White Oleander

I painted a mirror on the wall opposite Claire's dresser where there was no mirror, and in the red-tinted darkness, my own staring image, with long pale hair, in the crimson velvet Christmas dress I never got a chance to wear. The me that died with her. I painted a crimson ribbon around my neck. It made my neck look slashed.

"Are you gay?" Paul Trout asked me.

I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn't know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific — chair, eye, stone — but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out. I thought of my mother's lovers, Jeremy and Jesus and Mark, narrow-waisted young men with clear eyes and voices like slipper satin across your bare chest. I thought how beautiful Claire was, dancing in her own living room, jete, pas de bouree, how I loved her. I looked up at him, "Does it matter?"

"Doesn't anything matter to you?"

"Survival," I said, but even that sounded untrue now. "I guess."

"That's not much."

I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. "I haven't gotten any farther than that."

WE WALKED the Big Field together when he got his privileges back. The girls called him my boyfriend, but it was just another word, it didn't quite capture the truth. Paul Trout was the only person I'd met there I could talk to. He wanted to see me on the outside, asked for an address, a phone number, someplace he could reach me, but I didn't know where I'd be, and I couldn't trust my mother to forward anything. Anyway, I'd decided not to give her my new address. I didn't want anything more to do with her. He gave me the name of a comic book shop in Hollywood, said he'd check there, wherever he was. "Just mark the letters Hold for Paul Trout."

I was sorry when he got his placement, to a group home in Pomona. He was the first kid I'd really enjoyed spending time with since my days with Davey, the first one who could remotely understand what I had been through. We were just getting to know each other, and now he was gone. I had to get used to that. Everybody left you eventually. He gave me one of his drawings to remember him by. It was me as a superhero, in a tight white T-shirt and ragged shorts, my body clearly the subject of much observation and thought. I'd just vanquished a biker archvillain, my Doc Marten bootheel planted on his bloody bare chest, a smoking gun in my hand. I shot him through the heart. I don't let anyone touch me was printed over my head.

OUTSIDE the junior boys' cottage a few days after Paul left, I sat at an orange picnic table, waiting for my interview. I ran my hand through my chopped hair, let the winter sun warm my scalp. The families weren't supposed to be shopping, it was supposed to be a "getting to know you" visit, but it was an audition and everyone knew it. I wasn't worried. I didn't want to get placed. I'd rather stay here until I was eighteen. Paul was right, there was lots worse than Mac. I didn't want to get involved with anybody ever again. But nobody got to stay.

At a table under the big pines, another interview was taking place, a sibling set. They were always the worst. The cute little brother in the woman's lap, the older brother, past cute, pubescent, downy-lipped, standing off to the right, hands in his pockets. They only wanted the little one. Big brother was trying to convince them how responsible he was, how he'd help take care of the little guy, carry the trash, mow the lawn. I could barely watch it.

I had my first interview on Tuesday. Bill and A

I didn't say much. I didn't even want to look at them. I could get to like them. I liked them already. Their kindnesses made small sucking noises at me, like water in the bathtub. It would be easy to let them take me home. I could see their house, bright and comfortable, on a street of tract houses but nice, maybe two-story. Pictures of kids on the tables, old swing set in the backyard. The su

I ccuid have gone with them, A

"You'll like it with us, Astrid," A

She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L'Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother's secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time. Which do you like better, tarragon or thyme? All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass birds and Debussy.

I looked at Bill and A

It wasn't that I didn't believe them. I believed everything they said, they were a salvation, a solution to my most basic lack. But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.

I hadn't understood at the time. If si