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She turns around, holding pictures. Photographs, maybe, is what she would say. All in frames — silver, gold, ebony. I just know she was careful to have the frames complement the snaps. Or she paid someone to do it.

“Here we are,” she says, propping one of them on the table.

“Oh, my God,” says Colleen. “Look at you.”

My grandmother in a bathing suit that’s almost psychedelic: swirls of purple, white, orange, black.

“Elastic waffle nylon with tummy-control panels and a floral Hawaiian print.” She recites the specs wistfully. It has that long-ago-and-far-away tone. One I’m not used to from her. When I was little and she read to me, Red Riding Hood would speed through the forest like a little fire engine.

“What’s that ruffly thing on your head?” asks Colleen.

“It’s a bathing cap with a rather ornate —”

Colleen asks me, “Didn’t something like that fall on Sigourney Weaver in deep space and try to suck out her brain?”

Marcie looks at my grandmother and says, “You look wonderful.”

“I went to the country club every day,” Grandma says.

“You could swim in that getup?”

“I swam the sidestroke to keep my makeup dry. I wore a lipstick by Elizabeth Arden called Perfect Red.” She looks at me. “Your grandfather loved that shade. He once had me kiss him on the neck so a little showed up on his white dress shirt. Then he went to work. He wanted people to kid him.”

“Holy shit,” Colleen says. But reverently. I know what she means. I’ve never heard Grandma talk like this.

She says, “I was pregnant when this photograph was taken. I just didn’t know it.”

She walks to the bin, moves a few things, comes back. “Here’s your father when he was three.”

He’s a solemn-looking little kid in short pants and a striped sweater. A black-and-white dog lies at his feet.

“What’s the dog’s name?” I ask.

“Owen.” Then she pairs it up with another one. “And then here you are, Ben.”

“You guys look alike,” says Colleen. “Except both his legs are the same size.”

I ask, “Where’s Mom?”

Grandma looks at Marcie, then me. She retreats to the bin, returns with half a dozen pictures, which she lays out slowly, like tarot cards: Mom and Dad, him with his arm around her; he’s grinning. Mom and Dad and me at Disneyland; he’s holding me. Dad and me beside his car, a cool-looking convertible. Me in the backyard with a fat plastic bat and him pretending to pitch a beach ball. Me on a tricycle and Dad making sure I don’t tip over. Mom by herself, shading her eyes with one hand and looking out of the frame. At Seattle, maybe.

“There’s a lot of just my dad and me,” I say.

“Your mother preferred lying down with a cold washcloth on her forehead,” Grandma says.

Just then Colleen’s phone rings. The timing is too perfect. I sigh and sit back in my chair. Grandma’s hand floats through the space between us and lands on my shoulder. We listen to one side of the conversation.

“It’s all right, Delia,” Colleen says. “If you have to go in, you have to go in. Yes. Yes, absolutely another time. Ben and I’ll come out next week. Sure.”

“I knew it.” I look at Grandma. “Didn’t you know it?’

She admits, “I certainly wondered if she’d be able.”

I hit the table with my fist. Not hard, just decisively. “Every time it’s like starting over with her. I drive twenty miles or take a stupid bus, and it’s just a rerun of the last time. Why do I even bother?”

“She said she wants us to come to her house,” Colleen says. “That’s progress.”

“Well, great. Maybe we can all sit in that one chair.”

“You don’t have to do any more than you already have if you don’t want to,” Marcie says. “We all really are on our own paths, Ben, and it’s just possible that yours and your mother’s don’t actually intersect.”

Colleen puts down her fork. “That’s such bullshit. Ben has to try. Delia’s his mom.” She looks at Marcie. “How can you say fucking heartless shit like that?”

Marcie takes a sip of Perrier and says evenly, “I’m just presenting alternatives.”

“Well, that one stinks.”

I say, “I know what Marcie means. Maybe my mom just wants to be left alone. She sure acts like it sometimes.”

Grandma shakes her head. “No, I agree with Colleen. You have to try.”

Then we don’t talk about that anymore. We eat and don’t look at each other. Little by little, we start again — Colleen’s job at the co-op, movies that the Academy drones overlooked at Oscar time, what’s going on at my school and Colleen’s, and Colleen herself, who is embarrassed to be getting good grades. She adds, “Class participation is a lot easier when you’re not unconscious.”

Everybody listens, even the ones propped up in their expensive frames — my dad puts down the beach ball, Delia turns around and smiles, Grandma takes off that amazing swim cap and runs one hand through her short hair.

“Ben and I will clean up,” Colleen says when we’ve finished.

