She came out in a few minutes wearing a yellow terrycloth robe, gathered the pile of clothes from the floor and threw them in a large wicker basket near the dresser. Then she came over and sat down next to me. It was dark in her place, but the white walls from the studio bounced enough light inside for me to see her face. I lit another cigarette and she began to talk.

“I don’t remember much about my mother, but I know I was taken away from her when I was just a little kid. I lived in foster homes at first, but then they put me in an institution when the family that had me moved out of the state. When I was fourteen, they found another foster home for me, and they let me out to go live there. The man in that home raped me. I told the social workers and they asked him about it. He said that we had sex, but that I had come on to him and he couldn’t help himself. He went into therapy, I went into a home for girls. I ran away and they caught me. I kept running away. I always got caught after a while, and they’d put me in an empty room with nothing in it, not even a book to read. The social workers told me it was all right to be sad, but not to be angry. It wasn’t healthy.”

She took a deep breath. “I had a friend, my best and greatest friend ever. Her name was Sadie. Her mother was Jewish and her father was black. She was so smart. She told me she wouldn’t have ever been put in the institution except that she wasn’t fashionable. I never understood that, at first. But she was my friend. We did everything together. We always shared. Everything. We fought the bull dykes together and the matrons too. I didn’t know how to fight then, but I was strong and I was always angry. Sadie couldn’t fight at all but she always tried. Once they put us in the Quiet Room for two weeks together and it only made us closer-better than sisters, because we decided. We ran away together once, to New York. We wanted to go to the Village. Sadie met this guy on a motorcycle who said he had a crash pad where kids could stay. I didn’t trust him-I didn’t trust anyone. But Sadie had charm. She said even if he was a bad guy, he wouldn’t have to be bad to us. I never had charm.”

An expression I couldn’t read flashed across her face and she went on, “We went with him and he was nice at first. But that same night, he brought in some other men from his pack. They told us to take off our clothes and dance for them. We wouldn’t. I could have gotten away, but I fought them with Sadie. I broke a bottle and cut one of them in the face. They beat us, badly. When I woke up, there was an old man there with a suitcase. He was arguing with the pack. He said something about how he couldn’t do it-we were too young. One of the pack came over to us and said he was sorry for what the others had done. He said the man was a doctor and he’d fix us up. He gave us each something to drink. I don’t remember anything except reaching for Sadie before I passed out.

“When I came to, I saw Sadie lying next to me. We still had no clothes on and Sadie was bleeding between her legs. I checked, but I wasn’t. My whole face was swollen so bad I could hardly talk. I think it was another day or so before we both really woke up. There was a dirty bandage on my hip, one on Sadie’s too. I thought it was maybe where the doctor gave us a shot, but it was a big bandage. I crawled out into the hall. The pack was all asleep in the next room. It was like a cave of devils-filthy and smelly. Sadie and I found some clothes and we made it down the stairs. A policeman found us, and took us to a place for runaways because Sadie told him we were sisters from Ohio. She was smart-I couldn’t think of anything to say. When they took the bandages off in the runaway place to give us showers, we saw what they had done, why they brought the old man up there. We each had a tattoo on our bottoms. Just the name of that pack, but a real tattoo. When I saw it on Sadie, I cried for the first time in years. She cried too. The nurse at the runaway place told us that they were permanent-they would never come off. When they left Sadie and me alone, we talked-and we decided what we had to do. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t care anymore after what they did to us.

“Sadie and I just walked out of the runaway place. They didn’t even try to stop us. Sadie panhandled in the Village until we got some money, then we bought four of those five-gallon cans and went to a gas station and filled them up. We just sat outside that building where the pack was until it was late at night and then we went upstairs. The pack was all zonked out on booze and dope. It was easy. Sadie and I knew what would happen to us, but it didn’t matter. We poured the gasoline all over the place-all over those sleeping devils. Then we each lit matches and threw them into the gas. We didn’t even run out of the building, just walked away. They screamed a lot-I wish I could have been there to see them. The papers said eleven people died. No people died. They weren’t people. It could have been eleven hundred for all we cared.

“Then Sadie and I went to this flophouse. We paid for the room with what was left of the panhandling money and walked right upstairs carrying one of the cans with a little gasoline left in it. In that room, we kept our promises to each other. We took off our clothes and we laid down on our stomachs and we poured gasoline over each other’s bottoms. We had the sheets all soaked in water, like a swamp. We said that we loved each other. We knew we couldn’t make any noise or it wouldn’t work. I kissed her. We were crying, but we did it. We put some of the wet sheets in our mouths, and we held hands and we lit the matches and put them on ourselves. We said we would count to ten before we rolled over onto the sheets. Sadie tried, but she pulled away before I got to three in my head. I held onto her like I promised-she fought me, but I held on. We rolled onto the sheets and spit the mess out of our mouths and it was okay to scream then. The cops got us when they came to the flophouse. They said we were too young to be tried as adults. We knew that before, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.

“The ambulance man was this big fat black guy. He looked so fierce, but he cried when he saw me and Sadie. After we got out of the hospital we went to some court and they put us away like they had before. I had a lawyer-some young kid. He asked me why we killed those devils and I told him, and he said if I pleaded insanity maybe they’d send me to a state hospital instead of the institution. I tried to get at him too, and they kept me handcuffed after that.

“We were good in the institution. Nobody bothered us anymore, not the other girls, not the matrons. Nobody. Everybody’s afraid of fire-everybody has respect for revenge. And they all knew we were stand-up people-I told the judge the whole thing was my idea and I made Sadie do it, but she told them the same thing, it was only her, so we both went to jail. We always said that when we got out we would never come back-we would do things. Sadie was so smart, so charming, even after the fire. I wanted to be a gymnast. Sadie read books all the time. They let us out when I was twenty-one. She was older than me but she stayed so we could leave together.

“We got an apartment and jobs. Sadie went to college. I met someone who began to teach me the martial arts. Sadie got married, she was going to teach school when she graduated. I lived with her and her husband, saving my money to go to Japan. My teacher said there was nothing more for me to learn here-I had to go to the East to finish my studies.”

“Sadie had a daughter. She sent me pictures in Japan. The baby was named Flower because that was the only part of my Japanese name she could translate into English-the other part means fire. She and her husband were doing so good-only he had cancer and they didn’t know it. I was with Sadie and Flower when he went. She was strong. She still had her child and she had her work. I helped her cry it out and then I went back.