“On the contrary, you’re the one that needs help and it’s gonna take more than a little lipstick.”
“Yeah,” the other girl said. “You should really do something about those gumby shoulders of yours.”
“And those flabs.”
“Flabs?”
“Give it a goog, fat ass.”
“Oh, abs, flabs. I get it, asscrack,” Hazel mocked, snapping the cheesy thong riding up the girl’s hip. “Hey, did a pole come with that dress?” Hazel asked of her tacky outfit.
The girls moved closer together, shoulder to shoulder, blocking Hazel’s path. One of them produced a cigarette lighter, the other a joint.
“You smoke?” one asked, taking a deep toke on the fat blunt.
“Course not,” the other said, reaching for the spliff. “She’s too good for that.”
“Listen,” Hazel said calmly, “I don’t know what’s up here but I got no problem, so I’m gonna go now.”
The girls didn’t budge. Hazel tried to push through them but they pushed her back toward the sink.
“Who texted you?”
“None of your business,” Hazel snapped.
“Was it your virgin bae from the mental ward?”
“Lying ratchet skank.” The other laughed, exhaling.
“Shut up, you fucking trolls,” Hazel yelled, ready for the fight that was coming whether she wanted to or not.
“She better not be coming back here,” one of them warned.
“Yeah, she’s making us all look like fucktards.”
“If the tampon fits . . . ,” Hazel said.
Hazel looked both girls in the eyes. “Get outta my way,” she shouted, rushing them again, hoping that a teacher, janitor, or student leaving detention would hear.
She was cracked in the jaw by an elbow and fell backward. One of the girls grabbed a handful of her hair and slammed her face into the mirror. It shattered on impact, cutting her cheek, the bridge of her nose, and her eyebrow. She wanted to fight back but dropped to the floor, dazed and still under assault. They kicked her ribs from each side with their hard leather ankle boots. She felt ready to vomit. Her attackers screamed like banshees and lifted her to her feet.
“Now she looks like a martyr,” one of the girls observed heartlessly. “Hang on, I want to gram this.”
She took Hazel by the chin, steadied her, and snapped a few pictures.
The bullies let her go and Hazel dropped once again to the floor. She was dragged over to the toilet bowl by her hair.
“Look at yourself and ask yourself.”
Hazel’s head was dunked in the toilet, four times, punctuating each word: “Is. She. Worth. It?”
Hazel coughed her lungs clear as the attackers laughed at her distress. Drenched, she could smell the ammonia from the janitor’s pail and the mildew from aging pipes fill her bloody nostrils. She crawled on her hands and knees, sliding along the moldy and urine-stained tile floor.
“Well, is she?”
One last kick to the face and a question, and the girls snuck away. Hazel grabbed the edges of the white porcelain sink. Pulled herself up. She looked at her cut and bruised face and swollen lips in the cracked mirror and answered their question.
“Yes.”
Daniel Less arrived at the dimly lit Bushwick joint to find Alan Frey already seated at a table in the back of the neighborhood café. Two such well-dressed and well-known men would not have seemed out of place in Midtown or the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but here nobody knew them. Exactly as they’d planned. Less strode to the table, his usual confidence on display in every fiber of his being. Frey watched him warily as he approached.
“Alan,” the executive greeted him, taking a seat across from Frey.
“Daniel, thank you for coming.”
“My pleasure.”
“I ordered an espresso for you.”
“Very kind, thank you.”
Both men sipped at their coffees, eyes locked on each other over the rims of their cups. Less looked away for a moment, over Frey’s shoulders toward the open and overfilled burlap sacks of espresso beans that lined the shelves along the back wall of the café. Just above the shelf, impossible to miss, were religious portraits—Saint Jerome holding a skull, Virgin Mary stepping on a serpent, Jesus with a sacred heart bursting from his chest, Saint Theresa surrounded by gorgeous flowers, and others. They appeared to be old, more than likely brought over from the old country and still a common sight in family businesses in these immigrant Brooklyn neighborhoods. Old, familiar portraits, except for one. A new one. A portrait of Lucy. She was dressed in a gilded gown, a crown of thorns surrounded by stars resting on her head over her coiffed blond locks; her eyes were closed and dripping blood. She was standing on red roses and holding her penetrating blue eyes on a hot pink plate. A turquoise votive candle was flickering wildly beneath it.
