OVERTOWN, MIAMI, FLORIDA

MARCH 1972

As she entered the Pool Palace, Marianne linked arms with two of her girlfriends and wiggled her knees together in a move she had invented herself for when her tuck had started to slide sideways in her gaff—popped the li’l beast right back into place. Gisele and Penny were real girls far as that went, but she was the prettiest. In Overtown, they didn’t care too much anyway. Marianne could pass. She was yellow and soft as butter. She had what her meemaw would have called natural class. It was easy enough if you were Grace Kelly with all that silky hair, bathtubs full of hundred-dollar bills, princes, and palaces. But it was a whole other game to be a class act if you were a lady who happened to be born Curtis Lee.

Oh well, she had the Pool Palace that night, and she would be the queen of the Palace, real girl or no.

Gisele’s shorts were wedged so far up her crack you could see Christmas. Marianne never went in for that cheap kind of display. That night, she had rimmed her wide hazel eyes in smoky gray, carefully tweezed and penciled her eyebrows into two delicate arches, and circled her neck in the gold chain that rat bastard Wes had given her, back when he was less of a rat bastard. Or he was probably already a rat bastard but she just hadn’t figured it out yet. She wore a delicate pair of nude hose with a seam up the back. Out of vogue, true, but they made her feel like an old-timey movie star—Princess Grace herself. She had a cream-and-red-checked skirt and a top that pulled just slightly over her chicken cutlet boobs, underneath which her real boobs were just starting to bud, with the black-market injections Wes had scored for her. He was good for something anyway. She wore her hair loose and wavy, pushed off her delicate face with a kerchief.

“You deserve better!” said Gisele, tripping over nothing but her own shoes.

“Girl, we don’t get what we deserve. We get what we get. Don’t you know that by now?”

The bar was populated with townies, stragglers, hippies, gamblers. Used to be that Muhammad Ali walked shadowboxing down this same stroll, the patrons of the diners and barbershops and juke joints pressing their faces to the glass. Anytime you got too blue, even thinking about the Champ out there could bring you back.

Lady Day stayed two doors down after she’d performed for the adoring audiences of Miami Beach. The swanky hotel guests rested their blown minds—could you imagine such grit and gorgeousness at the same moment in time? Pay for her cab to Overtown. Truly a lady.

If anyone deserved better than what she got, it was Lady Day. Marianne loved the old stuff. Sang “God Bless the Child” to herself in the shower. Her two roommates in Liberty City told her she wasn’t half-bad. They weren’t ladies like her; they were pretty boys and hustlers. All of them in Overtown and Liberty City doing what they gotta do to get by.

Marianne left the girls at the bar and did a quick scan as she unsnapped her purse. She wasn’t especially looking for a paid date that night, just a drink or two and a little company. A night to take her mind off Wes and the empty coffers and the mama who wouldn’t love her no more no matter how hard she tried. Meemaw would still take her calls now and again, but even she still called her Curtis. Mama was a God-fearing woman, and the last time they talked, she had called Marianne an aberration. Mama had beat her breast and told Marianne she was glad, glad, her poor father was in heaven with Jesus rather than having to see his son become Satan’s minion.

“You. You could have done anything! You could have been anything!”

“I still can, Ma. Anything but a lie.”

Mama’s parting words had been, “Curtis, your demons will follow you all the days of your life. Don’t come around here no more. You are dead to me. Do you hear me, son? Dead.”

Marianne wasn’t alone. The Pool Palace was a haven for night crawlers as good as dead to their people. But what were you gonna do? Lie your whole life? Clutch your threadbare housedress, wring your hands, call everything that scared you a sin, pretend you never dared to dream of anything bigger than winning the casserole contest at another church picnic, like her ma had?

Marianne had a purse full of change at least. She sauntered over to the jukebox and picked not just one but five songs. She sang with one hand twirling in the air as she wound her way back to the bar.

It was two more of her songs and one drink in (bought by Gisele, who was straight haired and practically white and sure to get a date by night’s end) when Marianne caught the eye of a hulk of a guy she hadn’t seen before. He moved a foot at a time down the length of the bar toward her. Marianne positioned herself on the outside edge of her girl gaggle to make herself more available, the antelope on the fringe of the herd.

The man’s hand nearly eclipsed the glass of amber liquid it held. He wore his flowered collar wide, his suit sharp, his hair a little bit wild, his mustache trimmed unevenly. He bowed his head to his beer and looked up at her, almost shyly, then looked away. She felt in her bones there was something unusual about this one. Something surprising.

