A pair of alligators circle around an orange hot dog and chomp at the limp meat. I know they’re not crocodiles because of their wide, U-shaped snouts. The bait sinks to the swamp floor, and the reptiles look up for more, waiting; but that was the last wiener. I wasn’t expecting them to miss.

UNE

I haven’t swapped spit with a soul in junior high, but I catch mono that’ll linger for months. My mother takes me to TJ MAXX to buy underwear and pajamas because I plan on sleeping away seventh grade. A pair of black panties is on sale, pressing up against the plexiglass. It’s mesh and lacy and covered in thready red kisses. The sides are black ribbons that must be cinched into bows in order for the panties to stay on my hips. The longer I stare at the pair, the more it becomes a need.

We were still in pajamas when Uncle Stanley showed me the crocodile tongues. He walked me to the back porch and held up a jar, trying to catch the afternoon light. The glass puckered full of vinegary juice and pale cucumbers from Grandma’s yard, one floor below. Standing up here, level with the tree’s limbs, the porch swelled with cool humidity and we took deep breaths through the window screens and sucked in the smell of fresh rain and bruised apples.

“Who brought the whores?” is not a particularly kind thing to say to two young girls; but I assure you, from nine and ten-year-old ears, this is what the craggily toothed man said. My older sister and I are standing in gauzy dresses that wrap around like an ace bandage, the compression stopping at the knees. I am a pink mummy and Katya is a green mermaid. We are wearing matching jelly shoes and small pearls the size of cats’ eyes.

At wakes the babushkas would whisper—he’s resting now, he’s sleeping, he’s gone with the angels. The angels were up there and I was down here, sad and bored, eating pinwheel cookies, wondering if ghosts were the same thing as spirits and which one would want to spook me.

The first time my sister and I ever stumble into a cave, I am approaching seven years old and my sister is trying out eight. My mother plows the car into a field of high grass and we take a bumpy ride down the edge of a bluff. At one point I think her minivan might flip tail pipe over headlights, but miraculously we land with a deep thunk and roil up brown dust; my mother is unfazed.

My sister and I have been trying to kill each other for years. When we were young, we were at our most vicious. The first time was at a party. We were the only two children, supervised by numerous blue shadowed eyes but no one really paying any heed to us. We were wearing little shorts and backless halter-tops made of pretty white cotton, lined with soft frills.

Bee and Sweetie are going to summer camp this year. “Whether or not you want to,” says their mother Babs. Their stepfather Jerry always agrees with their mother. Bee is thirteen and hates the smell of periods. “Everyone is always bleeding,” she says. Sweetie can’t smell blood. Sweetie chews on a straw and pushes the glittery letters on her t-shirt—SUPERSTAR—a glittering iron-on she made in Jerry’s store. Her wardrobe was slowly turning into a collection of unicorns, gumball machines, and puffy letters on baseball shirts. As a joke, Bee put the name ELOISE on the back of her sweatshirt.

There is a picture of Ala from happier days. She is thirteen with colt-thin legs and arms peeking out of a dark coat with shiny buttons. She is bent forward in what surely must be an accidental laugh, carrying a large wreath around her neck, the branches swallowing up her shoulders. It’s a giant horseshoe of greenery with a thick white ribbon tied into one of the brambles. I don’t know what it’s for but the scene is full of snow and happiness and Christmasery. In the picture, she still has both of her eyes. This is before you could cup one of her blue irises in your hand and pet it like a cherished marble.

We wanted our mother to take us to the pantyhose chickens. My mother, who reminded us, I didn’t raise idiots, asked us what the hell we meant by such a stupid question. (Stupid questions were always an insult to my mother.) Mom’s stockings came in pastel colored eggs by a company named L’eggs.

When my mother and I were invited to the Brown Deer Middle School Cake Walk, we didn’t know what to expect. In my eight-year-old head, I was absolutely certain that sheets of creamy, large cakes would cover the gymnasium, corner to corner and that my mother and I were going to walk across the spongy floor.

I have at least three photographs with the same number of candles on the cake. I guess no one was counting. Then again, maybe it wasn’t my birthday; maybe I was just seated in front of the cake. In most of my birthday photos, I’m sitting alone which makes a terrible amount of sense because I was a pretty lonely kid. I didn’t mean to be. I craved acceptance and attention just like everyone else but I was good at hiding my needs.

Aunt Henrietta died. It is a cold Tuesday evening when I arrive at the wake. My older sister, Annette, and my mom, Babs, are already inside when I walk up to the Cumberland Chapel.

“Do you want to meet some of your distant cousins?” my mother asks.

The evening has turned rather sexy—sipping red wine beneath crystal chandeliers has led to a limousine ride back to George’s place in Old Town. The townhouse is a bachelor’s pad, but a nicer, older, wiser bachelor pad. I run my hand along the back of the sofa, feeling the skin, caressing the supple slink of unborn calves. The seat fits like a vintage hermes glove. George walks over with three books in his hand and places them in my lap. “For you,” he says, “written by friends. They’re writers just like you.” I peer down at the covers—Christopher Dickey, Christopher Buckley and Christina Garcia. I nod behind a glass goblet and choke back despair. Of course, just like me.

There were six of us in the mailroom flinging envelopes. Typical for an afternoon shift, we stood side-by-side before the columns and rows of cubbyholes and rapidly stuffed the letters into mailboxes. We were precise, despite the endless acronyms used for Harvard’s buildings and departments; and if we refrained from chitchat, we could play a few rounds of speed Boggle.

For 388 days in a row, my stepfather, wearing a tired button-front shirt and a wrinkled silk tie, the sign of a classy man, visited his mother, Irene, in the Northshore Candlelight Nursing Home. On the 389th day, the day he didn’t show up, she closed her paper-thin eyelids and finally died.

Hey. You are walking down the blue road and the rest of the world hangs on a billboard up above. Highway bright. The pretty lights. The seven-foot smiles. You’re dragging your feet down here, looking up at life. Waving. You’re too small for anyone to see you, though. Your hand hurts from saying, hello. Hello. That’s how lonely you must feel most of the time. Nothing fills the emptiness. You’ve tried the orange, the blue, the white, the purple, the green, the yellow pills.

Late one night last winter, I watched the 1987 suicide of former Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. I hadn’t set out to watch the startling clip, but I stumbled upon it in my own quiet desperation. I was reeling from my oldest friend’s suicide.

Up ahead, an opossum wriggles in the middle of the road.

“Mom, don’t hit it!” my sister yells.

Mom swerves off to the side and my sister jumps out of the red station wagon, about to ruin the start of our summer day.

“We need to save it,” my sister pleads, “it needs our help.”