“Somebody?” I said out loud. “Somebody see me.”

  And a man did appear. He pushed through the front door and slowly made his way around the room. Judging by his deliberate walk as he wove through the crowd without watching where he was going, he did seem to be coming for me. Wide shoulders. Square jaw. A bit of gold flashed on his left hand, another glint in one earlobe. Handsome, even with my dizzy vision. I lifted my shirt a little to reel him in. This stirred the onlookers. A half dozen more men stood up and gave halfhearted shouts. As soon as my stranger was beside me I collapsed into his arms. “Let’s go,” he said. “Now.”

  I heard a name being called several times before I realized it was mine. Nino reached his arm out in front of him and grabbed at air; the table I had been dancing on was lying overturned on the floor. When I replay this memory, I always imagine looking back and knowing that it was the last time I’d see inside of the Legion, or any other hole-in-the-wall pub, that my world was about to change completely. But I truly had no idea what was going to happen next.

  The stranger carried me through the front door; it bounced against the doorframe a few times before closing. My shirt remained hiked up as we drove down Park Street. He drove a shiny black Italian car that smelled of leather and perfume. I reclined my seat as far back as it would go and watched the street lamps streak by. “My bra has daisies on it,” I said a bit too loud. He glanced back at me as I reached beneath my unicorn belt. “My panties do, too,” I told him. “Daisies.”

  II

  I woke up smothered under a black bedspread. Only my arm had discovered the way out. I studied it dangling off the bed like it was a dismembered limb not my own, an alien object that had fallen through a tear in the sky. My hangover head was still falling. I began to untwist myself from the blanket and found that I was neither naked nor wearing my own clothes. A large white T-shirt stuck to my skin like I’d been sweating all night. My nipples showed through the fabric, and I covered myself again with the heavy spread. Across the room, on top of a long black lacquer dresser, my clothes were folded in a pile: jeans on the bottom, striped T-shirt, daisy print bra and underwear, and my belt rolled into a coil with the unicorn belt buckle facing me. “Where are we?” I asked it.

  I always wore the unicorn. I slept in it. Sometimes I’d lay awake and press that belt buckle into me until it hurt, then I’d undo my pants to see little unicorn imprints left on my belly. I believe this was my home remedy for the teenage blues.

  But I wasn’t blue in the stranger’s bed. Only my stomach was alarmed at the unfamiliar surroundings. It rumbled in a way that said no sudden movements. The bed I was in was enormous, with enough room for me to sweat, then inch over onto dry sheet and sweat again. I wondered if the sheets and pillowcases were silk, and I felt a bit guilty. There was nothing on the walls but a framed print of Muhammad Ali submerged in a pool of water. Ali stood upright like the bottom of the pool was any old corner of a gym. His gloves raised, boxing the water all around him. I couldn’t tell if the water was real or superimposed.

  Morning came in through the blinds, cutting everything into ribbons. I made a couple of attempts to get up and failed, managing only to get one leg dangling ineffectually off the bed. The stranger’s voice was in the next room. All I could recall were his eyes, not his name, how we got here, or what we did. I wanted to call out to him, but how do you call a nameless pair of eyes? And besides, my voice was a whisper.

  When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles. He offered me watered-down apple juice, raising his eyebrow at the meek sips I took from the glass. He laid the back of his hand on my forehead and sucked his teeth. “You’ve got a fever,” he said. “You’re too young yet to be all that drink sick. A day’s rest will set you right again.” I feigned a cough. Sank deeper into the bed. “You got someplace to be?” he asked. “Where’s home?” I shrugged my shoulders and he nodded back at me. “You’re not on the back of a milk carton? No search parties dragging Moore Park Ravine for you?”

  “Yeah right,” I said.

  “Arsen,” he told me. “Not a pseudonym de flava, my birth name.” He burned for nine months in his mamma’s womb; she swore she was pregnant with a dragon. As a child he would break into the boarded-up, abandoned steel mill near his home and shout just to see if he could make flames shoot out of his mouth.

