And it wasn't my fault.

"Really," I say, "if Shane really wanted to give me a present, he'd come back from the dead and buy me the new wardrobe he owes me. That would give me a merry Christmas. That I could really say 'thank you' for."

Silence.

As I fish out the second envelope, my mom says, "We're officially 'outing' you."

"In your brother's name," my dad says, "we bought you a membership in P.F.L.A.G.

"Fee-flag?" I say.

"Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays," my mom says.

Perry Como is singing "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays."

Silence.

My mother starts up from her chair and says, "I'll go run get those bananas." She says, "Just to be on the safe side, your father and I can't wait to see you try on some of your presents.”

Jump to around midnight in Evie's house where I catch Seth Thomas trying to kill me.

The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you'd look if you got the cherry pie in a pie eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink arid smooth as the inside of a crab's back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left. There are times to wear a veil and there are not. Other than this, I'm stunning when I meet Seth Thomas breaking into Evie's big house at midnight.

What Seth sees coming down the big circular staircase in Evie's foyer is me wearing one of Evie's peachy-pink satin and lace peignoir sets pieced on the bias. Evie's bathrobe is this peachy-pink retro Zsa Zsa number that hides me the way cellophane hides a frozen turkey. At the cuffs and along the front of the bathrobe is the peachy-pink ozone haze of ostrich feathers that match the feathers on the high-heeled mules I'm wearing.

Seth is just frozen at the foot of Evie's big circular staircase with Evie's best sixteen-inch carving knife in his hand. A pair of Evie's control top pantyhose is pulled down over Seth's head. You can see Evie's hygienic cotton crotch sitting across Seth's face. The pantyhose legs drape the way a cocker spaniel's ears would look down the front of his otherwise mix-andmatch army fatigues ensemble.

And I am a vision. Descending step by step toward the point of the carving knife, with the slow step-pause-step of a showgirl in a big Vegas revue.

Oh, I am just that fabulous. So sex furniture.

Seth's standing there, looking up, having a moment, afraid for the first time in his life because I'm holding Evie's rifle. The butt is planted against my shoulder, and the barrel is out in both hands in front of me. The sight's cross-haired right in the middle of Evie Cottrell's cotton crotch.

This is just Seth and me in Evie's foyer with its beveled glass windows broken around the front door and Evie's Austrian crystal chandelier that sparkles like so much costume jewelry for a house. The only other thing is a little desk in that Frenchy provincial white and gold.

On the little French desk is a tres ooh-la-la telephone where the receiver is as big as a gold saxophone and sits in a gold cradle on top of an ivory box. In the middle of the push-button circle is a cameo. So chic, Evie probably thinks.

With the knife out in front of him, Seth goes, "I'm not going to hurt you."

I'm doing that slow step-pause-step down the stairs.

Seth says, "Let's not anybody get killed, here."

And it's so deja vu.

This was the exact way Manus Kelley would ask if I'd gotten my orgasm. Not the words, but the voice.

Seth says through Evie's crotch, "All's I did was sleep with Evie."

So deja vu.

Let's go sailing. It's the exact same voice.

Seth drops the carving knife and the tip of the blade sticks mumblety-peg straight down next to his combat boot in Evie's foyer parquet floor. Seth says, "If Evie says it was me that shot you, she was lying."

On the desk next to the telephone is a pad and pencil for taking down messages.

Seth says, "I knew the second I heard about you in the hospital that it was Evie's doing."

Balancing the rifle with one arm, on the pad, I write:

take off your pantyhose.

"I mean you can't kill me," Seth says. Seth's pulling at the waistband of his pantyhose. "I'm just the reason why Evie shot you."

I step-pause-step the last ten feet to Seth and hook the end of the rifle barrel on the pantyhose waistband and pull them off Seth's square-jawed face. Seth Thomas who would be Alfa Romeo in Vancouver, British Columbia. Alfa Romeo who was Nash Rambler, formerly Bergdorf Goodman, formerly Neiman Marcus, formerly Saks Fifth Avenue, formerly Christian Dior.

Seth Thomas who a long time before was named Manus Kelley, my fiance from the infomercial. I couldn't tell you this until now because I want you to know how discovering this felt. In my heart. My fiance wanted to kill me. Even when he's that much an asshole, I loved Manus. I still love Seth. A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

It's from this night we started on the road together and Manus Kelley would someday become Seth Thomas. In between, in Santa Barbara and San Francisco and Los Angles and Reno and Boise and Salt Lake City, Manus was other men. Between that night and now, tonight, me in bed in Seattle still in love with him, Seth was Lance Corporal and Chase Manhattan. He was Dow Corning and Herald Tribune and Morris Code.

All courtesy of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project, as she calls it.

Different names, but all these men started out as Manus TryingToKillMe.

Different men, but there's always the same special police vice operative good looks. The same power blue eyes. Don't shoot—Let's go sailing—it's the same voice. Different haircuts but it's always the same thick black sexy dog hair.

Seth Thomas is Manus. Manus cheated on me with Evie, but I still love him so much I'll hide any amount of conjugated estrogen in his food. So much I'll do anything to destroy him.

You'd think I'd be smarter now after, what? Sixteen hundred college credits. I should be smarter. I could be a doctor by now.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.

Jump to me not feeling anything but stupid, trying to balance one of Evie's gold saxophone telephones against my ear. Brandy Alexander, the inconvenient queen she is, isn't listed in the phone book. All I know is she lives downtown at the Congress Hotel in a corner suite with three roommates:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

And the vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters, three drag guys who worship the quality queen deluxe but would kill each other for more closet space. The Brandy queen told me that much.

It should be Brandy I talk to, but I call my folks. What's gone on is I lock my killer fiance in the coat closet, and when I go to put him inside there's more of my beautiful clothes but all stretched out three sizes. Those clothes were every penny I ever made. After all that, I have to call somebody.

For so many reasons, no way can I just go back to bed. So I call, and my call goes out across mountains and deserts to where my father answers, and in my best ventriloquist voice, avoiding the consonants you really need a jaw to say, I tell him, "Gflerb sorlfd qortk, erd sairk. Srd. Erd, korts derk sairk? Kirdo!"

Anymore, the telephone is just not my friend.

And my father says, "Please don't hang up. Let me get my wife."

Away from the receiver, he says, "Leslie, wake up, we're being hate-crimed finally."