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want to forget? I thought you loved this house.”
    “I do, and I know she’d want us to stay.”
    “Then why , Mom?”
    “I’m just selling it, Charlene. We need the money. End of discussion.”
    And there was something so sad and strange about her mother that, for once, Charlene did shut up when she was asked. She had been thirteen at the time, filled with a big, ugly anger and a crushing sadness about losing her grandmother and the house she loved. But there was no talking to Melody about it. Life is loss, Charlene. Get used to it. Was that true? Charlene wondered. Was that all it was?
    She’d lost her father already. She’d been too young to grieve for him; but she knew other girls had something she’d never understand. She wrote a song about it all, “Selling Memories.”
The things you want to keep, go
The things you want to lose, stay
Sell your history
Sell your soul
You’re still bankrupt, tired and old .
And the memories how they linger ,
Wrap around you when you’re cold .
    The refrain was an angry scream, repeating the title over and over. It wasn’t bad. Certainly no worse than some of the crappy covers they played over and over. She’d tried to get Slash to help her write some music recently. But he wouldn’t.
    Slash thought her lyrics, her poetry, tended toward the too flowery, overly ornate. As if someone who called himself Slash and wore black lipstick had any right to criticize anything . They fought about it, passionately and often. She disagreed. Her language was in line with her inner life. A drama queen, her mother called her. If pressed, she knew most of her friends—even Rick—would agree. She didn’t care what they thought. Better to live loud, cause a scene, feel too much, than die a brain-dead automaton in a suburban wasteland.
    If it weren’t for Rick, she’d have left their stupid garage band ages ago. She was sick of singing covers at parties—other people’s lyrics, other people’s thoughts, badly imitated. Slash didn’t have an original thought in his head. He could read music, mimic guitar players he liked, but he couldn’t write an original chord to save his life. She hadn’t meant to ruin his guitar when she grabbed it from him, but it had slipped from her hands and smacked against the wall, hit hard and in just the right way. She’d thought he might cry the way he looked at it. He just picked it up, its neck broken and dangling, the strings slack, and carried it out like a child in his arms.
    “Nice, Char,” Rick had chastised.
    “I didn’t mean it,” she’d said, looking after him helplessly. She still felt bad about it, wondered how much it would cost to buy him a new guitar. This happened to her a lot. She acted out of passion, sometimes hurting people, and then felt horrible about it later. But she never seemed able to make things right again. She had a gift for creating damage that couldn’t be undone.
    She sat in her ticky-tack room, in her ticky-tack house, painting her nails iridescent green. She hated the tract house with all its perfectly square rooms and thin walls, identical to every third house in their development. It was like living in the box of someone else’s limited imagination. How could someone reach the height of her creativity in a drywall cage? She couldn’t. And she wouldn’t. She would be eighteen in six months. After graduation, she was so out of here. College? Another four years of indentured servitude, living by someone else’s arbitrary rules? No way.
    Where do you think you’ll go? her mother wanted to know. You think you’ll survive on minimum wage in New York City? Because without an education you’ll be working at McDonald’s . But Charlene had an escape plan; it was already under way.
    You can always stay here with me, Charlene, when you’re ready . He’d promised her this the last time she’d seen him. You can stay as long as you want .
    She was smiling to herself when she heard the slow rise of voices