“It’s your job,” Marcie reminds her, with just a little chill in her voice.

Colleen calmly picks up the four bowls. “You want to wash or dry, Ben?”

When we’re alone in the kitchen, I ask her, “What was that about?”

“That’s just Marcie being Marcie.” Colleen turns off the hot water and picks up a pair of blue rubber gloves. “I loved seeing those pictures. And I’ll bet Granny brought them over for Delia to see, too.”

“I’m not going to give up on her.”

“I know, baby. You might be a wormy little spaz who’s spent way too much time indoors, but you’re not a quitter.”

Then she kisses me.

Colleen washes and I dry. Once, we hear Marcie and Grandma laughing in the other room, and we look at each other and make that you-never-know face.

When I reach for a saucer that Colleen is holding out, I tell her, “I’ve seen this kitchen scene in about nine thousand movies.”

“Usually the guy’s traded his cojones for a cardigan sweater, right? Who was that
Father Knows Best
dude, anyway?”

“Robert Young. But that was television. Played the most well-adjusted guy in the world, but in his real life he tried to commit suicide.”

“No shit?” Colleen freezes. White suds on the blue glove. A dripping dish halfway to the rinse water. The sleeve of her tangerine sweater pushed way up, and there’s that tattooed race car, complete with wavy speed lines zooming toward her shoulder.

“It’s cool that you know that stuff,” she says. “It puts things in perspective. You know what I wonder? How many people watch movies and shit and then want to be like what they see. They don’t think about some actor taking off his, like, costume and turning into somebody who needs to stop at the market on the way home.”

I say, “There’re probably a hundred seminars a year with people trying to figure out if watching movies is bad for kids or not. The same experts over and over. They probably all travel on the same bus. And nobody knows for sure. I watched who-knows-how-many movies. I was a spaz when I started and a spaz ten years later. Movies didn’t change me; you did.”

She leans into a greasy platter. “Just for the record — after a night like this, I want to smoke a blunt about as big as King Kong’s thumb.”

“Was it that bad? You seemed totally —”

“I was fucking nervous. What if Delia canceled? How were you going to feel about that? What would you do if she did? So I wanted to get high.”

I pull her toward me. She resists, and then she doesn’t.

“But I’d kind of hate myself afterward,” she says. “And you’d hate me.”

“I’d never hate you.”

She turns around, drapes both arms across my shoulders, and asks, “Why are you so fuckin’ nice to me? I’m really not a nice person.”

“Remember when we were in Target that first time? And you went over to my mom and told her that her son was standing by the polyester separates? And then you ate that stupid lunch in that stupid snack bar and you were so patient and sweet to her?”

Colleen nods. “Well, okay. Maybe I am pretty lovable sometimes.”

“And modest, too.”

There’s that smirk of hers, the one I like so much. She tightens her grip on me. She makes sure I can feel her from my forehead to my knees. She gets right up next to my ear and hisses, “Leave your window open tonight.”

“Why?” I gasp. “When Grandma goes to bed, I’ll just unlock the front door.”

She shakes her head. “I want to come in the window. That’s how Dracula does it.”

A couple of nights later, here’s what I’m staring at:

I literally say “Huh?’ out loud, and just then the phone rings.

“Remember Crystal and Amber,” Colleen asks, “those dancers we ran into at Buster’s? Well, they’ve got a new place, and they’re having a party tonight. Right now. They want us to drop by.”

I close my math book. “Are you crazy? They’re druggies.”

“Just Crystal. Amber’s totally vegan and thinks her body is a fucking temple. We’ll be there for, like, two minutes. Just enough time for me to drop off some guacamole. C’mon, Ben. I don’t want to go alone.”

“This is a bad idea, Colleen.”

“Excellent. I’ll be right over. Wear that sweater I like.”

Crystal and Amber’s new place is in a brand-new building about half a block from one of the light-rail stations. A banner announces,
ONLY 8 LEFT!

The ground floor isn’t residential, though. All that’s upstairs. But there aren’t any street-level businesses yet, just big, empty spaces and
FOR LEASE
signs.

Colleen parks against the building, and I follow her up a curved ramp like we’re the most unlikely pair of animals boarding the ark. Everything is brand-new. I can smell the paint.

Colleen’s in a Bebe T-shirt cropped and ripped in all the right places, very short skirt, and precarious-looking shoes.

I ask, “Aren’t you cold?”

“It’s a party, right? These are my party clothes.” She leans in and kisses me. “Stop worrying. I just dress like a drug-addicted slut. I’m clean and sober, and I’m going to stay clean and sober.”

I tell her, “This is not a good idea.”