  He toured me around his spacious one-bedroom apartment: the view of the city from the balcony; the marble tile on the kitchen floor; the Jacuzzi jets in the tub. Toro, his French bulldog, kept his big paw draped over his food bowl. There was a soapstone wolf howling on the coffee table, a leather three-piece sofa suite with very few scratch marks. And a bookshelf covered in framed photographs of aunties holding flowers in front of a church, wearing impossible hairdos at spring dances, and gathered around Arsen’s pregnant mother, rows of hands on her huge belly. Pictures of what must have been young cousins wearing home-sewn dresses on the porch steps of old brownstones. My favourite was of six-year-old Arsen—the closest somebody to a man in any of the photos—looking down at his birthday cake, his mouth puckered and ready to blow out the candles. There was only one book on the shelves, the Bible on the bottom shelf. As a boy, he told me, he sang in a gospel choir. “What do you think of the place?” he asked.

  It was the best apartment I had ever seen. I wouldn’t last very long in a place like this, was what I thought of it. Arsen didn’t seem to mind me not answering him. He turned back to his photos, looking at them in a way I didn’t want to interrupt. I fixated on him the same as he did on his photos. I focused so intently he nearly disappeared, just breath and flesh beside me. I hoped that I would fall in love with him.

  On our second morning, it was me who woke up first. He had insisted, again, on giving me the bed and was sleeping on the sofa. I snuck across the living room carpet on my hands and knees. Each time he stirred, I froze low to the carpet and held my breath. It must have taken me twenty minutes to get close to him; the whole time I was scolding myself for being such a little creep. It couldn’t be helped; I’d already convinced myself that he was everything. I curled up quietly beside the sofa and listened to the sound of his breath against the leather. His knee bent over the edge of the sofa, and I was so grateful to have just that small, naked part of him in clear view. I didn’t take my eyes off it until he woke and said, “Come closer, little one.” He reached for me with his eyes still closed. When I offered my hand he tucked it under him like a stuffed toy, close to his face, and fell back asleep. I knelt on the floor beside him as the pins-and-needles numbed my hand. I can take it, I thought. I’ll give all four limbs if he wants them.

  We shared the breakfast he made: finger-like strips of toast rolled in cinnamon sugar, poached eggs, and ham steak. I’d only seen men cook on talk shows. I let each bite sit in my mouth, reciting a full “mi-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i” before I chewed, making the meal last. When he asked, “Food’s going down alright today?” I slumped over in the chair and held my gut, even though the nausea had stopped a full twenty-four hours before.

  He drew me a bath, with bubbles. What he was doing with bubble bath I did not care. He posed in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and sang to me as I bathed, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen …” Gospel music was beyond me, but somehow he chose the one song I knew. “… The trou-ah-ah-ble I’ve seen, but the Lord.” He reached through the shower curtain, and I prepared for his touch, shifting so that his fingers would connect with my cheek first. But he was only passing me a razor. A fresh, pink plastic razor. And he didn’t even peek through the shower curtain as he passed it to me. “I have shaving cream too, cocoa butter, anything you want.” I leaned my head against the tiles and decided that was the moment I fell in love.

  “Telephone is right there,” he told me several times, pointing out a cordless phone that seemed to follow me from room to room. It appeared on the coffee table, then on the dresser in the bedroom. It even made an appearance on the balcony. I never used it.

  And when I lay in his bed he said, “You can stop pretending to be drink sick and just stay because I want you to.” He pulled the cover up to my chin, clicked off the light as he left, and I swear I felt each and every pore on my body open up like the mouths of baby birds, hungry. That, for real now, was the moment I fell in love.

  On day three we did it all again; he cooked, he sang, he said sweet things to me. What he did not do was take me out, not even when he walked the dog. From the balcony I spied on him leading Toro along the thin strip of manicured grass in between the sidewalk and the road. Nino had taken me out; he made me a fixture in his day-to-day. That’s why I hung on so long with him; I didn’t conflict with his bar-trolling schedule. During my stay at Arsen’s, on the other hand, Arsen barely used the phone or left the apartment for any reason (apart from Toro’s walks). He must have had something or someone he was keeping me hidden from, I was sure of it. I gave the stint with him a realistic six-day maximum. I prayed for more.

