It's just plain mean, making Evie in Cancun lay awake so long for her good news.

So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on the first ring.

And Evie says, "Hello?"

There's nothing but the sound of everything I've done, the smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier as the breeze chimes through it, that's all there is to hear from her end of the conversation.

Evie says, "Manus?"

Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room doorway and over the foyer floor.

Evie says, "Manus, don't play games. If this is you, I said I didn't want to see you anymore."

And right then:

Crash.

A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.

Another inch, and I'd be dead.

How can I not laugh. I'm already dead.

"Listen, Manus," Evie says. "I told you not to call me or I'll tell the police about how you put my best friend in the hospital without a face. You got that?"

Evie says, "You just went too far. I'll get a restraining order if I have too."

Manus or Evie, I don't know who to believe, all I know is my feathers are on fire.

Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a "pussy strip" of surgical tape underneath, and Evie starts in with, "About your mutilated brother ... ?"

It's not my favorite photographer or art director, either.

And I'm going back to Evie, "Yeah?" Busy sticking out my butt.

And the photographer goes, "Evie? That's not pouting!

The uglier the fashions, the worse places we'd have to pose to make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses.

Sewage treatment plants. It's the ugly bridesmaid tactic where you only look good by comparison. One shoot for Industry Jeans Wear, I was sure we'd have to pose kissing dead bodies.

These junked cars all have rusted holes through them, serrated edges, and I'm this close to naked and trying to remember when was my last tetanus shot. The photographer lowers his camera and says, "I'm only wasting film until you girls decide to pull in your stomachs."

More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus yanking off your pussy strip if you're not close-shaved.

About hell, I told Evie, "We're shooting there tomorrow."

So, now the art director says, "Evie, could you climb up a couple cars higher on the pile?" And this is wearing high heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are scattered on everywhere you might fall.

Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, "How exactly did your brother get mutilated?" You can only hold a real smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.

"It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our family's burning barrel," I say. "He was burning the trash and it exploded."

And Evie says, "Somebody?"

And I say, "You'd think it was my mom, the way she screamed and tried to stop him bleeding."

And the photographer says, "Girls, can you go up on your toes just a little?"

Evie goes, "A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off."

We both go up on our toes.

I go, "It wasn't so bad."

"Wait a sec," the art director says, "I need your feet to be not so close together." Then he says, "Wider." Then, "A little wider, please." Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to hold.

Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.

"It's a ball-peen hammer," Evie says, "and you're holding it wrong."

"Honey," the photographer says to Evie, "could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth, please?"

The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops crushed under the weight of being piled on top each other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the back seats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from before seatbelts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life. Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their exploded gas tanks.

"This is so rich," Evie says, "how this is the place I've worked my whole life to get."

The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against the cars.

"The whole time, growing up," Evie says, "I just thought being a woman would be ... not such a disappointment."

All I ever wanted was to be an only child.

The photographer says, "Perfecto.”

What you get with the Rhea sisters is three skin-andbone white men who sit around a suite at the Congress Hotel all day in nylon slips with the shoulder straps fallen off one shoulder or the other, wearing high heels and smoking cigarettes. Kitty Litter, Sofonda Peters, and the Vivacious Vivienne VaVane, their faces shining with moisturizer and egg- white facials, they listen to that step-to-three cha-cha music you only hear on elevators anymore. The Rhea sister hair, their hair is short and flat with grease and matted down bristling with bobby pins, flat on their heads. Maybe they have a wig cap stretched on over the pins if it's not summer outside. Most of the time, they don't know what season it is. The blinds aren't ever open, and there are maybe a dozen of those chacha records stacked on the automatic record changer.

All the furniture is blonde and the big four-legged RCA Philco console stereo. The stereo, you could plow a field with that old needle, and the metal tone arm weighs about two pounds.

May I present them:

Kitty Litter.

Sofonda Peters.

The Vivacious Vivienne VaVane.

AKA the Rhea sisters when they're onstage, these are her family, Brandy Alexander told me in the speech therapist office. Not the first time we met, this wasn't the time I cried and told Brandy how I lost my face. This wasn't the second time, either, the time Brandy brought her sewing basket full of ways to hide my being a monster. This was one of the other tons of times we snuck off while I was still in the hospital. The speech therapist office was just where we'd meet.

"Usually," Brandy tells me, "Kitty Litter is bleaching and tweezing away unwanted facial hair. This unsightly hair thing can tie up a bathroom for hours, but Kitty would wear her Ray-Bans inside out, she loves looking at her reflection so much."

The Rheas, they made Brandy what she is. Brandy, she owes them everything.

Brandy would lock the speech therapist door, and if somebody would knock, Brandy and me, we'd fake loud orgasm noises. We'd scream and yip and slap the floor. I'd clap my hands to make that special spanking sound that everybody knows. Whoever knocks, they'd go away fast.

Then we'd go back to just us using up make-up and talking.

"Sofonda," Brandy would tell me, "Sofonda Peters, she's the brains, Sofonda is. Miss Peters is all day with her porcelain nails stuck in the rotary-dial princess phone to an agent or a merchandiser, selling, selling, selling."

Somebody would knock on the speech therapist door, so I'd give out with a cat scream and slap my thigh.