The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

“You gotta go in there like somebody they tell things to,” he said. “Somebody that gets what she wants.” “Be white, you mean.” He nodded. “Easier that way,” he said. “I can’t go in with you. Give you away. But you just go in, say you lookin for somebody. An old friend. Not your sister, that raise too many questions. Tell ’em you lost touch, somethin like that. Just keep it light, breezy. Like a white lady with no worry on her mind.” So she imagined herself as Stella—not the Stella she once knew but Stella as she was now. Pushing past the giant brass MB door handles, stepping inside the department store. She passed through the perfume aisle with the confidence of a woman who could buy any bottle she wished. She stopped to smell a few, as if she were considering a purchase. Admired the jewelry in the display case, glanced at the fine handbags, demurred when salesgirls approached her. In the lobby, the colored elevator operator gazed at the floor when she stepped on. She ignored him, the way Stella might have. She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were. When she entered the first office level, a white security guard hurried over to help her. She played back Early’s words. Light, breezy, no worry on her mind. She told him that she was looking for an old friend who used to work in marketing. Of course he couldn’t find a Stella Vignes in the building directory, but he gave her directions to the department. She rode the elevator to...

She felt, again, overwhelmed by Early’s help, unsure of how she could ever manage to thank him. After they finished their drinks, she walked him to the boardinghouse. He tucked her hand under his arm as they climbed up the muddy steps and she didn’t pull away, not even once they were inside his room. She wasn’t drunk but the room suddenly felt hot. She hadn’t undressed in front of a strange man in years. Slowly, then. He was leaning against the worn dresser, waiting, and she pressed against him, trailing her hand down his stomach. He stopped her at his belt. “It’s just a start,” he said. “I ain’t no closer to findin her.” He held on to her hand, as if he understood that this was a condition for them to go any further. “All right,” she said. “I might not. She might just be gone. You know that, right?” She paused. “I know.” “I’ll look as long as you want me to,” he said. “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop.” She wrested her hand free, slipping it under his black T-shirt. Her fingers brushed against a rough scar stretching across his stomach. He shivered. “Don’t stop,” she said.

In the autumn of 1978, a dark girl blew into Los Angeles from a town that existed on no maps. She rode a Greyhound all the way from this unmapped place, her two suitcases rattling in the undercarriage. A girl from nowhere and nothing, and if you’d asked any of the other passengers, they would have noticed nothing interesting about her except that she was so, well, black.

Too bad, those legs with that face. That skin. Jesus, he’d never seen a woman that black before. She didn’t notice the bus driver watching her. She barely noticed anyone staring at her at all anymore, or if she did, she knew exactly why they were looking. She was impossible to miss. Dark, yes, but also tall and rangy, just like her father, whom she had not seen or heard from in ten years.

You could find just about anybody if you were good at lying, he told her. Half of hunting was pretending to be somebody else, an old friend searching for his buddy’s address, a long-lost nephew trying to find his uncle’s new phone number, a father inquiring about the whereabouts of his son. There was always someone close to the mark that you could manipulate. Always a window in if you couldn’t find a door. “Ain’t that exciting,” he told her, chewing on a toothpick. “Most of it just sweet-talkin old ladies on the phone.” He made finding the lost sound so easy that once, she’d asked if he could search for her daddy. He didn’t look up at her, swabbing his brush inside the gun barrel. “You don’t want me to go lookin for him,” he said. “Why not?” “Because,” he said. “He’s not a nice man.” He was right, of course, but she hated how certain he was. How could he possibly know? He’d never even met her daddy. She’d always imagined her father driving up in his shiny Buick to rescue her. She’d step out of school one day and find him waiting. Her father, tall and handsome, smiling at her, arms open. The other kids would gawk. Then he’d bring her back to D.C., and she’d go to school and make friends and date boys and run track and go off to college in a place so unlike Mallard that she would hardly believe that Mallard even existed, that she hadn’t just imagined it. But ten years passed, no phone calls or letters. In the end, she rescued herself.

THEY CALLED HER TAR BABY. Midnight. Darky. Mudpie. Said, Smile, we can’t see you. Said, You so dark you blend into the chalkboard. Said, Bet you could show up naked to a funeral. Bet lightning bugs follow you in the daytime. Bet when you swim it look like oil. They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow. She was amazed by how well she remembered. At that party, she forced herself to laugh, even though she’d found nothing funny at the time. The jokes were true. She was black. Blueblack. No, so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world.

She would get no darker, although she seemed to the longer she lived in Mallard. A black dot in the school pictures, a dark speck on the pews at Sunday Mass, a shadow lingering on the riverbank while the other children swam. So black that you could see nothing but her. A fly in milk, contaminating everything.

But all she could picture was Lonnie splashing her in a mud puddle or sticking chewing gum in her hair or calling her a dumb bitch, Lonnie punching her until her lip burst open and her eye swelled shut. After, her father would always storm out while her mother sobbed on the floor, her face buried in the couch cushion. Once, he didn’t leave right away. Instead, he pulled her mother’s face into his stomach, petting her hair. Her mother whimpered but didn’t pull away, as if she were comforted by his touch. Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.

When they arrived home, her father greeted her mother with a kiss, and Jude realized that if she tried, she could pretend that the bruises came from someplace else. Her relationship with one parent magically untethered to the other. So when she thought of her daddy, he was sprawled beside her on the rug, flipping through the comics. Not dragging her mother by her hair into the bedroom—no, that was some other man. And after the broken glass was swept, the blood wiped off the tile, after her mother retreated into the bathroom, a bag of ice pressed against her face, her real daddy returned, smiling, stroking her cheek.

She was beginning to realize what she would soon know for sure: there was no plan to go back home or to go anywhere else, even, and her mother was lying each time she pretended that there was.

She was thinking, somehow, of Stella—a woman who resembled her just as little but would be a better version of her mother. Stella wouldn’t make Daddy so angry that he beat on her. She wouldn’t wake Jude in the middle of the night and force her onto a train to a little town where other children taunted her. She would keep her word. Stella wouldn’t promise that they would leave Mallard again and again, only to stay. “You gotta watch your mama,” her father had warned her once. “She still like those folks.” “What folks?” She was lying on the rug beside him, watching him catch jacks, his large hands blurring in front of her eyes. “The folks she come from,” he said. “Your mama still got some of that in her. She still think she better than us.” She didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

BY HIGH SCHOOL, the names no longer shocked her but the loneliness did. You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it.

Once, Jude had seen him ease up behind her mother and bury his face in a handful of her hair. She didn’t know who she wanted to be in that moment—Early or her mother, beautiful or beholding—and she’d felt so sick with longing that she turned away.

WHEN DESIREE VIGNES waved at her daughter’s bus from the terminal, she waited until the Greyhound disappeared around the corner to wipe the tears from her eyes. She didn’t want the last thing for her daughter to see, if she had in fact been staring out the back window, to be her silly mother, crying as if she’d never see her again. Early handed her a handkerchief and she laughed, dabbing her eyes. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, although nobody had asked and she wasn’t. After he dropped her by Lou’s Egg House for her shift, she realized, tying her apron, that she was starting her day the same way she’d started it for the past ten years, except that this time, she did not know when she would see her daughter again.

Ten years. She had been home ten years. Sometimes she glanced around the house, shaking her head, as if she still didn’t understand how she’d found herself back. As if she were in The Wizard of Oz, but instead of a house dropping on her, she’d fallen through the roof and awakened, years later, dazed to realize that she was still there.

