Jump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiance or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie's big house, her real house where even she didn't like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rainforest with nobody paying attention.

Jump to me being on Evie's bed, on my back that first night, but I can't sleep.

Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie's furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn't a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie's house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—are all either black or gray.

Evie's house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It's like the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways. So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs, right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big- boned girl who'd never be a big-time success anywhere.

The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look, the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look when people say they're smiling.

Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.

Evie's house was big—white with hunter green shutters, a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars. Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses— were climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar. You'd imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.

Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital. Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She's traded publicly now. Everybody's favorite write-off. The Cottrells made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty- one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil money are heavily invested in Evie's being a model failure.

Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see auditions with Evie. Sure, I'd get work, but then the art director or the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert opinion she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming back over her shoulder about how I shouldn't let them treat me

like a piece of meat. I should just walk out.

"Fuck 'em," Evie's screaming by this point. "Fuck 'em all."

Me, I'm not angry. I'd be getting strapped into this incredible leather corset by Poopie Cadole and leather pants by Chrome Hearts. Life was good back then. I'd have three hours of work, maybe four or five.

At the photo studio doorway, before she'd get thrown out of the shoot, Evie would swing the assistant stylist into the door jamb, and the little guy would just crumple up at her feet. It's then Evie would scream, "You people can all suck the crap out of my sweet Texas ass." Then she'd go out to her Ferrari and wait the three or four or five hours so she could drive me home.

Evie, that Evie was my best friend in the whole world. Moments like that, Evie was fun and quirky, almost like she had a life of her own.

Okay, so I didn't know about Evie and Manus and their complete and total love and satisfaction. So kill me.

Jump to before that, Evie calling me at the hospital and begging me, please, could I discharge myself and come stay at her house, she was so lonely, please.

My health insurance had a two-million-dollar lifetime ceiling, and the meter had just run and run all summer. No social service contact had the guts to transition me into God only knows where.

Begging me on the telephone, Evie said she had plane reservations. She was going to Cancun for a catalogue shoot so would I, could I, please, just house-sit for her?

When she picked me up, on my pad I wrote:

is that my halter top? you know you're stretching it.

"You'll need to feed my cat is all," Evie says.

i don't like being alone so far out from town, I write, i don't know how you can live here.

Evie says, "It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under the bed."

I write:

i know girls who say that about their dildos.

And Evie says, "Gross! I'm not that way at all with my rifle!”

So jump to Evie being flown off to Cancun, Mexico, and when I go to look under her bed, there's the thirty-aught rifle and scope. In her closets are what's left of my clothes, stretched and tortured to death and hanging there on wire hangers, dead.

Then jump to me in Evie's bed that night. It's midnight. The wind lifts the bedroom curtains, lace curtains, and the cat jumps up on the windowsill to see who's just pulled up in the gravel driveway. With the stars behind it, the cat looks back at me. Downstairs, you hear a window break.

Jump way back to the last Christmas before my accident, when I go home to open presents with my folks. My folks put up the same fake tree every year, scratchy green and making that hot polyplastic smell that gives you a dizzy flu headache when the lights are plugged in too long. The tree's all magic and sparkle, crowded with our red and gold glass ornaments and those strands of silver plastic loaded with static electricity that people call icicles. It's the same ratty angel with a rubber doll face on top of the tree. Covering the mantel is the same spun fiberglass angel hair that works into your skin and gives you an infected rash if you even touch it. It's the same Perry Como Christmas album on the stereo. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn't so confronted by singing Christmas carols.

My brother Shane's still dead so I try not to expect much attention, just a quiet Christmas. By this point, my boyfriend, Manus was getting weird about losing his police job, and what I needed was a couple days out of the spotlight. We all talked, my mom, my dad, and me, and agreed to not buy big gifts for each other this year. Maybe just little gifts, my folks say, just stocking stuffers.

Perry Como is singing "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas."

The red felt stockings my mom sewed for each of us, for Shane and me, are hanging on the fireplace, each one red felt with our names spelled out, top to bottom, in fancy white felt letters. Each one lumpy with the gifts stuffed inside. It's Christmas morning, and we're all sitting around the tree, my father ready with his jackknife for the knotted ribbons. My mom has a brown paper shopping bag and says, "Before things get out of hand, the wrapping paper goes in here, not all over the place."

My mom and dad sit in recliner chairs. I sit on the floor in front of the fireplace with the stockings by me. This scene is always blocked this way. Them sitting with coffee, leaned down over me, watching for my reaction. Me Indian-sitting on the floor. All of us in bathrobes and pajamas still.

Perry Como is singing "I'll Be Home for Christmas."

The first thing out of my stocking is a little stuffed koala bear, the kind that grips your pencil with its spring-loaded hands and feet. This is who my folks think I am. My mom hands me hot chocolate in a mug with miniature marshmallows floating on top. I say, "Thanks." Under the little koala is a box I take out.

My folks stop everything, lean over their cups of coffee, and just watch me.

Perry Como is singing "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful."