All of her miseries stabbed at Cheryl's gut. Something bothered her about Brandy's report of last night. Cheryl wanted to call her on it. She wondered if the kid was now lying, too. Brandy lied about everything. She gave her child a sharp look. There was nothing wrong with Cheryl's eyes. "Jesus, what the hell is that?”

"What?" Brandy said.

"That outfit is bad, Bran."

Brandy was wearing a pink fuzzy sweater the size of a hanky. She had a small frame and breasts large enough to nourish all the children in a well-populated state. The breasts stretched the sweater way out of shape and hiked it high up on her midriff. Her jeans hung low on pudgy hips and were pegged tight down to surprisingly coltish ankles. Cheryl groaned some more.

The daughter she'd prayed would come out more like her than her father looked like a refugee from a road show production of Grease. Here they were in a new millennium, with beauty aids more advanced than at any other time in history. And of all the daughters in America, she, Cheryl Fabman, had to have the only one who wouldn't do a single thing to fix herself up. Brandy's short brown hair was, well, brown, flat on top, flat on the sides. Her chubby cheeks showed no sign of bones anywhere. Her eyelids were pale and virtually lashless-her eyes pitifully small for the brilliant blue that was the only thing Cheryl could claim as hers. And worst of all were the breasts-the breasts! The least Brandy could do was camouflage the freaking breasts just a little. The sight of her daughter looking like such a poor imitation of a tart was so disturbing it was almost enough to distract Cheryl from herself. Her daughter was a disaster, a complete disaster. She couldn't bear it.

"What?" Brandy's lips were stuck together in a pout.

"Trust me on this. The outfit makes you look fat. What are you eating? I told you no fats. No sugar, Brandy. What's in your mouth?"

"Nothing."

Cheryl sat up a little. "Something's in your mouth. What is it?"

"Nothing's in my mouth. I have a class, Mom. I gotta go"

"I thought today was One World Day." Cheryl's lips hurt or she would have had a lot more to say.

"It is, but I can't skip the whole thing. Do you want me to take it as a sick day?"

"No, if you have to go, then go. But come back at five. I want to see you for dinner."

"You can't eat anything," Brandy reminded her.

"Neither can you. We'll have soup together." Cheryl shook her head. "What did your dad give you for dinner last night?"

"He took me to the Posthouse for a steak."

Cheryl closed her eyes. Their old hangout. "You didn't eat the French fries, did you?" she demanded.

"Just a few. Not all of them." Brandy broke free of the door. "Bye, Mom. Don't die on me. Promise?"

"Put on a sweater or a jacket, anything to cover up those boobs," Cheryl replied.

Fifteen

David hung out on Lexington Avenue, waiting for Brandy to get away from her mother and call him. It took all morning. He had eggs, bacon, and hash browns for breakfast in a coffee shop on Eighty-sixth Street, then moved on and had a second breakfast of pancakes and sausage with lots of syrup in another coffee shop on Seventy-ninth. The food hardly calmed him at all as he waited and waited. Brandy didn't try to reach him until almost one. They met up on Madison, crossed Fifth Avenue, and walked west through the park. They were going to Seymour Fabman's apartment to celebrate their first killing.

As he walked, David was thinking about how good it felt to hit a man and bash his head in. It was more exciting to think about that than to worry about his payment. Brandy promised to do it with him on her father's sofa, the one in the window overlooking Central Park. He was a little worried about it since she'd told him she'd had sex many times before, and he'd never done it even once. He snorted. But he was a dangerous man now. No one could claim he was a loser anymore.

"How's your mom?" he asked, thinking Brandy looked just unbelievable in the fuzzy sweater. And was now his slave forever.

She clicked her exciting tongue pierce against her teeth. "You wouldn't believe what they did to her lip. Ugh, it's so gross. No one will ever kiss her now."

"Why?"

Brandy rolled back her top lip to show him where the doctor had made incisions to plump up her mother's deficient lip. The view of the pink wet flesh on the inside of Brandy's mouth almost made David nuts with excitement. He wanted to grab her on the spot, kiss her, and feel that metal pierce with his own tongue. She hadn't let him kiss her in the week and a half since she'd had it done because she was afraid of infection. Today was the day. She'd promised.

She let go of her mouth, made a little skip away from him, and grinned at the bump in his pants, daring him to come and get her. This rendered him speechless with joy and pain. Should he grab her? Shouldn't he grab her? He hated it when she shrugged away from him. He wasn't sure what she expected him to do. He felt the power had shifted last night, and now he had to be the boss. He struggled with his confusion about it.

"Any trouble with your mother?" she asked.

"Nah, what about you?" he asked, biding his time on the boss thing.

Brandy shook her head. They walked in silence for a while, knapsacks on their backs. As they neared the West Side, almost by tacit agreement they swerved north, away from the corpse in the cave. David's excitement about the promised sex gnawed at his ulcer. He chewed a Maalox.

"Are you sure your dad won't be there?" He concentrated on the parent who could bust them for skipping school. That would be a royal pain given the circumstances.

"Of course I'm freaking sure. He goes to work, doesn't he?"

"Yeah, but last night, you said he wouldn't be there, and there he was la-" David snorted again. Seymour Fabman had been naked on the sofa, lapping at his girlfriend's crotch. David giggled. Brandy had run like a rabbit when she saw her father going down on a girl who looked as young as they were.

Brandy turned the color of her sweater. "Shut up," she warned.

"Well, he was. Did he see us?"

"He didn't call my mom," she said vaguely.

They came out of the park at Eighty-sixth Street and David stopped short. "Jesus! Already?" He was pumped now.

News vans were lined up along Central Park West just outside police barricades. Emergency vehicles and police cars blocked the avenue even to buses. Cops were swarming all over the place, trying to get the traffic north of Eighty-fourth Street out of gridlock.

"Wow. Wow, look at that."

They headed toward the blue police barricade, then past it, right down the emptied middle of the street. A lot of other people had the same idea. No one stopped them. At Seventy-ninth Street Brandy walked up to a cop, who wasn’t doing anything. It was a girl cop, bulging in her uniform. Her hair was straggling out of a ponytail, and she stood by the park wall, looking over at the activity inside.

"What's going on?" Brandy asked.

She looked them over and shrugged. "Someone's missing. They're looking for him."

"No kidding," Brandy said excitedly.

"You kids better watch yourselves."

David wondered what she meant by that. They moved on, didn't speak to anyone else. At Brandy's father's building, they stopped. The doorman was glued to the canopy in front.

"Is my dad at home?" Brandy asked him.

"Nope. He went out at eight this morning, same as usual."

"Anyone else there?"

He shook his head.

Brandy and David went upstairs to the twelfth-floor apartment with the great view of the park. "This is cool," he said in the elevator.

"Yeah," Brandy agreed. "I hope they find him soon." They got out and walked quickly down the hall. In the apartment, the music was off now and the place was cleaned up. They went straight through to the big windows facing the park in the living room. Right away they saw the man with the orange SAR jumpsuit being dragged along by a shepherd with one of those orange necklaces that glowed in the dark. The two were out by the edge of the lake. Nearby, some cops were beating the bushes and bending over to pick things up.