When he visited, Desiree felt like a girl again, the years falling away like meat off the bone. His arrivals always seemed a little miraculous. Once, she was carrying a country-fried steak and eggs to a table and found Early sitting at the end of the counter, chewing on a toothpick. Another time, she locked up the diner and turned to see Early leaning against the phone booth across the road. She was exhausted but still laughed at the sight of him, as unexpected as the sudden coming of spring. One day there was frost, and the next, bloom. “I was just thinkin about you,” he’d say, as if he had stopped by on his way home, not driven all the way from Charleston, pressing on through the night, bleary-eyed, to get to her sooner. “Wonderin what you was up to.” She was never up to anything, of course, her days blending together into a sameness that she later found comforting. No surprises, no sudden anger, no man holding her one moment, then hitting her the next. Now life was steady. She knew what each day would bring, except when Early appeared. He was the only thing in her life she wasn’t prepared for. He never stayed longer than a day or two before he was gone again. Once, he’d convinced her to call in sick to Lou’s so that he could take her fishing. They didn’t catch anything but halfway through the afternoon, he kissed her, slipping his fingers under her dress, stroking her as they floated on the glassy lake. It was the most thrilling thing that had happened to her in months.

She didn’t ask who Early spent his nights with outside of Mallard. He didn’t ask her either. Each time he left, she missed him, but she wondered if his leaving was the only reason why they worked. He wasn’t a settling man, and maybe she wasn’t a settling woman either. When she thought about marriage, she felt trapped with Sam in an airless apartment, bracing herself, through each calm moment, for his inevitable rage. But Early was easy. He had no hidden sides. They didn’t argue, and if she ever grew annoyed with him, she was comforted by the fact that soon enough he would be gone again. He couldn’t trap her because he refused to trap himself. She’d had to convince him to stay at the house when he visited.

He wanted to pull her back into bed. There was never enough of her. He could never love her the way he wanted to. Full. A full love would scare her. Each time he returned to Mallard, he thought about bringing a ring. Her mother, at least, would finally respect him; she might even begin to think of him like a son. But Desiree never wanted to marry again. “I’ve been through all that already,” she said, with the same weariness of a soldier talking about war. It had been a war, in a sense, one that she could never win and only hope to survive. She’d told him about all the ways Sam had hurt her: slamming her face into the door, dragging her by her hair across the bathroom floor, backhanding her mouth, his hand streaked with lipstick and blood. She touched Early’s mouth gently, and he kissed her fingertips, trying to reconcile that quiet voice he’d heard over the phone ten years ago with the man she described.

Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it.

“When I was little,” she said, “like four or five, I thought this was just a map of our side of the world. Like there was another side of the world on some different map. My daddy told me that was stupid.” He’d brought her to a public library, and when he spun the globe, she knew that he was right. But she watched Reese trace along the map, a part of her still hoping that her father was mistaken, somehow, that there was still more of the world waiting to be found.

On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese. He cut his hair in Plano, hacking off inches in a truck stop bathroom with a stolen hunting knife. Outside of Abilene, he bought a blue madras shirt and a leather belt with a silver stallion buckle; the shirt he still wore, the buckle he’d pawned in El Paso when he ran out of money but mentioned wistfully, still feeling its weight hanging at his waist. In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

Since then, he’d bought plenty of steroids off plenty of Thads, each time the transaction feeling as grimy as when he’d first stood in that dirty bar bathroom. He met meatheads in dark alleys, felt vials pressed into his palm during handshakes, received nondescript paper bags in his gym locker. Now, seven years later, Therese Anne Carter was only a name on a birth certificate in the offices of Union County Public Records. No one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.

Jude began to run there even though she hated running indoors—no sky, no air, just running in place, staring at her own reflection. She hated every part of it except for when Reese eased up beside her, wiping down a stationary bike.