“Couldn’t you have found an organic market for us to have a cup of coffee and a chat?” Less asked, pointing indifferently toward the back wall.
Frey didn’t need to look. He knew what Less was referencing.
“The coffee is better here,” Frey answered. “And it’s easier to focus on our, shall we say, issues.”
“I didn’t come for a therapy session, Alan. This is a strategy session.”
Perhaps not, the doctor thought, but between Less and Murphy he could hardly think of two men more in need of care.
“Yes. Strategy. That was quite a stunt you pulled.” The doctor was in no mood to mince words.
“Cecilia you mean?”
“Yes,” Frey said.
“Something had to be done, Alan. As I told you in our gathering, your approach was failing and time is of the essence.”
“Surely you don’t think you need to lecture me on the efficacy of my treatment plan for her or the others?”
“Your plan, as it were, yielded nothing. In fact, it was doing more harm than good.
“And your expertise in psychiatry derives from all of those psychotic wannabe pop tarts you date and dump?”
“If you’re implying that my interest in the girl extends beyond our mission, you are wrong.” Less smiled, his teeth big and gleaming white in contrast to the salt-and-pepper goatee surrounding them. “Mostly.”
“I’m not here to evaluate you, Daniel. That would take too long.”
“Then why are we here, Alan? For you to vent at losing Cecilia? To cover for your own incompetence?”
“Incompetence? I had all of them in my care. Under my control.”
“Yes, quite famously in your care, unfortunately. While the crowds outside grew larger and more and more media trucks parked outside the hospital door—crowds that were undeterred, by the way, and grew larger still when your minions went on the attack. It’s a grassroots groundswell. The most dangerous kind.”
“Since when are you afraid of the press, Daniel?”
“I’m not afraid, nor am I stupid,” Less griped. “It doesn’t take a shrink to see the effect these girls are having on the public, and the media taking up their cause does us no good whatsoever. Quite the opposite in fact.”
“The weak minded looking for something to latch onto,” Frey groused. “To feel part of.”
“Maybe so, but we can’t take that chance. I warned you I would take matters into my own hands.”
“You warned me?”
“Even the police are becoming suspicious of you, am I right? Cecilia would have been released sooner or later and you might have become a target of the investigation. I did you a favor.”
“In my own way, in my own time, I would have achieved the desired result.”
“Have you taken a look at the wall behind you, Alan? Do you recognize that girl at the end? Memorialized in the pantheon of misfits they worship as saints,” Less said. “They are winning. We are losing.”
The irony that Less would echo Agnes’s sentiments was not lost on Frey.
“Your way, we may win the battle. But we lose the war. It’s short-ter
m thinking. They need to be reprogrammed.”
“The war analogy is a good one, Doctor. The problem is that generals are always fighting the last war. For centuries now we’ve been content to let the culture do our work for us. A few steps forward, a few back, but always moving ahead, leaving the old ways in the dust without anyone ever noticing or powerless to do anything about it. Customs, laws, rules all changed in our favor. But it’s different now.”
“Yes it is, Daniel. We have the tools. We control the levers of power. How we proceed will be the difference between our survival or extinction.”
“We live in an attention deficit society, Doctor. You of all people should know this,” Less continued. “Out of sight, out of mind. They don’t need to be persuaded they are deluded, nor does anyone else. I am interested only in their extinction. They need to be eliminated. People will forget soon enough.”
Frey pointed back at the old portraits on the wall.
