My father says, "Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute."

My mom says, "We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn't figure which."

"Yellow," my father says, "means watersports."

"A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, "would mean just regular oral sex."

"Regular white," my father says, "would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear." He says, "I can't remember which."

My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.

We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.

"Finally we just gave up," my mom says, "and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material."

Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, "Do you know about rimming?"

I know it isn't table talk.

"And fisting?" my mom asks.

I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.

We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.

"Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my father she says, "Do you know what felchirig is?"

This, it's too much. Shane's dead, but he's more the center of attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over Thanksgiving dinner, I can't take this. It's just Shane this and Shane that. It's sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did. I know everybody thinks it's my fault, what happened. The truth is Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he's dead. I'm good and obedient and I'm ignored.

Silence.

All that happened was I was fourteen years old. Somebody put a full can of hairspray in the trash by mistake. It was Shane's job to burn the trash. He was fifteen. He was dumping the kitchen trash into the burning barrel while the bathroom trash was on fire, and the hair-spray exploded. It was an accident.

Silence.

Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I'd tell them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomer-cial. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he's good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry.

"Listen," I say. This just blurts out. "Me," I say, "I'm the last child you people have left alive so you'd better start paying me some attention."

Silence.

"Felching," I lower my voice. I'm calm now. "Felching is when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That's felching. It may or may not," I add, "include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth."

Silence.

Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.

Flash.

The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but crunchy on top. The stuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother the butter.

My father clears his throat. "Bump," he says, "I think 'fletching' is the word your mother meant." He says, "It means to slice the turkey into very thin strips."

Silence.

I say, oh. I say, sorry.

We eat.

Don't look for me to ever tell my folks about the accident. You know, a whole long-distance telephone crying jag about the bullet and the emergency room. That's not anywhere we're going. I told my folks, as soon as I could write them a letter that I was going on a catalogue shoot in Cancun, Mexico, for Espre.

Six months of fun, sand, and me trying to suck the lime wedges out of long-necked bottles of Mexican beer. Guys just love watching babes do that. Go figure. Guys.

She loves clothes from Espre, my mom writes back. She writes how, since I'll be in the Espre catalogue, could I maybe get her a discount on her Christmas order.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

She writes back: Well, be pretty for us. Love and kisses.

Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong. My folks, they call me Bump. I was the bump inside my Mom's stomach for nine months; they've called me Bump from since before I was born. They live a two-hour drive from me, but I never visit. What I mean is they don't need to know every little hair about me.

In one letter my mom writes:

"At least with your brother, we know whether he's dead or alive."

My dead brother, the King of Fag Town. The voted best at everything. The basketball king until he was sixteen and his test for strep throat came back as gonorrhea, I only know I hated him.

"It's not that we don't love you," my mom writes in one letter, "it's just that we don't show it."

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience. You know what you need to do to keep alive. Folks will just screw you up with their reactions about how what happened is so horrible. First the emergency room folks letting you go ahead of them. Then the Franciscan nun screaming. Then the police with their hospital sheet.

Jump to how life was when you were a baby and you could only eat baby food. You'd stagger over to the coffee table. You're up on your feet and you have to keep waddling along on those Vienna sausage legs or fall down. Then you get to the coffee table and bounce your big soft baby head on the sharp corner.

You're down, and man, oh man, it hurts. Still it isn't anything tragic until Morn and Dad run over. Oh, you poor, brave thing. Only then do you cry.

Jump to Brandy and me and Seth going to the top of the Space Needle thing in Seattle, Washington. This is our first stop after the Canadian border except us stopping so I could run buy Seth a coffee—cream, sugar and Climara—and a Coca Cola—extra Estrace, no ice. It's eleven, and the Space Needle closes at midnight, and Seth says there are two types of people in the world.

The Princess Alexander wanted to find a nice hotel first, some place with valet parking and tile bathrooms. We might have time for a nap before she has to go out and sell medications.

"If you were on a game show," Seth says about his two types of people. Seth has already pulled off the freeway and we're driving between dark warehouses, turning toward every glimpse we get of the Space Needle. "So you're the winner of this game show," Seth says, "and you get a choice between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested retail price three thousand dollars— or—a ten-day trip to the old world charm of Europe."

Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set.

"It's just that people want something to show for their effort," Seth says. "Like the pharaohs and their pyramids.

Given the choice, very few people would choose the trip even if they already had a nice living room set."

No one's parked on the streets around Seattle Center, people are all home watching television, or being television if you believe in God.

"I have to show you where the future ended," says Seth. "I want us to be the people who choose the trip."

According to Seth, the future ended in 1962 at the Seattle World's Fair. This was everything we should've inherited: the whole man on the moon within this decade—asbestos is our miracle friend—nuclear-powered and fossil-fueled world of the Space Age where you could go up to visit the Jetsons' flying saucer apartment building and then ride the monorail downtown for fun pillbox hat fashions at the Bon Marche.