Now, as he watched the photo, she watched him, trying to picture Therese. But she couldn’t. She only saw Reese, scruffy face, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, that loop of hair always falling onto his forehead. So handsome that when he glanced up, she couldn’t look into his eyes. “What do you think of all this?” he said. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” But that wasn’t exactly true. She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some. Maybe others were just stuck with who they were. She’d tried to lighten her skin once, during her first summer in Mallard. She was still young enough then to believe that such a thing was possible, yet old enough to understand that it would require a degree of alchemy that she didn’t quite understand. Magic. She wasn’t foolish enough to hope that someday she might be light, but a deep brown maybe, anything better than this endless black. You couldn’t force a magic like this but she tried her best to conjure it.

“I always wanted to be different,” she told Reese. “I mean, I grew up in this town where everybody’s light and I thought—well, none of it worked.” “Good,” he said. “You got beautiful skin.” He glanced at her, but she looked away, staring down at the photo paper as an abandoned building shimmered into view. She hated to be called beautiful. It was the type of thing people only said because they felt they ought to. She thought about Lonnie Goudeau kissing her under the moss trees or inside the stables or behind the Delafosse barn at night. In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.

He loved taking pictures of anything but himself. The camera never saw him the way he did. Now he spent his weekends shooting abandoned buildings shuttered behind wood boards, graffitied bus stops, paint chipping off stripped car husks. Only dead, decaying things. Beauty bored him. Sometimes he snapped pictures of her, always candids, Jude lingering in the background, staring off into space. She didn’t realize until she was developing them. She always felt vulnerable seeing herself through his lens. He gave her one photo of herself standing on a boardwalk, and she didn’t know what to do with it so she sent it home.

In all of her school pictures, she’d either looked too black or overexposed, invisible except for the whites of her eyes and teeth. The camera, Reese told her once, worked like the human eye. Meaning, it was not created to notice her.

“What do you think she’s like?” he asked. She fiddled with the strap of his camera bag. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I used to wonder. Now I don’t think I wanna know. I mean, what kind of person just leaves her family behind?” She realized, all too late, that this was, of course, exactly what Reese had done. He’d shed his family right along with his entire past and now he never talked about them at all. She knew not to ask, even as he wanted to know more about her life.

Earlier that night, Barry had performed as Bianca at a club in West Hollywood called Mirage. For seven electrifying minutes, Bianca strutted onstage, a purple boa wrapped around her broad shoulders, and belted out “Dim All the Lights.” She wore ruby red lipstick and a big blonde wig like Dolly Parton. “It’s not enough to be a woman,” Reese had joked during the show. “He’s gotta be a white woman too.” Barry’s apartment was lined with wig heads covered in hair of every color, realistic and garish: a brown bob, a black pageboy, a straight Cher cut dyed pink, the bangs slicing across the forehead. At first, she’d thought that Barry might be like Reese, but then she arrived at his apartment to find him wearing a polo shirt and slacks, scratching his bearded cheek. During the week, he taught high school chemistry in Santa Monica; he only became Bianca two Saturdays a month in a tiny dark club off Sunset. Otherwise, he was a tall, bald man who looked nothing like a woman, which was part of the delight, she realized, watching the enraptured crowd. It was fun because everyone knew that it was not real.

The girls had come over. The girls, Barry always said, when he meant the other men who performed alongside him at his drag nights. By spring, Jude had been to enough of Barry’s parties to know what everyone looked like without makeup: Luis, who sang Celia Cruz in pink fur, was an accountant; Jamie, who wore a Supremes wig and go-go boots, worked for the power company; Harley transformed himself into Bette Midler—he was a costume designer for a minor theater company and helped the others find their wigs. The girls took Jude in until she felt, almost, like one of them. She’d never belonged to a group of friends before. And they’d only accepted her because of Reese.

