The one with the cigarette gives me her long hand with its porcelain nails and says, "I'm Pie Rhea."

"I'm Die Rhea," says another one, near the stereo.

The one with the cigarette, Pie Rhea, says, "Those are our stagenames." She points at the third Rhea, over on the sofa, eating Chinese out of a takeaway carton. "That," she says and points, "This Miss Eating Herself To Fat, you can call her Gon Rhea."

With her mouth full of nothing you'd want to see, Gon Rhea says, "Charmed, I'm sure."

Putting her cigarette everywhere but in her mouth, Pie Rhea says, "The queen just does not need your problems, not tonight." She says, "We're all the family the top girl needs."

On the stereo is a picture in a silver frame of a girl, beautiful in front of seamless paper, smiling into an unseen camera, an invisible photographer telling her:

Give me passion.

Flash.

Give me joy.

Flash.

Give me youth and energy and innocence and beauty.

Flash.

"Brandy's first family, her birth family, didn't want her, so we adopted her," says Die Rhea. Pointing her long finger at the picture smiling on the blonde stereo, Die Rhea says, "Her birth family thinks she's dead."

Jump to one time back when I had a face and I did this magazine cover shoot for BabeWear magazine.

Jump back to Suite 15-G and the picture on the blonde stereo is me, my cover, the BabeWear magazine cover, framed with Die Rhea pointing her finger at me.

Jump back to us in the speech therapist office with the door locked and Brandy saying how lucky she was the Rhea sisters found her. It's not everybody who gets a second chance to be born again and raised a second time, but this time by a family that loves her.

"Kitty Litter, Sofonda, and Vivienne," Brandy says, "I owe them everything."

Jump to Suite 15-G and Gon Rhea waving her chopsticks at me and saying, "Don't you try and take her from us. We're not finished with her yet."

"If Brandy goes with you," says Pie Rhea, "she can pay for her own conjugated estrogens. And her vaginoplasty. And her labiaplasty. Not to mention her scrotal electrolysis."

To the picture on the stereo, to the smiling stupid face in the silver frame, Die Rhea says, "None of that is cheap." Die Rhea lifts the picture and holds it up to me, my past looking me eye to eye, and Die Rhea says, "This, this is how Brandy wanted to look, like her bitch sister. That was two years ago, before she had laser surgery to thin her vocal cords and then her trachea shave. She had her scalp advanced three centimeters to give her the right hairline. We paid for her brow shave to get rid of the bone ridge above her eyes that the Miss Male used to have. We paid for her jaw contouring and her forehead feminiza-tion."

"And," Gon Rhea says with her mouth full of chewed-up Chinese, "and every time she came home from the hospital with her forehead broken and realigned or her Adam's apple shaved down to a ladylike nothing, who do you think took care of her for those two years?"

Jump to nay folks asleep in their bed across mountains and deserts away from here. Jump to them and their telephone and years ago some crazy man, some screeching awful pervert, calling them and screaming that their son was dead. Their son they didn't want, Shane, he was dead of AIDS and this man wouldn't say where or when and then he laughed and hung up.

Jump back to inside Suite 15-G and Die Rhea waving an old picture of me in my face and saying, "This is how she wanted to look, and tens of thousands of Katty Kathy dollars later, this is how she looks."

Gon Rhea says, "Hell. Brandy looks better than that."

"We're the ones who love Brandy Alexander," says Pie Rhea.

"But you're the one Brandy loves because you need her," says Die Rhea.

Gon Rhea says, "The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person." She says, "Brandy will leave us if she thinks you need her, but we need her, too.”

The one I love is locked in the trunk of a car outside with a stomach full of Valiums, and I wonder if he still has to pee. My brother I hate is come back from the dead. Shane's being dead was just too good to be true.

First the exploding hairspray can didn't kill him.

Then our family couldn't just forget him.

Now even the deadly AIDS virus has failed me.

My brother is nothing but one bitter fucking disappointment after another.

You can hear a door opening and shutting somewheres, then another door, then another door opens and Brandy's there saying, "Daisy, honey," and steps into the smoke and cha

cha music wearing this amazing sort of Bill Blass First Lady type of traveling suit made out of solid kelly green trimmed with white piping and green high heels and a really smart green purse. On her head is an eco-incorrect tasty sort of spray of rainforest green parrot feathers made into a hat, and Brandy says, "Daisy, honey, don't point a gun at the people who I love."

In each of Brandy's big ring-beaded hands is a sassy off- white American Tourister luggage. "Give us a hand, somebody. These are just the royal hormones." She says, "My clothes I need are in the other room."

To Sofonda, Brandy says, "Miss Pie Rhea, I have just got to get."

To Kitty, Brandy says, "Miss Die Rhea, I've done everything we can do for now. We've done the scalp advance-merit, the brow lift, the brow bone shave. We've done the trachea shave, the nose contouring, the jawline contouring, the forehead realignment ..."

Like it's any wonder I didn't recognize my old mutilated brother.

To Vivienne, Brandy says, "Miss Gon Rhea, I've got months left on my Real Life Training and I'm not spending them holed up here in this hotel."

Jump to us driving away with the Fiat Spider just piled with luggage. Imagine desperate refugees from Beverly Hills with seventeen pieces of matched luggage migrating cross- country to start a new life in the Okie Midwest. Everything very elegant and tasteful, one of those epic Joad family vacations, only backwards. Leaving a trail of cast-off accessories, shoes and gloves and chokers and hats to lighten their load so's they can cross the Rocky Mountains, that would be us.

This is after the police showed up, no doubt after the hotel manager called and said a mutilated psycho with a gun was menacing everybody up on the fifteenth floor. This is after the Rhea sisters ran all Brandy's luggage down the fire stairs. This is after Brandy says she has to go, she needs to think about things, you know, before her big surgery. You know. The transformation.

This is after I keep looking at Brandy and wondering,

Shane?

"It's just such a big commitment," Brandy says, "being a girl, you know. Forever."

Taking the hormones. For the rest of her life. The pills, the patches, the injections, for the rest of her life. And what if there was someone, just one person who would love her, who could make her life happy, just the way she was, without the hormones and make-up and the clothes and shoes and surgery? She has to at least look around the world a little. Brandy explains all this, and the Rhea sisters start to cry and wave and pile the American Touristers into the car.

And the whole scene would be just heartbreaking, and I would be boo-hooing too, if I didn't know Brandy was my dead brother and the person he wants to love him is me, his hateful sister, already plotting to kill him. Yes. Plotting me, plotting to kill Brandy Alexander. Me with nothing left to lose, plotting my big revenge in the spotlight.

Give me violent revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Just give me my first opportunity.

Flash.

Brandy behind the wheel, she turns to me, her eyes all spidery with tears and mascara, and says, "Do you know what the Benjamin Standard Guidelines are?"