caught on it, not yet fallen.

Around the room all those naked women laughed and leered. They paraded their confidence—Esteem! Built from posing naked!—smiled at Georgie, and dared her to smile back. She cowered. Bitchy Bitch lifted her head.

What kind of role model was Georgie if she couldn’t pose naked—couldn’t stand proud in her meat suit, as the saying goes?

Dulcet lifted the sling to take it away. Georgie let her and maneuvered Bella through the sling, though she held on to her dress with one hand. She asked, “Do you ever take photos of naked men?” Her voice came out a little thin and desperate, vying for a distraction.

Dulcet put the baby sling on her filing cabinet. She glanced at the lights and kicked the step stool to another corner to adjust another one. “Not often. With men, the whole focus is on the cock, you know? Erect, curved, relaxed. That’s it. With women, you can find more complex planes, invert conventions, find a cultural charge.”

Georgie hid behind her dress and her baby, uneasy with that cultural charge. Her nursing bra was heavy cotton, decorated with snaps where function trumped form. Worse than the bra, she still wore granny panties hoisted over her C-section scar.

Dulcet disappeared behind a tall rolling bookcase that served as a room divider, then came back out with an old cotton battery-operated jiggling baby chair on a metal frame. “Voilà!” She plunked it down. When she turned a switch it played a slow and garbled song. “Let’s start with a few of just you, until the room warms up.”

Georgie walked over to the bouncy chair. “What do you have this around for?” She put Bella down. The girl didn’t fuss. Without her baby in her arms, she felt naked already. Dulcet was stripping Georgie of props.

“I photograph some moms,” Dulcet said, and picked up her camera again. “You don’t have this much rock-solid sexual energy and not make a few babies. Now, you ready?”

“I’m fat.”

Dulcet snapped a picture. She said, “You’re gorgeous.”

Bitchy Bitch jumped off the chair and settled in closer, blinking big eyes. What’s more powerful, the male gaze, or a blinking bitch’s calm stare?

Dulcet let the camera hang around her neck and ducked behind her wall-shelf again. “I’ve got a little something to put you at ease.”

Georgie could hear her dig through a box. A little something. What did that mean? Georgie called over, “I’m still not drinking. And I’m staying away from pills. All of them.”

Dulcet came back around the corner tossing a silk scarf. It caught on the air, hung, then fell without going much distance. Georgie bent and picked it up, still holding her dress in place. As she bent she felt her bottom grow larger—expanding! Impossibly large. Her knees pressed together, she felt like a hippo. This body! She didn’t love it.

There, she admitted it to herself: She didn’t love her body. Was that such a crime?

She reached one hand down in front and pulled the damp nursing pads out of her bra. Her nipples were sweaty and cramped. She tossed the pads out of the way, off the backdrop. She reached back and unhooked her bra, under her dress. She’d known Dulcet twenty years, since before she became Dulcet Marvel, back when she was Tina Stanton and got her first job as a waitress at a French restaurant. They’d gone camping together. They’d been naked at hot springs. It was different with a camera. She’d have to trust Dulcet’s eye.

It really was about trust.

Georgie stared at the robust ta-tas and damp love lips of the women on the walls. “So are these all about developing relationships? Photographer and subject?”

Dulcet took a breath. She thought about the question. “Sometimes, secretly, I think maybe really it’s only about my relationship to me.”

Georgie let the scarf unfold. It was a wide scarf, and long, though sheer. She let her dress drop. The cold air was a chill.

Dulcet said, “A naked woman’s body is a commodity, as natural and common as homegrown pot. Strip everything away, like a stripper, and you’ve got this radical object. Take a picture of a woman’s back, it’s art. Show the vertebrae and ribs, it’s architecture. If you take the same picture from the front, straight on, it’s confrontational. Spread her legs, and the photo’s illegal to show in public, most places.

“And I am one. That’s the part I can’t get my head around. I am that object.”

Georgie reached a hand down and slid her fuchsia granny panties to her knees. She stepped out of them.

Dulcet said, “I’ve found two galleries to show my stuff. Both times, the show closed early.”

Georgie said, “And they sold out, right?”

Dulcet said, “Yes, that, too.” She snapped a photo of Georgie naked and veiled.

Georgie tried to relax. She tossed her head back. She twirled the scarf experimentally.

Dulcet said, “These’ll be a gift for Humble. Imagine he’s here—that he’s the one you’re posing for.”