She was too ashamed to tell him the truth: that she’d spent weeks meeting Lonnie in the stables at night. In the dark corner, he’d spread a blanket, prop up a flashlight, call it their secret hideaway. It was too dangerous, meeting in the middle of the day. What if someone saw them? At night, nobody would catch them. They could be truly alone. Didn’t she want that? He wasn’t her boyfriend. A boyfriend would hold her hand, ask about her day. But in the stables, he only touched her, palming her breasts, slipping his fingers up her shorts. In the stables, she swallowed him dripping into her mouth, breathing manure through her nose. But around town, he looked right past her. And yet, she would have kept meeting him each night if she hadn’t been caught by Early. Early hearing her creep out one night, tracking her through the woods, banging on the door until Lonnie, yanking frantically at his pants, shoved her outside. She was crying before she even stepped through the doorway. Early hooked a hand around her arm, unable to look at her. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You want a boyfriend, you tell him to come by the house. You don’t go off meetin no boy in the middle of the night.” “He won’t talk to me nowhere else,” she said. She started crying harder, her shoulders shaking, and Early pulled her into his chest. He hadn’t held her like that in years; she hadn’t wanted him to. He wasn’t her father and never would be, a man whose violence had not yet reached her, whose ang...

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT,” Barry said. “It’s like a sexless marriage.” Backstage at Mirage, he perched in front of the vanity mirror, swiping blush across his cheeks. It was an hour before the show, and soon, the dressing room would be crowded with queens jostling in front of the mirrors, swapping eyeshadow, the air clouded with hairspray. But now, Mirage was dark and quiet, and she sat on the floor watching Barry, a chemistry textbook balanced on her knees. They had an arrangement. He helped with her chemistry homework and she joined him at the Fox Hills Mall, where she pretended to buy the makeup he wanted. He guided her down the aisles, her arm looped through his; to strangers, they might have passed as lovers, a tall man in gray slacks, a young woman reaching for face powder. When he paid for everything at the counter, the clerks thought he was a gentleman. No one imagined his bathroom counter covered in tiny bottles of scented lotions, palettes of eye shadow, gold tubes of lipstick. Or that the girl at his side had no interest in any of this, despite his plea to teach her how to wear makeup. She doubted that she would find any shade to match her skin and besides, she knew what people called dark girls wearing red lipstick. Baboon ass. No, she had no interest in sorting through Barry’s bottles and tubes, which seemed as mysterious to her as the test tubes in her chemistry lab. Weeks into the semester and she was already falling behind. Barry had only agreed to tutor her ...

“Nothing’s wrong with it.” He glanced at her through the mirror. He was trying a new look—classic Hollywood, Lana Turner—but the blush was too pink, tinting his skin orange. “I’ve just never seen Reese with no friend like you.” Once, carrying her groceries up the stairs, Reese had joked that he sometimes felt like her boyfriend, and she’d laughed, unsure of what was funny. That he wasn’t? That he would never be? That in spite of this, he had, somehow, found himself playing this role? What she didn’t say: she felt like his girlfriend sometimes too, and the feeling scared her. A big feeling. It took up all the space in her chest, choking her. “We’re friends,” she said again. “I don’t know why you can’t see that.” “I don’t know why you can’t see that you’re not.” He sighed, turning to face her. One cheek was covered in full makeup, the other half of his face still clean. “I don’t know why you’re fighting it neither. What could be better than being eighteen and in love? Oh, you don’t even know. If I could go back, I’d do everything different.” “Like what?” she said. “Oh, everything.” He turned back to the mirror. “This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”

During the week, she reported to her job at the music library, where she pushed a heavy cart down the aisles and slid thin scores onto the shelves until her fingers dried from touching their dusty covers. When she returned home, West Hollywood felt so different from that idyllic campus, the brick buildings she still felt cowed to enter, always lowering her voice as if stepping inside church, those endless green lawns, the bicycles constantly whisking past. In the dormitories, she’d been surrounded by the relentlessly ambitious, but in that West Hollywood apartment building, all of the neighbors she met were people whose dreams of fame had already been dashed. Cinematographers working at Kodak stores, screenwriters teaching English to immigrants, actors starring in burlesque shows in seedy bars. The people who did not make it were ingrained in the city; you walked on stars emblazoned with their names and never realized it.