She let one corner of her mouth turn up just slightly and shot him a sideways glance, a subtle bat of her eyelashes. He responded immediately, sidling up beside her.

“You are about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You like something on a movie screen.”

“Oh, stop it now, big boy. You playing me.”

“You shine so bright, I’m half-blind looking at you.”

“You dance?”

“I do with you.”

Marianne had been slight, even as a boy. In her heels, as he pulled her onto the makeshift dance floor, she folded into the handsome stranger’s chest, her head resting neatly on his shoulder, like they were born to dance together. The man wrapped her in his arms in a bear hug and nuzzled her neck with his nose, taking a deep drag of her scent.

“You smell like apricots and cotton candy,” he said. “You smell like dessert.” Glued together, they swayed. I know a place. Ain’t nobody crying…

The man himself smelled oddly like nothing. A tinge of BO maybe, a hint of pomade.

She took his hand at one point when they were dancing and noticed it was hairless, smooth, with long, square, manicured fingernails. Like a woman, she thought. Strange.

Some inexplicable wave of emotion rose from the tips of her toes crunched into her too-tight heels up the back of her spine. Marianne usually felt she had lived a hundred lifetimes in her eighteen years, but something about the night—the moon, her mother, the rat bastard she had left behind, the stranger who found her beautiful—caught in her throat. She cried into the stranger’s neck.

“I’m sorry.” She hastily drew her arm back and wiped her eyes, giving her head a little shake. “I never do this.”

He drew her back in.

“It’s okay. Cry for me. All I ever wanted was for you to cry.”

Marianne stiffened for a moment before surrendering. She cried into the man’s shirt, not caring about her mascara, finally letting herself weep for all of it. For how goddamn unfair life was. Across town, all along the beach, rich white folks were clinking glasses and eating steaks and throwing around $100 bills like confetti, later weaving through the streets of Overtown in their shiny cars when they got drunk enough and wanted to sample some ghetto pussy. Two weeks ago, one of them had been sweet as a peach until he finished up, then he had spit on her. Spit on another human being who had three seconds before been sucking on his measly cocktail wiener without once laughing.

Pasty-ass, white, spoiled, cruel, rich shitbirds like that would always come out on top.

Those hippie kids could march through the streets of Overtown all day, hang out smoking weed and playing guitar in the park, holler about love and equality and revolution until they were blue in the face. Marianne knew that she would forever be confined to the shadows. Maybe a magical Star Trek day would come, bringing with it a safe world for people like her, who lived in an in-between space—not a boy or a girl, not an angel or a whore. Just Marianne. A child of God like any other. Maybe on Mars.

Bravo to the protestors and everything. Hell no, we won’t go and all that. Have a ball.

Marianne knew that nothing they were hollering about was going to change what it was like for her to walk down the street every night, hoping no one caught the telltale Adam’s apple, the wide wrists, the man-size feet that had once carried Curtis Lee flying over hurdle after hurdle to win the gold in the all-state track meet three years running, the four-hundred-meter hurdle champion. Running had been the only time Curtis had felt like he wasn’t living in the wrong body. Muscles pumping, blood coursing through his veins, buoyed by adrenaline, sucking in deep breaths of the clean country air, he had flown. He had been barely a body at all, just a heart in motion.

Curtis had given his final medal to his father in the hospital. He’d been buried with it.

Marianne kept the other two golds in the bottom of a drawer. She never took them out to look at them, but occasionally she’d reach in to grab a sweater and one would catch the light. She was a winner.

Marianne may have been jaded, but she believed in love. She didn’t need the world to understand her. All she needed was one right person to know and love her. She had thought for a moment it would be Wes, but she could see now that was just her telling herself stories. That was the problem with having what her teachers had always called a vivid imagination: you invent people rather than really seeing them.

“That’s all right,” the man said. “There you go.”

He kissed her tears away. With one hand, he held the back of her head, and with the other, he gently stroked her neck.

“Take me home,” Marianne said.

“Let’s go somewhere else. You want to take a drive in the country?”

Marianne hesitated. She wasn’t sure he knew the little secret. Sometimes they surprised you with their stupidity and then blindsided you with anger. You don’t want to be in the “country” with a man who felt duped and emasculated.

“Okay,” she said. “But let’s stop at home first. I want to change my clothes.” It would buy her a little time at least. She’d get a better bead on him.