Ha! Georgie hardly thought Humble would care. He was a simmering pot on the stove, the way he skulked around the house these days.

Dulcet said, “He’s one of the good ones.” Then she lowered her camera. She looked over the top of it. “What is that?”

“What?” Georgie looked behind her. Then she looked at her own front, at her soft stomach and pale thighs. Her scar was a red grin along the top of her pubic bone. She’d only just started to relax. Now the anxiety meter shot up again.

Dulcet said, “Above your ass, next to your tattoo?”

Jesus. Embarrassing! What was it? Georgie twisted to one side. She brushed her fingers over her skin and ran a hand down between her own legs.

Dulcet walked over to touch one finger lightly on the back of Georgie’s hip. “It’s huge.”

Georgie twisted around the other way until she could see a bruise the size of a softball, purple and yellow and faded at the edges like a storm cloud.

Dulcet traced a line up Georgie’s back. “And you’ve skinned your spine. In another kind of shoot, we could use it as a prop, it’s that dramatic.”

There was nothing between naked Georgie and the world. “I fell down the stairs.”

Dulcet let out a long whistle.

She found an oversized tackle box. She opened one drawer, then closed it again and opened another. She took out a tube of makeup, a container of powder, and a few triangular sponges. She dabbed pale green concealer on her fingertips. “I’ll Photoshop it out, but it’ll be easier if we lighten it now.”

Georgie let Dulcet paint concealer on the round backside of her hip and dot cool makeup along her vertebrae. Dulcet asked, “Does that hurt?”

“No.” Georgie closed her eyes. She felt nerves radiate a hot pain under Dulcet’s fingers, and then again as Dulcet swiped her skin with a sponge.

Dulcet said, “Has Humble seen it?”

Georgie kept her eyes closed, without answering. The fingers on her back could be anyone’s fingers, taking care.

Why go into it?

When Georgie opened her eyes, baby Bella, in her pink onesie, was a sweet rosebud there on the floor, in her bouncy chair. She was pink and fresh, still figuring out how to lift her own head, a newborn baby girl. Bella smiled her small, toothless smile, glad to be part of the world, happy to be alive. She was beautiful. Georgie’s heart ached. Her skin warmed under the glow of the C-light as it poured light like an artificial sun kissing her bruised back.





Arena had been raised to walk abandoned dogs at the pound—beautiful dogs they couldn’t take home. She’d planted trees every Arbor Day, though the trees mostly died the same season. She, her mom, and her sister had a tradition of forcing their way into Thanksgiving meals at Sisters of the Road, a shelter where Nyla thought it was edifying for a kid to serve a holiday dinner to black-toothed drunks.

Community service didn’t faze her—but what was up with the idea of unearned punishment? Sure, she sold Crystal Light on school grounds, and she sold those individual packages marked not to be sold individually. So what? Lesson learned.

But no. Here was community service coming at her again. Her assignment: litter. Also, meetings where she’d meet other losers.

Each meeting cost $75. If she was one minute late, they wouldn’t let her in. If she missed a meeting, she’d have to pay anyway and then pay again at the makeup session. It was rigged.

Her mom was totally lame about it. She’d said, “Take notes. Keep a journal. Later, it’ll all seem like a great story.”

They were still trying to fight the accusations, but the truth was, Nyla could not afford a lawyer. Instead, she gave Arena a bound book made out of recycled paper, with a recycled cover, and a recycled card where she’d written, “Keep an Attitude of Gratitude. Life is an adventure! I love you always.”

An Attitude of Platitudes.

Nyla would quote a teacher she’d had: “Interesting stories happen to people who can tell them.” Arena was supposed to collect interesting stories.

Arena wrote “My Prison Journal” on the cover in silver Sharpie.

On Nyla’s bumper, another sticker declared nonviolent, not silent. Arena had never noticed how ineffectual her mother’s political opinions were until now. Her mama had no power.

Nyla gave Arena a ride to the work crew pickup station. As she saw her off, onto a county bus, she waved and said, “See you at dinner! Remember, it’s all material, right? Tell me how it goes.”

The bus was short and yellow, like a school bus but without the name of any school or district on the side. Inside it smelled like sweat and loserdom. It smelled like old backpacks, lost lunches, and guys who needed to shower. It was all guys, and her.

On the short bus there was no way-back, no far-back, no place different from the front, no place to use her hiding skills. She sat in the second seat and put her forehead against the dirty glass of the window.

