What I Loved

shrugged. "I'd believe anything now. Are you going to Dallas to look for him?"
    "I thought you said Houston."
    "I think it's Dallas. I don't know. Maybe they're back already. What day is it?"
    "Friday."
    "They're probably back." Teenie started chewing on the nail of her little finger. She appeared to be thinking. She removed the finger from her mouth and said, "He might be at Giles's house, but he's probably at the Split World offices. Sometimes kids sleep there."
    "I need the addresses, Teenie."
    "Giles lives at 21 Franklin Street on the fifth floor. Split World is on East Fourth." She stood up and began to rummage in a drawer. She produced a magazine and handed it to me. "The street number's in there."
    On the cover of the magazine there was a lurid picture of a young man, supposedly dead or dying, his head propped up against a toilet. His slashed wrists rested on his thighs as he sat in a brilliant pool of blood.
    "Charming photo," I said.
    "They're all like that," she said in a bored voice. Then she raised her chin and looked at me for at least three seconds. After she had looked down, she continued, "I'm telling you all this 'cause I don't want any more bad stuff to happen. That's what I said to Mark's dad when I called him."
    For an instant I held my breath, then with deliberate calm I said, "You spoke to Mark's father? When was that?"
    "It was a pretty long time ago. The next thing I heard was that he died. That was pretty sad. He seemed like a nice man."
    "You called him at home?"
    "No, at his office, I think."
    "Where did you get that number?"
    "Mark gave me all his numbers."
    "Did you tell Mark's father about the cut on your stomach?"
    "I think so."
    "You think so?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice.
    Teenie pushed the carpet hard with her toes. "I was pretty upset and I was high, too." She pushed harder. "Maybe you can find a hospital for him. Both Mark and Teddy should probably be in a hospital somewhere."
    "Were you the one who left a message with Bill saying that Giles had killed you?"
    "He didn't kill me. He hurt me. I told you."
    I decided not to ask her anything more about the message. After talking to her, I felt sure that the voice I had heard on Bill's machine didn't belong to Teenie. "Where are your parents?" I asked her.
    "My mom's at some charity meeting thing for cancer and my dad's in Chicago."
    "I think you should talk to them. That was an assault, Teenie. You could go to the police."
    She didn't move. She began to shake her platinum head back and forth and fixed her gaze on her desk as though she had forgotten I was there.
    I took the magazine and walked out of the room. When I opened the front door to leave, I heard water running and the sound of a woman singing to herself. It must have been Susie.
    On my way downtown in a taxi, the bathetic tones of Teenie's confession lingered in my ears, especially her refrain, "I thought I was in love with him." Her skinny little body, her lowered gaze, the jumble of makeup and feminine paraphernalia around her had depressed me. I pitied Teenie, pitied the small ruined figure in a vast pale blue apartment, and yet I wondered about the phone call. Had Bill's heart stopped after he heard the story about Mark holding her down? Had she even mentioned it? The truth was I found it hard to imagine Mark restraining her, because the scar had been too neat. Could she have been cut so cleanly if she were struggling? Teenie's stories about Psycboland and the stolen codeine pills were more believable, however, and I began to speculate on Mark's drug use and its possible role in lifting whatever inhibitions he may have had when it came to lying and stealing. Apparently, Teenie retained a few scruples, a dim moral code that condemned what she called "bad stuff," but the badness of that stuff seemed to be determined by its effect on her rather than its lack of adherence to broader ethical sanctions. She couldn't remember her conversation with Bill because she had been drugged, and by her own lights, this made her amnesia both natural and excusable. Teenie belonged to a subculture where the rules were lax and permission was broad, but as far as I could tell, it was also surprisingly bland. If Mark and Teenie were any indication, these kids had little fervor. They weren't Futurists glorifying the aesthetics of violence or anarchists advocating liberation from the reigns of law. They were hedonists, I suppose, but even the taking of pleasure seemed to bore