“So wait in the car. You’re not Lassie. You don’t have to go everywhere with me. I’m not going to fall in a well.”

“Take it easy. Since when do you know so much about Lassie?”

“In rehab they had all these warm and fuzzy DVDs. The whole Lassie platinum set:
Lassie Come Home, Lassie Saves the School, Lassie Gets a PhD.
”

Just then two girls come up the stairs and pass us, their heels clicking. “Hey, Colleen,” one of them says.

“Yeah, hi.” But she doesn’t turn around. She leans into me. “Baby, just ten minutes. Amber’s my friend, okay? I don’t want to just blow her off.”

I tell her, “Listen — if I was addicted to movies and they’d almost ruined my life, I wouldn’t be able to go to the mall, because there’d be a multiplex and I’d be tempted.”

She takes my face in both hands. “Movies have already ruined your life. Look what you’ve got for a girlfriend.”

Colleen has three or four ways of kissing me. This one is absolutely my drug of choice.

“All right,” I manage to say. “Just ten minutes.”

Then she barges in without knocking. Everybody looks up — a white kid in size 78 jeans; Amber and Crystal, in tank tops and low-slung pants; an older guy in velour sweats and what used to be called bling; a girl in a long, pretend-leather coat and big, clunky shoes; a blonde wearing earmuff-size headphones, dancing by herself in the corner; and Mr. Cool: hair slicked back like Michael Douglas in
Wall Street,
aviator shades, leather sport coat.

Ugly brown furniture with cigarette burns, but huge TVs — a giant plasma on the wall with ESPN on mute, and a smaller flat-screen sitting right beside its box, which hasn’t been opened so much as torn apart by something with rabies.

Colleen hugs Crystal like she hasn’t seen her in years. Then I get introduced: Mr. Velour is Randy, the ghetto-poseur is Jax (“with an
x
”), faux-leather coat is Dee, and Mr. Cool is Arthur.

Randy — who’s got a phone plastered to one ear — asks Colleen, “Who’s this guy again?”

“From school.”

“He looks like a narc.”

“Relax, Randy. Jesus.” She tugs at me. “Let’s take the tour.”

I stop a couple of yards away and say, “‘He looks like a narc’? We’re getting out of here.”

“I just want to tell Amber I saw the whole place and I love her new shower curtain with the fish on it.”

We go down a short hall, through a door with just a hole where the knob should be.

There are two dressers, three posters taped to the walls (half-naked girls wearing not much and holding foaming glasses of brew), and two beds. Neither one is exactly made, but one has a girl in it. She’s covered up with what looks like an electric blanket. I can see the naked prongs at one end. It’s not plugged into anything.

Colleen leans over her. “Hey, Luci. You okay?”

She’s groggy and has trouble focusing. “Leave me alone, okay? I’m behind a bunch of Valium. Randy gave me a tab of something weird. I just want to sleep.”

Colleen leads me into the hall, where she whispers, “Fuck.”

I ask, “Is she okay?”

“No, she’s not okay. I have to find Amber.”

I wander over to a card table loaded down with white bread, lunch meat, pale tomato slices, and a mustard jar with crust around the top. Jax cruises up, makes a huge sandwich, plops that on a paper plate decorated with clowns, then adds two brownies.

“Not hungry?” he asks.

“Listen, do you know that girl in the bedroom?”

“Luci? Oh, yeah. Luci knows what she’s doing. C’mon, let’s sit.”

We settle in front of the little TV. Arthur lounges right underneath the giant plasma, and Crystal brings him things. They must communicate by telepathy, because he never says a word. Compared to Randy, who shouts, “Unbelievable. You call me and tell me that? Me? Do you know who I am?”

Jax lowers his voice. His mustardy breath wafts over me.

“Remember when you were in high school and the cute guys got all the prime trim? Now it’s the heavy hitters with the designer pain relief. Take you, okay — you’re crippled and all, but if you were to, like, go into any club with, say, a zip of train wreck, those girls would be all over you. Those pole dancers, man, they can smell primo product from across the room. Like, Randy never has to be alone unless he wants to be. He’s got this grow house out in the boonies with tunnels and underground lights and guards from Thailand who are, like, blind but deadly with their hands or five-sided throwing stars. And he knows this lab in Mexico where some MIT genius Frankensteins some amazing shit. I smoked some once, and I’m, like, saving to go down there. Forget margaritas and señoritas.” He finally takes a breath, then leans closer. “But the thing is with Randy — don’t ever piss him off to the extent that he says he’s going to his car. He ever says he’s going to his car, get your ass out the back, because he’s supposed to have an AK in there.”