In Red Azalea, Anchee Min, assigned the role of peasant under Chairman Mao, was taken away in a truck, starting from someplace called “People’s Square” in China.

Was this any different? Arena was assigned the role of criminal.

Anchee Min wrote, “My family stood in front of me, as if taking a dull picture. It was a picture of sadness, a picture of never the same.”

Arena replayed her mom’s words: “See you at dinner. Tell me how it goes!” Her mom seemed almost happy, like this was a scholarship to science camp or some extended writing exercise.

The bus took them to a barren hellhole strip outside of Tigard, a suburb. They got out and walked along a culvert on the side of the highway. A coordinator handed out orange reflective vests, plastic garbage bags, and gloves. He said, “Stay three feet apart minimum. No talking, no breaks.”

The bus took off. The man in charge got busy with his iPhone, moved away, and lit a cigarette.

Picking up garbage was as easy as picking blueberries in season: McDonald’s wrappers, Big Gulp cups, cigarettes, diapers, soda cans, a pair of pants, three pairs of underwear—two ladies’ and one pair of boxers.

Arena had never touched what she still thought of clinically as a “penis,” and had no ready list of familiar pet names, stories about banana shapes and commas. She heard those stories, but she was a loner and a listener and school was one big reality TV show where up until getting expelled she’d been cast as an extra.

Now, she held a blue and twisted rubber condom in her gloved hands, then put it in her bag.

How many other hands had slid into the work gloves Arena wore? It was cold out, but the gloves were rubber and her hands started to sweat. The reflective vest smelled like old cigarettes. She was in the costume of somebody else.

Arena could write that in her new journal: “Punished for crimes I never committed, made to wear the costume of a criminal.”

The guy picking up trash beside her inched closer, breaking the three-feet-apart rule.

He said, “Hey. You new?”

She heard him, over the rush of traffic. She didn’t answer, though.

He said, “I’ve been here three months.” He kicked his foot through the grass. “I’m an expert.” He walked right past bottles, cans, and chip bags.

She picked up a brown paper grocery bag and put it in her plastic garbage bag. If her mom saw this, she’d get on the city about recycling the trash. She’d do more about that environmental injustice than she was doing to get Arena off the chain gang.

The guy said, “You find good stuff. Last week I found this awesome bong, no shit.”

Arena looked at him then. He was tall and thin, with skin like coffee ice cream.

“It was, like …” He held his hands apart, his plastic bag swinging in one, tongs in the other. He whispered, “Had to smuggle it out in my pants. Looked like I had a woody so big I couldn’t bend my leg, but none of these homophobes wanted to pat me down.”

Arena had to laugh. She said, “You did not.”

He nodded. “I did. I’m AKA.”

She said, “That’s not a name.”

He said, “It’s mine. You can call me AK, like the assault rifle.” He made a gesture as though to gun invisible people down.

He was pretty and girlish and handsome all at once. He seemed kind of gay, but also like he was flirting.

She said, “I’m Arena.”

He said, “Beautiful name.”

“If you like sports.” She practiced looking him in the eyes. His eyes were so dark they were all one shade, almost black. His hair was shaggy, a short haircut that’d grown out, and his cheekbones were high and narrow.

He asked, “What’d you do to get here?”

“Sold Crystal Light to kids.”

That cracked him up. He said, “Jesus! She’s dangerous.” He turned to the guy behind him, a red-haired slacker with tired eyes. The wind and rush off passing semis stole their voices.

Arena’s hair blew in the freeway corridor’s draft. She asked, “You?”

He said, “Knocking over old ladies.”

The red-haired guy said, “Knocking up. And wasn’t that your mom?”

They were clustered together now.

AKA gave his friend a fake jab, a swing to his jaw that only pushed through air. His teeth were white, his fingers long. He was so tall and thin, it made him seem fragile as an insect, like his arm could come off under his heavy coat. He said, “I robbed ’em blind, and cashed in. It’s a cakewalk.”

He giggled in a way that was no kind of threat.

Arena said, “Right.”

He said, “Serious.”

Their leader marched through the tall grass, wheezing when he reached them. He made a gesture with his hands, like swimming frog-style, pushing the air, telling them to move apart.

Arena nodded, and moved away. She let the roar of traffic fill the lull in voices, and disentangled another mangled condom from the scrub grass, then another pair of underwear. Who would lose their underwear on a freeway? How did that happen?