IT WAS NO BIG DEAL, Barry said. Just a little fight. But all her life, she would hate when people called arguments fights. Fights were bloody events, punctured skin, bruised eye sockets, broken bones. Not disagreements over where to go to dinner. Never words. A fight was not a man’s voice raised in anger, although it would always make her think of her father. She would wince a little when she heard raucous men leaving bars or boys screaming at televisions during football games. The sound of slamming doors. Broken plates. Her father had punched walls, he smashed dishes, and even once his own eyeglasses, hurling them across the living room at the door. To be so angry that you’d make yourself blind. Strange, and yet so normal to her then in a way she wouldn’t fully realize until she was older.

“I shouldn’t have hollered at you like that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—goddamnit, you know I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that, don’t you, baby?” You could never know who might hurt you until it was too late. But he sounded desperate, pleading with her from the step, and she cracked the door a little more. “There’s this doctor,” he said. “Luis told me about him. You gotta pay him upfront for the surgery but I been savin up.” “What surgery?” she said. “For my chest. Then I won’t have to wear this damn thing at all.” “But is it safe?” “Safe enough,” he said. She stared at the shallow rise and fall of his chest. “I’m sorry too,” she said. “I just don’t want you to hurt. I didn’t mean—oh, I don’t even know. I wasn’t trying to act like I’m somebody special.” “Don’t say that,” he said. “Say what?” He was quiet a moment, then he leaned in and kissed her. By the time she realized it, he was already pulling away. “That you’re not special to me,” he said.

IN THE MORNING, she wandered through the bright campus, dazed. She hadn’t slept a second after Reese departed down the darkened sidewalk. Even now, thinking about him, her stomach twisted with dread. Maybe he’d been so drunk he wouldn’t even remember kissing her. He’d awakened at home, vaguely recalling that he had done something embarrassing. Or maybe he’d sobered up and regretted it. She was the type of girl that boys only kissed in secret and, after, pretended that they hadn’t.

Maybe he pitied her. He’d only kissed her because he felt so bad about yelling at her. He knew that she hoped that kiss meant more so he was avoiding her, standing so far on the other side of the room that Harley asked what was wrong.

In the dark, you could be anybody, but she knew him before he even spoke. His cologne, his rough palms. She could find him in any darkened room.

“We don’t have to talk,” she said. “I know you don’t like me. Not like that. And it’s okay. We just don’t have to talk about it.” He dropped her hand. At least she didn’t have to look at him. Maybe she would never find the candles and she wouldn’t have to see his face. She inched farther down the hall, finally feeling the tile on the bathroom wall, but when she opened the medicine cabinet, Reese pressed it shut. Then he was kissing her against the bathroom sink.

Somewhere, across the vast city, a grandmother listened to children tell ghost stories in front of the black television screen. A man sat on his porch, petting a dog’s graying muzzle. A dark-haired woman lit a candle in her kitchen, staring out at her swimming pool. A young man and young woman walked home, climbing the silent steps, shutting the door on the rest of the city. She held his lighter as he searched the cabinets for candles. He couldn’t find any and they both felt relieved. She wasn’t afraid of the dark; he felt safer inside it.

What did her mother mean, different? And how could she even tell? Jude hated the idea of being so transparent to anyone, even her own mother. Then again, hadn’t Barry noticed right away? Two days after the blackout, she’d met him by the fountain outside the May Company and before she’d even walked over, he was suspicious, squinting at her. “What happened?” he demanded. “Why do you look like that?” “Like what?” she said, laughing. Then it dawned on him. “You didn’t,” he whispered. “Oh, I can’t believe you! You sat right there on my couch and told me you had some big fight—” “We did! I mean, nothing had happened then, I swear—” “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. “I don’t know why neither of you called me.” But after the blackout, she hadn’t told anyone. She wasn’t even sure how to explain what had happened between her and Reese. One night they’d been friends, the next lovers.