  “Who was that calling your name at the bar?” he asked from the other side of the bathroom door as I was changing into the dress he’d somehow procured for me during his dog walk. It was pretty if I pretended it wasn’t me wearing it. I only wore jeans then, boy-cut jeans. This dress was merely a slip with tricky lace straps that tied at the shoulders. It smelled slightly of someone else, the incense smell of girl skin, but I wasn’t about to mention it to Arsen. It was better than my own clothes that still stunk of the Legion. And it almost fit. Dresses loosely hung off me as if they were refusing to commit to my body.

  “Nobody,” I said, delaying opening the bathroom door for him to see me.

  “Is he your man?”

  “He wishes he was,” I said, attempting to sass-talk.

  Arsen cracked the bathroom door, tapped the doorframe a few times as if counting down the seconds before he entered. We were crowded in his bathroom, which I should have enjoyed except there was this strange look to him. “He wishes he was,” Arsen repeated my words one by one, each word sounding graver than the last. I tried to backtrack, but I couldn’t come up with a sure fix. If I told him Nino was nothing special, I might make myself seem like slut. If I told him I was using Nino for a place to stay, I’d seem like a freeloader. It was too late to say we were only friends. So I stammered without an explanation. Arsen took this worse than anything I could have said. “If you two still have business together …” he told me, “then I’ll take you to him.”

  He didn’t ask me to take my clothes with me as he pointed me to the door; they were left in their tidy pile on his dresser. I took that as an indication that it wasn’t the last time I’d see his apartment. But with my clothes left behind, I’d have to face Nino wearing a little black dress. I folded my arms tight across my chest as we rode toward the old section of town. I didn’t bother lying about Nino’s address. There wasn’t time to lie; Arsen’s questions were so rapid-fire:

  “How long have you lived with him?”

  “You got belongings moved into his place?”

  “Are there other men you’re stringing along?”

  “You sleeping with them?”

  He must have pulled every pathetic detail out of me. I doubt I had considered my life pathetic before. Spontaneous, sure. Wayward— well, probably. But hearing myself stumble through it all while sitting in the deep leather passenger seat of his car, I felt very small. As if I was being drained of my stories. The Nino part wasn’t nearly as bad as the string of second-rate Ninos: the small-time pot pushers; the crash pads; the buildings I’d used as squats then abandoned because of fire or rats. Yes, I told him about dumpster diving behind the Nabisco factory for breakfast. Yes, I told him about letting men feel me up behind the liquor store for spare change. Yes, I told him—promised him, in fact—that despite all the scrounging, I was still a virgin. A diamond in coal is how I liked to think of it.

  “Why?” was his next question. “Why put yourself through all that?” This is where I fell silent. I didn’t put myself anywhere. It just was there—life was—long before I had anything to do with it.

  “Stuff just happens to me,” I shrugged.

  I leaned my head out the car window; hair blew around my face in damp yarns. In the passenger side mirror I looked almost invisible: black hair cocoon, black dress against the black upholstery. There was no asking why.

  “You look pretty, by the way,” he said just as a lace strap fell down my shoulder. I caught the dress before it fell down past my left breast.

  He made me list the things I had at Nino’s: a second pair of jeans; a Hello Kitty sweatshirt from Chinatown; a glitter lip gloss; a skintight, floor length, neon-green velvet dress given to me by a stripper at Nino’s cousin Johnny-V’s stag party (this dress had made Nino laugh until he choked because it was long enough to make me look like I’d grown a mermaid tail); a toothbrush; a few pairs of dirty underwear; and a pocket-sized stuffed bunny with a tuft of real rabbit fur on its head that found its way into my pocket again and again. None of which I cared too much about, but Arsen said he wanted every last trace of me out of Nino’s place. I was either to make a clean break or not bother coming back to down to the car.

  I buzzed #210 at the front door with Arsen watching from his nearby parking spot. “Don’t be home,” I said through clenched teeth. It wasn’t late enough for the bar, but if I was lucky he would have started early that day. Nino answered, his voice a scratch over the intercom. Next I wished for the waitress to be with him as I climbed the stairs to his floor, stirring up dust bunnies on each step. He opened the door before I knocked. Nino paused, like I knew he would, to take in my dress before he asked, “What the hell happened to you?”