“No, Daniel, people don’t forget.”
Less backed off only slightly. “We don’t have time for twelve-step programs and drug therapies, Alan. It failed with Sebastian and you gave no indication it would be any different with the girls.”
“You don’t give me enough credit, Daniel. You never did. And yet it was I who identified the threat from Sebastian and from the girls and confronted it. Not you or any of the others.”
Less took a long sip of his espresso.
“Yes, I see now that was a mistake. One I won’t make again.” Less hurled the insult. “Do you know what your problem is, Doctor?”
“Now this is a consultation? All right, you tell me what my problem is.”
“I think you have a martyr complex of your own.”
Frey laughed loudly enough to attract the attention of the cashier at the front of the store.
“I hope you didn’t lose any sleep dreaming up that theory, Daniel.”
“You appeal to the head. The mind. I appeal to the gut.”
“Sorry but I don’t follow you.”
“Of course you don’t. You have been trying all this time to convince Cecilia of what she isn’t. That’s a fight you can’t win. What I have given Cecilia is what she most desires.”
Frey shifted uncomfortably in his chair, offended by his colleague’s statement.
“She doesn’t want to be what she was, can’t you see that?”
“Wrong. She wants it as much as ever. It’s just buried. I’m going to dig it up. Make her face it. You want to change people, Alan, convert them to your view. I want to encourage her to be who she really is. And that will be her undoing.”
“The rock star is no longer who she is or wants to be, Daniel.”
“Wanna put money on that?”
“Temptation? That’s your strategy?”
“Time-tested. You were a priest. You should know better.”
Frey bristled at the characterization and the reminder. “We aren’t betting a few bucks here. We are betting on our future. On the future. This is not a hand of blackjack, Daniel.”
“Isn’t it? She will be weakened. Her loyalty divided. Her spirit broken. Her mind confused. Vulnerable,” he said sipping the last of his espresso. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“You don’t know Cecilia.”
“You want to fix her, Alan. I want to break her,” Less said. “One side is going to win and the other is going to lose. This isn’t the Little League, where everyone gets a trophy. I’m making sure the deck is stacked in our favor.”
“You’ve interfered in my work.”
“Our work.”
“Well then, you’ll have your work cut out for you.”
“How so?”
“I released Agnes yesterday and that irritating blogger. It’s in your hands now.”
“Taking your ball and going home, Doctor?”
“There’s no spite in it. All theories need to be tested, including yours. The scientist in me, you understand.”
Frey was goading Less, challenging him. Releasing Agnes and Jesse was a petulant act but not an impulsive or irrational one. Less understood this was the doctor’s way of pushing back, of staking out his territory against a threat even more repugnant to Frey than the girls: loss of his own position and relevance. Less remained cool and didn’t bite.
“You seem to be taking this rather personally, Doctor.”
“On the contrary, it’s strictly business Daniel.”
The executive eyed the psychiatrist skeptically and considered his priorities.
“Agnes can wait. The boy can be managed. The blogger is a sideshow. Cecilia is at the top of my agenda now.”
“You approach everything as a business, Daniel. I think the music industry has finally gotten to you.”
“And your analytic, therapeutic approach to things has gotten to you, Doctor Frey,” Less hissed with contempt. “You are trapped in process.”
“There is an order to things. First a problem must be identified and understood clearly.”
“It is not enough to identify problems. They must be solved.”
“I have people to solve them.”
“How has that worked out for us so far?” Less sniped. “You rely too heavily on those minions. They are erratic and attract unwanted attention. Instead of scaring the crowds off, they’ve only emboldened them. There are some things one must do personally to be sure they are done properly.”
“I knew you were a devious and deceitful man, Daniel, but even I didn’t suspect that under the expensive suit and manicured fingernails was the soul of a mafia hit man.”
“Coming from you I’ll take that as a compliment, Doctor. I learned early on there’s no good in being a backstabber unless you’re willing to put the knife in yourself.”