When he tugged off her pajamas, she reached for his belt and he squirmed away. “Don’t,” he said softly, and she froze, not knowing what to do. Lonnie had never been shy about what he’d wanted. Shoving her hand down his boxers, pushing her face toward his lap. But there were rules to loving Reese and over time, she learned them. Lights off. No undressing him. She could touch his stomach or arms but never his chest, his thighs but not between them. She wanted to touch him as freely as he touched her but she never complained.

Mama. He’s so sweet to me. But he’s not like other boys.” “What you mean?” She thought, for a second, about telling her mother Reese’s story. Instead, she just said, “He keeps me out.” “Well,” her mother said, “I’m sorry to tell you but he’s just like other boys. Exactly like all the rest of ’em.”

He wanted a new chest. Carried in his wallet a worn business card from Dr. Jim Cloud, a plastic surgeon with an office on Wilshire. Dr. Cloud, a patron at Mirage, had worked on friends of friends, but his price was steep. Three thousand dollars cash up front. Fair, if you thought about the risks he was incurring even performing such procedures. The medical board could revoke his license, shutter his practice, call for his arrest. The shadiness unnerved Jude, although Reese insisted the doctor was legit.

“Let me tell you,” he said, “don’t believe none of what you hear about the economy and all that. It don’t matter one bit. White folks always wanna throw a party.”

Did Scooter know about Bianca? Barry prided himself on his ability to keep his lives separate. “It’s like the Good Book says,” he told her once, “don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” He was Bianca on two Saturday nights a month, and otherwise, he pushed her out of sight, even though he thought about her, shopped for her, planned for her eventual return. Barry went to faculty meetings and family reunions and church, Bianca always lingering on the edge of his mind. She had her role to play and Barry had his. You could live a life this way, split. As long as you knew who was in charge.

But she’d catered a party for a real estate agent who’d sold homes to Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. She’d wandered through the house, admiring the long white couches and marble countertops and the giant glass windows that faded into a view of the beach. She couldn’t imagine living like this—hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.

THAT SEMESTER, she thought of bodies. Once a week, she sat on the edge of the bathtub, holding a hypodermic needle while Reese rolled up his plaid boxers. On the counter, a glass vial filled with a liquid that was yellowy clear like chardonnay. He still hated needles; he never looked when she flicked the tip before squeezing the fat part of his thigh. Okay, she always whispered after, sorry that she’d hurt him. Each month, he paid out of pocket for a vial small enough to fit in his palm. She barely understood how hormones worked, so on a whim, she enrolled in an anatomy class that she enjoyed far more than she’d expected. The rote memorization that bored the rest of the class thrilled her. She left flash cards labeled with body parts strewn all over the apartment: phalanges by the bathroom sink, deltoids on the kitchen table, dorsal metacarpal veins squeezed between couch cushions. Her favorite organ was the heart. She was the first person in her class to properly dissect the sheep heart. It was the most difficult dissection, the professor said, because the heart isn’t perfectly symmetrical but so close to it that you cannot tell which side is which. You have to orient the heart correctly to find the vessels. “You really must experience the heart with your hands,” he told the class. “I know it’s slippery but don’t be shy. You have to use your fingers to feel your way through the dissection.” At night, she placed her flash cards on Reese to quiz herself. He stretched out on...

He’d told her once that California got its name from a dark-skinned queen. He’d seen a mural of her in San Francisco. She hadn’t believed him until he showed her a photograph he’d taken and there the dark queen was, seated at the top of the ceiling. Flanked by a tribe of female warriors, looking so regal and imposing that Jude was heartbroken to discover that she wasn’t even real. She was a character from a popular Spanish novel, an art history book said, about a fictional island ruled by a black Amazon queen. Like all colonizers, the conquistadors wrote their fiction into reality, their myths transforming into history. What remained was California, a place that still felt like a mythical island. She was in the middle of the ocean, sealed away from everyone she’d once known, floating.