He shifted, suddenly restless. His eyes wandered as if he was losing interest. She wasn’t ready to lose this one yet, and she didn’t want to be alone.

“I have some grass,” she offered. With that, he was back.

Marianne bid goodbye to her girlfriends with a cursory wave. They raised their eyebrows.

Gisele gave her a little hip shimmy, a tacit gesture of approval for the date she’d scored.

Once they reached the street, the man’s posture changed. He hunched forward, hands in pockets, eyes scanning the area around them. Wouldn’t be the first time she got in a car with a dodgy and paranoid man, but it was a marked change from the sensitive guy she had met at the bar less than an hour before.

“Hey, what did you say your name was?”

“Name’s Sam.”

He didn’t bother to open the door to his red Pontiac LeMans for her. Marianne nursed a sinking suspicion she’d be facing yet another disappointment. Still, she slid into the white leather bench seat.

When they reached the cramped, concrete-block apartment she shared in Liberty City, he trudged silently up the stairs behind her. She turned and jutted a defiant hip forward, resting a hand on it.

“You got somewhere else to be?”

His smile snapped back like a rubber band.

“No, baby. No, no, no. I only want to be with you.”

The clacking of her heels on the concrete was swallowed by the shag carpet when she opened the door. A strong waft of grass, cigarette smoke, and cheap Chinese food hit them like a wall.

Two of her roommates, one Black, one white, both bare chested and clad in blue jeans, sprawled on the brown velour couch, personal ads spread out in front of them on the coffee table Marianne had scavenged and painted herself. Sam posted himself in a corner of the room, arms crossed over his chest. Marianne trotted into her room to get changed. She was wiggling into a pair of silk black bell-bottoms when he opened the door without knocking.

“Wait,” she said, pulling up the pants in a panic.

“I don’t care what’s between your legs, sugar,” he said.

She breathed a sigh of relief. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and was embarrassed to notice she needed a shave. She popped her head out of the room and locked eyes with her Black roommate.

“You got Magic Shave?”

“Girl, we been out of Magic Shave for days. Have big handsome there take you for some. Hey, big handsome! You want to take Princess here to get her Magic Shave, or you want to kiss a hedgehog?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Sam said. “I’ll buy it for you myself.” In the car, he shook his head and said, “Those homosexuals you live with. I don’t cast judgment. That’s for God, not me. But I personally do not care for it.”

The comment caught her off guard, but she shook it off when he pulled over to the five-and-dime and bought her the Magic Shave, like a proper gentleman.

Except he didn’t turn around and drive back toward Overtown. He swung onto the 27 instead, which led to a whole lot of green nowhere.

“Where we going?”

“We going for a nice romantic drive in the country. Find somewhere quiet we can get our freak on!”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Let’s go back to my place. I got grass. We can party.”

“Trust me,” he said. He put his arm around her shoulder and she snuggled closer to him, mostly because the insistence of his grasp gave her little other choice. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Marianne drummed her long nails on the can of Magic Shave as the foliage flanking the road grew denser, seemed ready to swallow the highway entirely. His arm around her neck tightened yet further, and a chill ran up the back of Marianne’s spine. Cold sweat pooled in her armpits and under her bra. Lord knows she had developed a preternatural sense for when things were turning wrong. The problem was they often turned so quickly it was hard to keep ahead of it.

“I’m not feeling so good. Let’s turn around.”

“What’s wrong, sugar?”

“Little bit too much to drink, I guess. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

“You want me to pull over?” He ran his tongue over his left incisor.

It was pitch-black around them, with half a pale moon caught in a web of clouds. Only the headlights coming the other direction illuminated the world for a heartbeat, then turned the dust on the windshield into a white screen, blinding her.

“Turn around.”

“Where you want to do that? Look. There’s nowhere to turn. C’mon, let’s just pull over and relax for a minute. I’ll take care of you.”

There was a wide swath of grass between the north and southbound lanes of the 27. There was, indeed, no visible place to turn around. Marianne felt her panic mounting, climbing toward her throat. Maybe she was actually going to vomit after all.

The headlights of the Pontiac illuminated what looked like a perpendicular road up in the distance.

“There!” she cried too enthusiastically.

“Okay, okay,” he said, taking the one hand that was on the wheel off it and holding it up in a gesture of surrender. The car began to veer toward the shoulder. Marianne shrieked and grabbed for the wheel, but he tightened his grasp around her neck and held her back.