“It’s quite a business you’re in, Daniel.”
“Indeed, Alan,” Daniel said. “It’s cutthroat.”
Jesse walked the Brooklyn streets he’d known for years now as if it were the first time. All the clichés about the feel of the sun on his face, the concrete beneath his feet rushed through his head. Unlike the reception waiting for Cecilia and Agnes, his departure from Perpetual Help was barely noticed. He’d left through a side entrance undetected, which, he thought, was fine with him.
He was wobbly from pain and moving slowly. Like an elderly man instead of the young guy he was. Jesse walked along down the streets of Cobble Hill into Carroll Gardens until he could see the spire of Precious Blood, the church where they all came together and learned their destinies. Where Sebastian and Lucy now rested together. There it was, piercing the dark, gloomy sky with its righteousness. He thought about continuing along the way to his apartment, given how bad he was feeling, but made the turn and walked toward the church. It looked very different than it had even a few months earlier when he’d last seen it. Grim scaffolding and broken windows had been replaced by sandblasted granite and stained glass. Paid for, he suspected, by the generosity of their legion of devoted followers. He looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes as his heart sank. Two ornate windows in the bell tower. One of Saint Lucy and the other of Saint Sebastian. There they were, together, etched in glass. A tragic love story. Timeless. Iconic. Eternal life. Eternal fame.
Jesse approached the wrought-iron gates at the entrance and noticed an old neighborhood woman locking up. “Can I help, young man?”
That was a big question and he wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. Right then, he felt he needed all the help he could get. Any help would do.
“I came to visit.”
“I’m sorry but daily mass is over and the church is closed.”
“Please.”
The old woman looked carefully at the young man. He was thin, barely able to fill out his clothes, unrecognizable even to those who’d followed the story in the daily papers. He might as well have been a junkie or a vagrant, she thought, there to steal whatever he could to sell on the street for a few bucks and a quick high. But the look in his eyes told a different story, especiall
y when he was looking up at Lucy’s window. She took pity on him. She removed the key from the lock and the chain from the gate and waved him in. “Did you know her?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Just for a few minutes,” the woman said with a sympathetic smile.
“Thank you,” he said softly, holding out a shaky hand in gratitude.
She clasped it with both of hers and felt his unsteadiness as she led him up the stairs to the main doors of the building.
“She’s inside.”
Jesse hobbled into the darkened vestibule and down the center aisle, looking off to either side. The hollow echo of his footsteps provided the perfect, solemn soundtrack to his memories. He was in a holy place but felt haunted nevertheless. He headed for the sacristy door and pushed gently on it. It opened without resistance. A few steps farther and he found himself at the door to the cellar chapel and pulled on the handle. The smell of roses, frankincense, and candle smoke filled his nostrils. He placed one hand against the cold stone wall and guided himself down the staircase, the faint gleam of yellow, red, and violet candles lighting his way. He took a deep breath and held it as he reached the bottom of the stairs, composing himself. He entered the chapel, full of blue smoke and black shadows.
The small room was aglow. Bones hung like sculptures from the walls and the chandelier. The fog of incense shrouded the room and made it hard to see. In the back, surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling canopy of flowers and greenery, was a large glass case on a pedestal. The reliquary of Sebastian positioned directly over it. He walked over to it, closer to it, and saw her.
Lucy was lying still, a slight smile on her lips, dressed in the most beautiful finery he’d ever seen. She was wearing a gown of gold and was crowned with an elaborate bone headpiece dripping with pearls. It fit loosely over her long blond hair, which flowed down around her shoulders. Her hands were clasped over her chest; her bone chaplet with double-eye milagro was visible. Shadows flickered and danced across her face like the strobe lights in the clubs where they’d spent so much time. She was dead, but there was not a hint of death in the room. It was ablaze with her beauty, filling the space with her presence. He wanted to pray, but didn’t know how.