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A uess so"

"Oh, so what?" so wolf on a leash

And Sinead O’Connor was singing "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance " and I had spent part of thevarious gossip columns to see if they had oing to happen for any of the in the bathroouy I had slept with the night before-a boy who looked like Paul New about a friend who had been murdered in Maui last week and then everyone around the pool joined in and I couldn’t follow the conversation A tiny rift with a drug dealer? An irate exporter/importer? A run-in with a cannibal? Who knew? Was his death bad? He had been lowered into a barrel of hungry insects A poll was taken On a scale of 1 to 10- being lowered into a barrel of hungry insects? Opinions were offered I thought I was going to faint This conversation was the only indication that anyone here knew anybody else I lit a cigarette I bu fae

And Sinead O’Connor was singing "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance " and soola the keys to one of the Mercedes parked in the garage and it was just too hot out and a jet flew overhead and I jealously studied Bruce Rhinebeck’s face suy I’d slept with the night before whispered to me "You’re a piece of shit" and there was"So what?" and I was so tan ed color and I looked down at h and when I brushed it away it caot my abs that cubed and I was so flattered I had to concentrate very seriously in order to answer hiue and it was chirping and flapping its wings uselessly and a few of the teenage boys stood around it silently The bat rolled over, upended, and when one of the boys kicked it, the bat screamed Someone struck it with a branch, and a puff of dust flew off its skin Light was flickering across the water in the vast pool and I atching everything through binoculars A servant brought me a piece of birthday cake and a can of Hawaiian Punch as I had requested The bat riggling on the ground next to a discarded cell phone Its spine was broken and it tried to bite anyone who got near it The boys continued torturing it Soht out a fork

There was no system to any of this At that point Chloe Byrnes wasn’t a real person to me and on that afternoon in the House on Ocean Drive a few decisions had to beany of this At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world: people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or too poor or they had too h, they rinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no tone, they weren’t hip, they weren’t remotely famous This was how you chose lovers This hat decided friends And I had to accept this if I wanted to get anywhere When I looked over at Chloe, she shrugged I observed the shrug She e of tears-because I was dealing with the fact that we lived in a world where beauty was considered an accomplishment-I turned away and made a promise to myself: to be harder, to not care, to be cool The future starteditself out and I focused on it In thatfro above the paler existed and relief swept over e boys was ready to pounce onin the pool, I realized faintly, could have been drowning and no one would have noticed I avoided thinking about that and concentrated on the patterns in a bathing suit that Marky Mark earing II was thinking that a part of edintroduced to toofa: if I didn’t erase this afternoon from my memory and just walk out that door and leave Chloe Byrnes behind, sections of this afternoon would cohtmares This hat the cold voice assuredover the half-sesture see around the praying boy