  “You won’t believe the shit I’ve been through. This guy just dragged me out of the bar. I’ve been trying to get back here ever since,” I lied.

  Nino stood aside to let me in. He was alone. He was never alone, except on that day. My duffle bag was in the same place I’d left it, half tucked under the sofa. Everything, including my toothbrush, was in there. I never left any of my stuff out, for fear that it would infringe on Nino’s space, remind him that he was aiming to get rid of me soon.

  “Who was that freakin’ guy?”

  “Arsen,” I said, then immediately regretted it.

  “Arsen? What kind of a freakin’ name is that? He looks like some kind of uptown faggot or something.” Nino raked his hand through his messy curled hair. I wanted to tell him he was full of shit. I only blinked my eyes at him as if he’d said something in a different language. “Teeth and I went driving around looking for you.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, you could have at least called.” He paced the length of the apartment a couple times, and then sat backwards on a kitchen chair. “Whatcha standing there for?” Nino kicked out a second chair for me. I didn’t expect that. I was ready for indifference. I stared piteously at the rawboned wooden chair he offered.

  “I’m not staying, Nino.”

  “Fuck off. Sit your tiny ass down.”

  I yanked at my duffle bag wedged firmly beneath the sofa. I felt the dress riding up in the back as I bent over to wrestle with the bag. He was looking, he had to be. When I pulled it out, I flung it over my shoulder and marched, heavy-footed, back to the door. “Thanks for taking me in, Nino,” I said in a voice so deadpan even I couldn’t tell if I was sincere or sarcastic.

  “Ah, come on. Don’t say you’re going with that guy,” he said. So I didn’t say it. This time Nino didn’t call after me. The only sound was the swish of the dress as I went back down the stairs.

  “That was quick,” Arsen said.

  “I didn’t want to make you wait,” I told him. “Besides, we had nothing to say to each other.” We had nothing to say to each other was what I reminded myself of, if ever I got sentimental about Nino. Which wasn’t often. The guy was no dreamboat. I suppose I remember him like Alice might remember the gilded frame before she fell through the looking glass. Angel Gabriel remembering the specific handle on the pearly gates. Nino was the last regular person I remembered before leaving the city. And at the time, there was nothing significant about that final scene at Nino’s. I was preoccupied; leaving Nino made me draw even closer to Arsen.

  Arsen wanted to celebrate my “break-up,” so he ordered Chinese delivery: deep-fried prawns, sweet-and-sour chicken balls, cashew green beans. He put on his favourite album by a singer I didn’t recognize, although it turned out I knew the words to her songs. All of them stories about being in love with a man who wasn’t worth it. Later I would learn she was Billie Holiday. Later I would also wonder if the dinner and music were band-aids for Arsen’s guilt, not a celebration at all. Why should he feel guilty? He was about to change my life. I’m not talking about the kind of change that makes you decide to go to college or quit smoking. Big change. Another-world change. For the good or for the bad is beside the point; with each tender word he spoke he was changing it.

  “Your scrounging days are over. You’re too good for that,” he told me. “You’re looking much better. Your skin’s got colour again. You’re a pretty girl, you know that?”

  I kept my eyes on my plate as he spoke. The way he stared at me, I thought I might unravel. I could feel the black dress sliding off me, my hair loosening from the ponytail I had tied it into. I was relieved when he picked up his fork.

  I wanted to lick the last bit of saucy glaze to prolong the meal, and not just because the Chinese was tasty. I knew what would happen after dinner was cleared. I fingered the bowl and licked my fingertip. I’d been told this was sexy.

  “I had my run-around days, too. I used to sleep with a lot of women,” he said—it seemed more to himself than to me—as he stared up at the wall behind us. “I was raised to be better than that; you know what I’m saying.”

  He turned to face his bookshelf of framed photographs. “Do you want family, Little?” he asked. I shrugged and kept my eyes on the empty bowl in front of me. He repeated the question, word for word, and was about to repeat it a third time.