The rain thickened, coming down in sheets of silver tinsel. Frankie took me shopping, undaunted. She’d done this when we first met, bought me airy negligees and vaporous thongs, things so sheer it seemed any moisture would dissolve them, like spun sugar. Now we hopped from boutique to boutique, filling bags with designer denim, organza tops, strappy heels, more makeup than I could use in a year. She was spoiling me. I could’ve bought this stuff myself but these were gifts, and I’d learned quickly as a cam girl that all gifts carried a price. When she held a pair of garnets against my ear, I pulled away.

“Happy birthday,” Elle had said, pushing a small box into my hands.

“You did not.”

“I did. Open it.”

“You don’t have the money for this.”

“Shut up and open it.”

Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay a pair of ruby earrings set in sterling. The settings were molded into threads of cold fire.

One day we’d gone window-shopping and pretended to buy all the things we couldn’t afford. Tried on clothes at high-end stores till they kicked us out, got spritzed with a potpourri of perfume at fragrance counters, talked a jeweler into taking the ruby earrings out of the glass case and reluctantly holding them up against my head. The jeweler said they looked lovely. Ellis said they looked like drops of blood bursting into flame. That night I painted a phoenix tearing its own wings apart. My brushstrokes were wild, paint licking up my arms as if fire were bleeding onto me, or from me. When I put the brush down, Elle dipped it carefully in the red and dabbed each of my earlobes.

“You remembered,” I said softly, letting reminiscence fade.

She turned my head and put an earring in, gentle. Then the other side. The graze of her fingers made me shiver.

“Do they look lovely?” I said, smiling.

“You do.”

She never told me where she got the money. But eventually, I knew.

(—Bergen, Vada. Happy Birthday, Baby. Oil on canvas.)

Frankie was giving me a strange look.

“Zoned out,” I said. “I’m starving. Call it a day?”

We went to a hipster clam bar near the wharf. Frankie ordered a flight of red wine, then another, and by the time the steamers were served I was grinning stupidly, tipsy.

“I have no idea how to do this,” I said.

She raised an amused eyebrow. Her face said watch me.

Frankie popped a shell with one hand and pulled out the clam, peeled the dark part off like a stocking, dipped the meat into the broth and melted butter and then finally lifted it, dripping gold, to her mouth. Her tongue flicked out to bring it inside slowly.

“Holy shit,” I said.

She licked a glaze of butter from her lips. “Think you can do it?”

“Show me one more time.”

“Only if we go private, baby.”

We both laughed.

By my third steamer I was doing it like a pro, sucking the juice before it could trickle over my chin, gesturing with my wineglass like I wasn’t on the brink of dropping it. Being around Frankie made me feel sophisticated, her urbane air rubbing off. She was an econ major with a solid background in high culture, and when I talked about Frida Kahlo or Paul Klee she knew who I meant. “Describe it,” she’d say when I mentioned a painting, and I let the wine take rein over my tongue and told her how Kahlo was a raw cry, how her colors burned into the canvas like blood still hot from a vein, how she captured the way that pain, chronic pain, felt like a nightmare that started when you woke up, and it made everything surreal, every ordinary object a torture device, every mundane chore a labor sentence. It both impeded Kahlo’s expression and intensified all she experienced. That’s what made her great, I explained. All art comes from pain. She was closer to the nerve pulp than most of us. But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.

Frankie stared at my hands. “That’s how it feels for you?”

“I have good days and bad days.”

“Can’t you have surgery?”

“Already did.” Today was a good day, and the wine buffered any twinge of discomfort. “Messing with it more might make it worse. I could lose all function.”

Sun speared through the rain, skewering the droplets crawling down the windows. Frankie tilted the cabernet in her glass.

“I never guessed it was that bad by looking at you,” she said.

“You probably see a hundred disabled people every day and don’t realize.”

“Never thought of that.”

“Most people just want to pass quietly in society. No preconceptions, no prejudices.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. People look at me and immediately see black girl.” Frankie smiled, dimples popping. “Not the girl, or the person. But my blackness. Then comes that pause, you know, checking if they’re being racist or rude or whatever. Like they’re saying, very politely, ‘You’re not like us. You never will be.’ ”

“Exactly. They’re othering you.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve done that. Or not accommodated your needs.”

“When I need help, I’ll ask. Assuming I need it makes me feel othered.” Except I never asked for help, even when I legit needed it. My dumb stubbornness. “If I’ve ever made you feel that way, I’m sorry, too.”

“Oh, please.” She whisked a fingertip over my forearm and the hair there stood on end. “Look at your gorgeous color. Where’s your family from?”

“Mom’s Puerto Rican, Dad’s Swedish. You?”

“Nigerian, Brazilian, and English. And I swear, if I hear ‘chocolate, caramel, and nougat’ one more fucking time, I will murder someone.”

“You mean you’re actually a person, not a Milky Way bar?”

She grinned. “You get me. And I get you.”

I took a long draught of wine. “Why’d you buy me all this stuff? Are you seducing me?”

I’d said it jokingly, but her smile grew sly, almost carnal.

“I like you, that’s all.” Frankie pushed a clam across her plate with a lilac nail. “You remind me of a younger me. Feisty, fiery. Chip on your shoulder. This business is tough, and it’s easy to see other women as enemies. But we’re the only real allies we’ve got.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’ve had to fight for everything in your life. You deserve some goodness pro bono. A rising tide lifts all boats.”

“Maine’s getting to you, Frankie. Next you’ll grow a beard and stroke it while staring out to sea.” She laughed, charmingly, and I dared to ask something personal. “Why’d you get into camming? You’re like, superhumanly beautiful. Top model material.”

“Modeling is a joke. There are millions of pretty faces out there. If you want in, you’ve got to fuck your way through talent scouts and photogs. Think the casting couch is only in Hollywood? It’s in fashion, too. It’s everywhere we sell our skin. And when men are the gatekeepers, they make us pay with our bodies to get in the door. But camming’s different. No gate. Anyone with an Internet connection can do it. Now we’ve only got to fuck ourselves.”

We both giggled. We were slightly drunk.

Then her gaze slid past me. “Speaking of the casting couch. Isn’t that your old boss?”

Shit.

Curtis sat at the far end of the butcher-block bar, hunched over a tin plate of fish and chips. He was still all skin and bones and shaggy hair. When our eyes met, he nodded.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Frankie called for the bill. But the rain was brutal, and as we waited for a cab Curt sauntered over.

“Vada?”

I frowned as if trying to remember who he was. “Hey.”

“Hi. You look—wow, you look great.”

All those days hiking and rowing had toned and tanned me even darker. Less alcohol, more fresh air. Less thinking. Self-improvement, I guess.