LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

APRIL 1989

Audrey’s thoughts rolled around in her head like marbles, scattered and too slow. The man in the driver’s seat didn’t seem to have much to say anyway.

They called her first baby Pearl now. The name rose to the surface, the house with blue shutters—a morning punctured by memories of dreams from the previous night.

Her mother changed her baby’s name. Unique was the name Audrey had given her. Unique Libertene, and yes, she knew how to fucking spell it right. She spelled it wrong because she wanted to. Because she could. Because no one could tell her how to do anything anymore. All those years up at four in the morning milking the cows. No TV, no magazines, no radio, no nothing. Get on a school bus and go to school and then get back on it and come home. Old-fashioned hard work and none of this artsy bullshit.

By the time she was sixteen, she would have crawled the length of New York State on broken glass to escape the farm. She ran away to the big city four hours south. Didn’t exactly work out. She met Preston there, like you do. Always some Preston waiting for the next farm girl. Got strung out even easier. He got into all manner of shit, jewelry, drugs, the rest. She’d followed him out here, to the edge of the fucking continent.

All for this glorious experience of freedom.

An iron pendulum knocked back and forth in her gut.

Pools of streetlight shifted to darkness. The car wasn’t moving. Was the car moving?

She regained consciousness as the man kneeling over her in the back seat let go of her throat to unzip his pants.

Man, she’d been off her game that night. She’d pegged this one as gay—something about his vibration. Figured he just wanted to pick up some whore to help him score drugs, then look in the other direction and imagine his friend from work while you blew him. She was usually good at reading a face, if you didn’t count Pres.

The threadbare black headliner of the Thunderbird turned to a staticky screen as he once again seized her throat, then released. She thrashed her arms, went for his hands, his face with her nails.

She’d sent Unique a letter with a palm leaf in it sometime not so long ago for her birthday, or close enough. The palm leaf signifies strength, she’d told her. Be strong, my love. I love you I love you I love you.

The palm trees in LA towered above gated Bel Air communities and high schools on the city’s ragged outskirts alike. The edges of the palm fronds shone in the twilight like knife blades.

She knew the letter would never reach her baby. Her first. There had been two more, snatched straight from her arms at birth. Unique she had held almost a year before getting arrested for prostitution. She called her little koala bear for how she clung to her.

Unique was no baby now. Pearl was her name. Who gets to name a person? The last time she’d seen Unique, her koala was seven years old.

Audrey had an epiphany one day, having been riding the crest of one of her wild pinks rather than her mean blues. Her mother was the same way. She lived up or down. It was slow or fast, soft or hard, rarely predictable and never gentle.

She was not yet burned. She was a mess, sure, but she was still a gorgeous mess, which was the easiest kind of mess to be, even if it doesn’t make you safer. She convinced some sulking trick to drive her four hours north. She rummaged through drawers as he’d impatiently honked the horn under her window. She grabbed a fistful of necklaces—she’d always liked chunky jewelry, stones, beads, crystals, magic.

She sang along with the radio the entire way. When there were too many commercials on the radio, she sang the Carpenters and the Rolling Stones. She opened the windows and fucked her careful hairdo. She sang to the yellows and reds and browns of the fall foliage. Even as he calculated the excuses he’d have to make to his wife, Audrey knew he loved her instantly. She was freedom. Freedom is a powerful fantasy.

She ran to the window of the ornate, white Victorian farmhouse with navy-blue shutters that her family had owned for nearly a century. Once stately, those hundred years had left it looking like a wedding cake in the rain.

She’d colored a hundred pictures of that house, climbed every tree on the farm. “Pearl!” she cried out. “Pearl, my love!”

The girl wouldn’t have answered to Unique.

Pearl had flown to the window and thrown it open.

“I’m your mommy!”

“Mommy!”

Audrey threw her the beads.

“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Pearl caught them, looked behind her, and shuttered the windows without a backward glance.

Unique was thirteen now.

Audrey gained momentary focus, and wow. What a shithole to die in.

“Time,” said the man on top of her, wedging her between the back seat and the floorboards, the small of her spine propped on the hump in the middle.

Time, like that song she liked, “Time After Time.”

A parking lot. Not even lipstick on, and a fuckwad trick on a shitty night saying cheesy shit like, “Time.”

Her little brother Billy would be lonely without her.

Audrey had seen him only sporadically over the last chaotic years, but all their lives, he’d been her one true friend. There had been no school friends allowed for either of them, so why bother trying? No sleepovers. No dances.

Except the one junior prom.

Billy made a case for her. What could go wrong if he went as her chaperone, with a pocketful of shiny dimes and a promise to call their mother if anything untoward occurred? Mother reluctantly agreed. Behind closed doors, the siblings rolled their eyes, locked fingers, jumped up and down with silent screams. Billy weighed in on her gown, her corsage. He made sure they were a splash.

It was the first time she’d danced anywhere but tap class, her bedroom, or her front yard. The first time she danced with a boy.

Oh, my love. My darling. I’ve hungered for your touch…

She sang and twirled into the parlor when they arrived home.

“You took their breath away,” said Billy, sitting in the most uncomfortable chair in the room and crossing his arms like a toddler. Since the moment her soccer coach had gently told her it was time to get a bra, Audrey had turned the boys’ heads. Her brother and best friend was jealous.

How could he not be sore? Boys, boys, boys, she got ’em. Boys, boys, boys, he wanted them and couldn’t figure out how to say it. Even if he could, she’d have him bested any day. Boys, boys, boys. No end to them.

A cracking sound. A trickle of wet down her face. No end.

She realized the man choking the life from her wasn’t saying “Time.” He was saying “Mine. You are mine.”

She wasn’t bound by him. She was no longer even bound by time. How about that? She was back at junior prom. Her life was hers again.

Poor Billy, ever the brother, ever the bridesmaid.

“Whaaaat? Oh, come on,” she said. “No way, really?”

She spun around, still in her bell dress, and wedged herself into his lap, throwing her arms around his neck.

“Can you let up on that bitchy pose?” she asked. He softened and she tucked her forehead into his neck. He wrapped his arms around her and told her she was too bony and should eat a sandwich.

She was maddening, but she knew it was hard to resent her for long—a thing so bright and wild. They’d all loved her because she was almost sure to fail. She was the one who took the bullet for the sober and sensible.

Audrey knew her mother. She knew Unique would be forced to stand in the backyard and burn those necklaces. But maybe one day, Unique would remember them catching the autumn sunlight as they flew to her small hands and would hear I love you, I love you, I love you.

“You did, honey,” Billy said, stroking her hair. “You took their breath away.”