Lexicon

even as every other local youth with half a brain fled at the earliest opportunity. The older ones, who’d lost the ability to imagine life elsewhere, or maybe never had it, seemed to view her as the first of many, as if Emily were the harbinger of a hip new fad sweeping the globe, where young people in big cities sweated and saved and dreamed of one day traveling to
connect
in Broken Hill, and give the town a future. She told them
I think maybe a year
, because she didn’t want to give false hope and couldn’t bear the thought that it might be longer.
    But a year passed and then another and there she was on her twenty-first birthday, watching senseless Australian television in a four-bedroom house with hardly any furniture. She sometimes wondered if the organization existed. Whether she had imagined it. Sometimes, when the door jangled open at Tangled Threads, she would think for a second it was Eliot, come to tell her it was okay, it was over, she could come home. But it never happened. It was just day after day of waiting. So she could take control of a good-looking boy now and again. She could do that.
    • • •
    One night after closing, she walked to the rear parking lot and found a group of girls in short skirts and fur-lined jackets waiting for her. One hopped off the hood of a car as she approached, the dirty-blond girlfriend of the football player, and Emily realized she had a problem. She turned to flee to the store but two more girls were blocking the path. She held up her hands. “I don’t have any money.”
    “Not interested in your money, bitch,” said the girl, letting something drop from her hand. A metal chain. Emily felt despair, not so much for herself but for the girl and Broken Hill, Australia, because a chain was ridiculous. If you pulled that shit in San Francisco, you would get yourself shot. “You know who I am?”
    “I think you came into the store one time.” The girls encircled her. Five in total. No other weapons in sight, which made running a good option. “If you want to return something, we open at nine.”
    “I don’t want to return something, you slut.”
    “And it’s not a
store
,” said a girl who was thin as a dead tree. “It’s a
shop
.”
    “Okay,” said Emily. “Can we talk this over, please?” She drew out the word
please
, made it sound like
police
, to remind everybody that shit like this could get you arrested. “Oh. I know you. I know your mom.” This was not true, but totally believable in a town this size. The point was to bring moms into the picture, to join
police
.
    “You came on to my boyfriend,” said the girl.
    This Emily recognized as a
speculative assertion
, what they called
test balloons
in class. When people made speculative assertions, they hoped to be disproved. It meant the girl wasn’t going to hit her with the chain. If she had said,
I’m going to fuck you up for what you did to my boyfriend
, Emily would have been in trouble. But she was just standing there, waiting for Emily to respond and explain how it was all a crazy misunderstanding. She almost felt disappointed, because it had been an interesting mental challenge there for a minute.
    “Actually, he came on to me,” Emily said, and she must want to be hurt; it was the only explanation. The girl stared at her, trying to believe her ears, and another girl said, “Oh, it’s on, bitch,” and Emily ran. She almost got through a girl with bad acne and scared eyes but someone grabbed her collar and dragged her to the ground. The girl with the chain came at her in pure rage, and despite the imminent ass whipping Emily felt a mild pleasure at successfully pushing her beyond precortex control. That wasn’t easy. You really had to sock a person in the core of what they believed to do that. She threw her arms around her head and curled into a ball.
    Pain exploded on her back. She tried to roll over and that was a huge mistake, because the chain caught her across the face. Her mouth disappeared. She found her knees and tried to crawl away. Something bright and bloody lay in the dirt. A tooth. She felt sad and stupid and wanted to go back in time and not be such a dick.
    Lights flared. She couldn’t see where they were coming from but apparently they were relevant because the girls fell away. Shoes slapped concrete. There were no new blows. That was an improvement.
    Someone took her by the shoulders. She flinched. He said, “It’s all right, relax, I’m