“Mrs. Harrington,” Shelby calls. “Hi.”

It takes a while for Mrs. Harrington to recognize the odd person approaching her. When she does she visibly relaxes. “Oh, Shelby, it’s you.”

“Yeah, it’s me.” Shelby walks alongside Mrs. Harrington. “You help out with Helene, right?”

“There’s a whole bunch of us who are regulars. She’s a darling girl.” Mrs. Harrington has her keys in her hands. Shelby doesn’t tell this nice woman that Helene always hated Kelsey Harrington. She’d thought Kelsey was a snob.

“Does she ever come to consciousness?” Shelby’s voice sounds shaky and thin. Mrs. Harrington throws her a look, clearly confused. “Helene,” Shelby says. “Does she ever say something or dictate something? Like a postcard?”

“Shelby.” Mrs. Harrington reaches for her hand, but Shelby backs away before she can touch her. “No, honey.” Mrs. Harrington shakes her head sadly. “She never does anything like that.”

Shelby has secretly been harboring the hope that Helene has been pretending, that she isn’t really brain-injured and in fact rises from her bed each night to walk through her house, pilfering snacks from the cupboards, watching TV, gazing into the mirror as she brushes her long hair.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t miracles,” Mrs. Harrington says.

“Yeah. I’ll bet.” Shelby runs off without another word. She must seem crazy to ask if a person who has no brain activity could be writing postcards.

Shelby calls Ben Mink to ask that he meet her in the park. Her hope that Helene will come back has faded into ash. Helene is gone. Shelby’s old life is gone with her. Shelby is so jittery she can barely sit still. She despises winter and herself. All she wants to do is get stoned and check out, and Ben can provide her with her ticket to do so. Or so she thinks.

“No weed,” he says sadly. “There’s some FBI activity in the Bahamas. Dealers are getting busted and it’s filtering up to the States. My go-to guys in Huntington and in Northport both got busted. Call me back at the end of the week.”

“How can you be out?” Shelby is beside herself. “I depend on you.”

“Yeah, right.” He actually laughs. He thinks she’s kidding.

“You’re my go-to guy,” she insists. “I need you.”

“That’s a mistake, Shelby,” Ben says. “I let people down.”

“Don’t make me sit through reality,” Shelby moans. The tremor in her hand is already worsening. “I don’t know if I can do it. People with their petty desires and their TV shows. Everyone wants to be famous.”

She was famous for a while, at least in the local Pennysaver and in Newsday. There was even an article in The New York Times about teenagers and car accidents and she was referred to twice. They got it wrong, as usual, and printed that she was currently under psychiatric care, when she was already out of the nuthouse, ensconced in her parents’ basement.

“Lie down and close your eyes,” Ben suggests. “Breathe deep. Imagine you’re in Bali. Or on a beach in the Hamptons. Life’s easier to get through that way.”

“I would never be in the Hamptons.” Shelby paces the basement. There are mice down here, but she knows they’re afraid of her. She once stumbled upon three baby mice that froze until she hid behind the stairs, giving them the courage to run away. She happens to catch sight of herself in an old stand-up mirror. She has to get rid of that thing. Frankly, she’s completely shocked by her own appearance. She looks like the kind of girl people back away from on the street, someone who begs for spare change while she curses the world.

“Do I seem different to you than I did in high school?” she asks.

“Sure,” Ben says. “You’re bald.”

“I mean in some definitive way, asshole.”

“That’s definitive. Bald makes a statement. You’re completely different.”

“No I’m not.” Shelby has a crack in her voice. “That would mean I’m subhuman.”

“No. You’re like the weird fucked-up sister of yourself, Shelby. Whereas I’m just an extension of my loser self that anyone could have foreseen. I have followed the path set out before me. You veered.”

He means crashed and she knows it, so she hangs up on him. All he is to her is a drug dealer, anyway. He’s become less geeky and is now good-looking, in a rangy, off-center way, better than anyone would have guessed back in high school. He’s handsome, really, but so what? She doesn’t care about his philosophy. Without getting stoned, it’s harder to sleep fourteen hours at a time. She can feel something coursing through her. She sneaks upstairs to look through her parents’ medicine cabinet. Ativan. That might work. She hadn’t realized her mother was anxious enough to need a prescription like that. There’s also tramadol, which she was given at the hospital. It’s a muscle relaxer that they added to her Valium and lithium. She grabs that as well.

Shelby’s father is sitting in the living room. She usually manages to avoid him. Lately he has kind of a looming presence. Dan Richmond used to be a man who could charm a roomful of people at a party, but he’s changed. Now he goes to work at the men’s shop he inherited from his father and he comes home at six. That’s his life. He watches a lot of TV and doesn’t talk much.

“What are you doing here?” he says when he sees his daughter. If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to remember the last time she’s come upstairs.

“I came to get some milk,” she tells him. That sounds all-American. She goes to the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”

“Nowhere,” Dan says.

Shelby pours herself a glass of milk. She notices her dad is watching the same show she always tunes in to, so she sits down on the couch.

“That guy’s crap,” she says of the contestant she despises. He sings country-western sometimes, and eighties rock sometimes. He has no center, as far as Shelby is concerned.

“Yeah, well, he’s there in Hollywood and you’re here.”

“I don’t want to be in Hollywood,” Shelby is quick to respond. She tries to sound casual, but her father’s remark stings. It’s just another way of saying she’s a nothing. As if she didn’t know that.