Brandy starts the car and puts it in gear. She drops the parking brake and cranes her neck to see for traffic. She says, "I have to live one whole year on hormones in my new gender role before my vaginoplasty. They call it Real Life Training."

Brandy pulls out into the street and we're almost escaped. Police SWAT teams in chic basic black accessorized with tear gas and semiautomatic weapons are charging in past the doorman holding the door in his gold braid. The Rheas run after us, waving and throwing kisses and doing pretty much ugly bridesmaid behavior until they stumble, panting, in the street, their high heels shot to hell.

There's a moon in the sky. Office buildings are canyoned along either side of the street. There's still Manus in the trunk, and we're already putting gross distance between me and my getting caught.

Brandy puts her big hand open on my leg and squeezes.

Arson, kidnapping, I think I'm up to murder. Maybe all this will get me just a glimmer of attention, not the good, glorious kind, but still the national media kind.

Monster Girl Slays Secret Brother Gal Pal

"I've got eight months left to my R.L.T. year," Brandy says. "Think you can keep me busy for the next eight months?”

Half my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.

Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I'm sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don't kill the pain but at least you're not pissed off about being hurt.

"Hit me," Brandy says and makes a fish lips.

The thing about Brandy is she's got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she's so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.

I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder blue Valium, Tiffany's light blue, like a gift from Tiffany's, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy's interior.

This suit I help Brandy out of, it's a Pierre Cardin Space Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It's an outfit you'd accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.

At the Bon Marche, when she catwalks out of the fitting room, all I can do is applaud. There's going to be postpartum depression next week when she goes to take this one back.

Jump to breakfast, this morning when Brandy and Seth were flush with drug money, we were eating room service and Seth says Brandy could time travel to Las Vegas on another planet in the 1950s and fit right in. The planet Krylon, he says, where synthetic bendable glam-bots would lipo-suck your fat and makeover you. And Brandy says, "What fat?”

And Seth says, "I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the 1960s."

And I put more Premarin in Seth's next coffee refill. More Darvon in Brandy's Champagne.

Jump back to us in the bathroom, Brandy and me.

"Hit me," Brandy says.

Her lips look all loose and stretched-out, and I drop another gift from Tiffany's.

This bathroom we're hiding in, it goes way the other side of decorative touches. The whole deal is an undersea grotto. Even the princess phone is aqua, but when you look out the big brass porthole windows, you see Seattle from the top of Capitol Hill.

The toilet I'm sitting on, just sitting, the lid's closed under my ass thank you, but the toilet's a big ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. The sink is a big ceramic half a clam bolted to the wall.

Brandy-land, sexual playground to the stars, she says, "Hit me."

Jump to when we got here and the realtor was just a big tooth. One of those football scholarships where the eyebrows grow together in the middle and they forget to get a degree in anything.

As if I can talk, me with sixteen hundred credits.

Here's this million-dollar-club realtor who got thrown his job by a grateful alumnus who just wanted a son-in-law who could stay awake through six or seven holiday bowl games. But maybe I'm being a touch judgmental.

Brandy was beside herself for feminine wetness. Here's this extra- Y chromosome guy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, a guy whose paws make even Brandy's big hands look little.

"Mr. Parker," Brandy says, her hand hidden inside his big paw. You can see the Hank Mancini soundtrack of love in her eyes. "We spoke this morning."

We're in the drawing room of a house on Capitol Hill. This is another rich house where everything is exactly what it looks like. The elaborate Tudor roses carved in the ceilings are plaster, not pressed tin, not fiberglass. The torsos of battered Greek nudes are marble, not marbleized plaster. The boxes in the breakfront are not enameled in the manner of Faberge. The boxes are Faberge pillboxes, and there are eleven of them. The lace under the boxes was not tatted by a machine.

Not just the spines, but the entire front and back covers of all the books on all the shelves in the library are bound in leather, and the pages are cut. You don't have to pull a single book to know this.

The realtor, Mr. Parker, his legs are still flat on the sides of his ass. In the front, there's just enough more in one pant leg to spell boxers instead of briefs.

Brandy nods my way. "This is Miss Arden Scotia, of the Denver River Logging and Paper Scotias." Another victim of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

Parker's big hand swallows my little hand, big fish and little fish, whole.

Parker's starched white shirt makes you think of eating off a clean tablecloth, so flat and stuck out you could serve drinks off the shelf of his barrel chest.

"This," Brandy nods toward Seth, "is Miss Scotia's half- brother, Ellis Island."

Parker's big fish eats Ellis's little fish.

Brandy says, "Miss Scotia and I would like to tour the house ourselves. Ellis is mentally and emotionally disturbed."

Ellis smiles.

"We had hoped you would watch him," Brandy says.

"It's a go," Parker says. He says, "Sure thing."

Ellis smiles and tugs with two fingers at the sleeve of Brandy's suit jacket. Ellis says, "Don't leave me too long, miss. If I don't get enough of my pills, I'll have one of my fits."

"Fits?" says Parker.

Ellis says, "Sometimes, Miss Alexander, she forgets I'm waiting, and she doesn't get me any medication."

"You have fits?" Parker says.

"This is news to me," Brandy says and smiles. "You will not have a fit," Brandy tell my new half-brother. "Ellis, I forbid you to have a fit.”

Jump to us camped out in the undersea grotto.

"Hit me."

The floor under Brandy's back, it's cold tile shaped like fish and laid out so they fit together, one fish tail between the heads of two fish, the way some sardines are canned, all the way across the bathroom floor.

I drop a Valium between Plumbago lips.

"Did I ever tell you how my family threw me out?" says Brandy after her little blue swallow. "My original family, I mean. My birth family. Did I ever tell you that messy little story?"

I put my head between my knees and look straight down at the queen supreme with her head between my feet.

"My throat was hurting for a couple of days, so I got out of school and everything," Brandy says. She says, "Miss Arden? Hello?"