Dana wrinkled her forehead, thinking. “She was out with friends or something. I don’t really remember. I was going to tell her, but Charlie yelled at me. He swore he’d kill me if I told. Said I was being a *. He actually said that, at, like, age five. Stuff like that happened a lot back then. Our dad really beat up on him, and Charlie would never tell. Like he was defending our dad, even though our dad almost killed him. He was so calm about it. I was the one freaking out. I would feel bad for Charlie if he hadn’t gotten so mean as we got older. I was scared of them both as far back as I can remember.
“We’d all get together on the holidays and stuff back then, up until we both finished middle school. I wanted to be close to Charlie. He was nice sometimes, when we were hanging out alone. But sometimes he’d change . . . just be a totally different guy. I think maybe he was afraid of what our dad would do if he thought he was spending too much time with me. He started beating up on me a lot when we were in elementary school even though he was two years younger. I think he thought if he showed our dad he was tough—that stuff like that didn’t bother him—he’d be proud. He was still living in Paris back then.”
“You were just young kids,” I say. Charlie was fourteen when he moved from Paris to Bangkok.
“Yeah,” says Dana. “I split when I was fifteen. The bath thing happened when we were really little. I think I was maybe seven. But that was just one example. God,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m almost twenty-two now. It feels so long ago. Anyway.” She shakes her head again quickly, as if ridding herself of the memories. “You don’t care about these sob stories. I only saw Charlie twice after I left. Coming here was the obvious choice for me. We’d traveled here when I was young. I knew my way around. Like I said, I saw Charlie twice after that. Ran into him once when he was a freshman at the American School here, just after I had split. It was a shock.” Dana shakes her head yet again, laughing a little. “He shows up at the bar where I’m at and I’m like, ‘That’s Charlie. That’s my little brother.’ But he doesn’t recognize me at all. I go up to him and I pretend to be a random girl just to mess with him, but he freaks. He thinks I look familiar and he can’t figure out why. Then it dawns on him and he’s totally spooked.” Dana laughs and runs a brush through her long hair, then twirls it into a haphazard bun at the nape of her neck.
“Back then I didn’t look like I do now, but I looked different enough. We talked for a while. He seemed okay. He apologized for what he’d done to me, how mean he’d been. Playing me against our parents and all that crap. He apologized but he still didn’t seem trustworthy. I asked how his best friend was, this guy named Phil. And he was all, ‘Who?’” Dana raises her eyebrows like a clown, in a mock expression of confusion, and laughs. “And I was like, ‘Dude, you’ve known that guy forever,’ and he claimed he’d never been friends with him at all or some shit. Same thing with family stuff. I was laughing about the time we rocked out to the Dr. Dre our mom wouldn’t let us listen to—we had to sneak that kind of thing around her—and smoked a joint and accidentally spilled cranberry juice on our parents’ white sofa—and then our parents thought the cat knocked over the glass, even though it was all Charlie. I was cracking up over it, and I remember he gave me this blank look. And he swore up and down it never happened. Like I care. Like I’m going to rat him out or something after all these years. It was the most pathetic thing.” Dana shakes her head, frowning at the memory.
“It was like he needed me to believe he wasn’t there. Or like he needed to believe it. He got all upset, said I was thinking of somebody else, because he doesn’t smoke, he’s straight edge, and furthermore he doesn’t even listen to rap, never has, couldn’t name a Dre song if you held a gun to his head. But like, we had had good times that night. We bonded over the whole sofa thing.” Dana looks disturbed. “I thought he was fucking with me. Then I realized. He didn’t remember it. It was like he blacked it out.” Dana trails off, seemingly forgetting about the makeup in front of her, the show she needs to dance, her preshow routine that should have started five minutes ago.
“And what about the second time?” Aubrey asks it so softly I can barely hear, but Dana seems to snap out of her reverie.
“That was two weeks ago,” she says. “Or maybe not quite. Maybe ten days. And seeing him . . .” She trails off, her eyes widening. She has caught sight of the tattoo on my wrist, exposed when my sleeve drooped back as I was tucking my long blond waves behind my ears. She pales.
“What?” I ask, confused. The tattoo is crude, even ugly; but her reaction seems extreme.
She appears to recover easily. “Nothing,” she says. “I’m just afraid of needles. Your tattoo looks . . . painful.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I tell her. “I have no memory of it.”
“Really.” The word is loaded. “How did you pick a lamb? That’s what it is, right?”