Sam laughed, and the temperature in the car dropped twenty degrees. He put his hand back on the wheel.

“Oh hey, hey, now, beautiful. I was just playing. It’s just me here. Your friend Sam. See, I’m turning around right here, just like you want. Any way you like it, okay? Look,” he said, noticing a wide, U-shaped driveway in bad repair encircling a battered barn and some old farm equipment. “Let’s pull over right here and talk a little.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How had she been so blind?

Blind. Blind him. That was it. It was her only hope.

Magic Shave was a bitch to open. It was like a tiny can of house paint. You needed a screwdriver or a nail file to pry off the metal top, and she had neither. She gripped the can tightly in her left hand.

She hooked a toe into the back of her left heel and nudged it onto the floor of the car. But she had broken out in a sticky panic sweat, and the right shoe had been tight to begin with. She couldn’t get it off.

As Sam slowed to a stop, Marianne turned to him and smiled sweetly as a debutante.

“I love you,” he said.

Loved her?

With desperate strength, Marianne both crushed the can in her palm and dug her fingernails into its metal rim. The top popped off and her nails came with it with a spurt of blood she barely felt. She tossed the white powder into his face, and he screamed, batting the cloud around him like a wounded animal.

Marianne kicked open the door with the heel that wouldn’t come off and hit the ground running. Run toward the light she might have seen in the doorway? Run for the road?

Just run.

She heard her teammates, her father. A small crowd.

Run, Curtis! Run, son!

Marianne blasted through the cooling night air, heavy with the smell of spring grass, the tang of stagnant water, a faint whiff of fertilizer from a farm nearby. She ran chest first, arms pumping. For a brief moment, she was back again. She was winning, fast and light as the wind on her face.

Her one heel lodged in a crack in the pavement and her ankle turned. She wrenched her foot free, took her mark, and started again, just like her coach had taught her. Everyone catches their foot on a hurdle once in a while. What you don’t do is sit there.

It was one hurdle too many. With the instinct of a runner who knows never to look back, she felt he was on her.

The man was big, but he was also swift and powerful as a hound from hell.

Was this the dark, vengeful thing her mother had spoken of, gnawing at her heels all along?

Sam fell upon Curtis from behind, but Marianne ran on. As she ran, she rose, off the ground, above the trees.

She looked back for a moment to watch the demon named Sam tackle Curtis, wrap his forearm around Curtis’s neck from behind. Marianne watched the boy thrash, then grow limp.

Marianne noticed the light in the barn turn off. Someone had heard the tussle but hadn’t wanted trouble. She watched as each last hope for Curtis’s survival receded one by one into the shadowy recesses of the Everglades.

Marianne watched as Sam locked an arm bar around the boy’s neck and dragged him back to the Pontiac. Curtis’s bloodied heels, stockings shredded to a thread, tried to find purchase on the concrete, but there was no strength left in his legs.

Sam hoisted the back door open and tossed Curtis inside like a doll.

The boy shook his head, sucked air into his aching lungs, wordlessly pulled down his bell-bottom pants, and kneeled on the back seat, facedown, his body offered in one last gesture of surrender.

Sam laughed.

“You think that’s what I want?”

Marianne felt an itching between her shoulder blades, a brief sharp pain. Hardly hurt a bit as a pair of glorious wings, the same she had always imagined when she was on the track, unfurled from between her shoulder blades.

Sam flattened the boy, pants around his knees, to the seat. He wrapped his thick forearm around the boy’s neck and pressed his hard cock, still in his pants, to the boy’s back. When Curtis stopped struggling, Sam flipped him over and wedged the boy’s body to the floor of the back seat. Sam unzipped his fly, freed his cock, grabbed hold of it, and stroked. It didn’t take long.

The boy was weak already and long done fighting. Sam ejaculated on Curtis’s sweater as the boy drew his last breath, with only Sam’s two fingers pressing on his windpipe.

Below Marianne, the deep green trees and silent black water shifted and blurred until all that remained was the dark firmament on every side, studded with sparkling pinpoints of light.

She knew she was home.

She’d always had faith love was possible and here it was: bold, warm, and bright as the stars all around. She had made it. She was Marianne. Whole, perfect, and loved for who she was at last.

Her wings beat furiously at first like the thrum of a heart, until the rhythm slowed and there was only silence. Marianne drew breath deep and full as the sky.