I'm not going to try to tell you I'm a good person. You know I'm not, and I know I'm not. But I'm not going to try to tell you that anybody else is either. I know you're not. Laurent wasn't. You come here with your own agenda and you want the story you're expecting but I'm not going to lie. And it's not because I'm angry, or because I don't like any of you. It's because I believe in what you're doing, and I didn't get my boyfriend a present for Christmas. Because he was gross to me around that time, too.

As I said to you before, I know I'm only in this because I'm nice to look at. It's true I'm really nice to look at. I look good in everything. I like money. My job is to look good. I've always looked good, too, which is why as a baby Dasius bought me from some slut addicted to coke. And believe me he brings that up, this idea that I'm stupid because of gestational drugs,  but I'm stupid because no one sent me to school when I was a child, not because I lack the ability to learn. All right I am dyslexic, but that has nothing to do with my mother. I don't mind whatever he says. At least when we argue, he's here, and as you know he rarely is, and he won't let me go with him anywhere because he thinks I'll embarrass him. Well here it comes.

Ever since I can remember I've been told to tuck my toes in. Be quiet, because children are a danger to themselves. Push back too much and its your life. Bellamy told me so, when I was little. That's who you want to hear about, Bellamy. But by the time I was old enough to make memories, he was less interested in raising children than he had been. He met Laurent in a Canadian nightclub in the early 1960s, in Montreal. He told me when I was older, when I was feeling bitter, that Laurent followed him into the bathroom and killed him in a locked toilet stall. It's very romantic, I know. He never really liked Laurent very much, but he did love him I guess. I don't know. Who cares. The subject of children was broached, and I'm told Laurent only agreed because he was desperate for Bellamy to like him. Bell had always had this idea that he could be a housewife. He wore his hair curled around his ears, the longest he had dared to grow it when living. Whenever he was home in Texas, he wore tea dresses more than anything. He used to make me fluff sandwiches and put lipstick on me. Laurent, ironically, could not stand effeminacy of this type, but Bell was free to do it at home when no one but me was looking.

We're not really supposed to ask where Dasius gets things. It embarrasses him. He has his fingers in all kinds of unsavory things, though he has assured me that stealing babies outright isn't one of them. We can assume the twins were paid for, then. Though to whom? I'm not supposed to wonder what he does at work. He wants me to be more innocent than that, though of course that's complete farce. Bell demanded children because he didn't think he would get them, because he wanted to leave and needed an excuse. As a complete surprise, Pascal and Marcel showed up a few months later. They didn't cry like me, so I guess they were born clean and undamaged. So Bell had to stay. Laurent installed them in a house in Texas, far away from either coast, in certainly a place where Bell couldn't go out looking like he did and the children would consequently grow up distant and well-adjusted to the outside world. 

In 1965, when the twins were four years old, Marcel caught a bad flu. I hear Bell went a little crazy, and Dasius being Dasius, he decided that the cure was to replace Marcel with another child in the event of his death. He did this the way you would replace a dying dog with a puppy. He insisted on my name, Marcellus, the way you would name a dog "Spot 2". Marcel didn't die, and so now we just have confusing, creepy, alike names. The established fact that I look like Laurent in the face makes me feel that there was certainly dark stuff going on regarding my origin, but I'm not important enough to be told about it. I know that Laurent used to send Dasius boys who looked like himself as a sick little game. I know that Dasius in the past had been involved with Laurent in some way, and that he found Laurent's look intoxicating. I told you that Dasius was gross. At any rate, I'm told I cried for two years without pausing to take a breath. And by the time I was old enough to speak, my twin brothers were at private school far away in Paris, because I had been so much of a handful that Bell had begged Laurent to get rid of them. I needed him more than they did. They came home summers, but that's it. They're more French now than Texan, and need to be reminded that they are clearly Eastern European, no matter how much they dye their hair. They're idiots in Prada shoes.

"Tuck in your toes or they'll kill you. Button your top button. No sugar don't get cavities. Stop screaming you're making mommy cry. Don't be so effeminate around other people. Don't sass." My impression of Bell from a young age was that he was constantly afraid, and I acted out because it made me nervous. He was worried that if he couldn't make me behave around Laurent that Laurent would hurt me. Once when I was four, Laurent brought another child with him, who was not a child at all, and he slapped me directly in the face for sassing. When I realized what he was, that he was a child trapped in that body and that he was like Laurent and Bell, I pissed myself. Laurent took me upstairs and stripped me, so that Bell wouldn't have to do it, and Laurent was very nice to me about it, but I knew that he didn't like me because I shuddered whenever his cold hand touched my skin. He gave up and let Bell wash me, and dress me, and took the other child away. When they were gone, I remember that Bell took off his boy clothes and put on a white cotton dress, and let me rub my face on it. That they were gone came as a giant relief. 

Bell had a very delicate look, and a bubble butt. Sometimes he let me rest my face against it through his dress, while he washed the dishes or cooked me breakfast. He had a little nose with small nostrils, and a wide mouth that smiled even when he was unhappy. He was nearly always unhappy when Laurent came around, which was every three months or so. Looking back on it, I'm certain that Laurent came to force Bell to drink blood, which he couldn't stand, and that the release of that pressure whenever we saw the back of him had a lot to do with the sense of relief. I never met any of the others until much later. The time came to put me in school and passed without note. I don't think I was even on the county register. We lived in a community where folks kept to themselves and their guns, and as long as we kept toes tucked in, we would be left alone. I didn't learn to read until I was twelve, and then only with a private tutor bused in from the city, who tried and failed to get me to learn anything else. I thought this was rebellion, but of course I now know that I was shooting myself in the foot. Anyway, being able to read meant I could spend all day reading magazines, and that became my chief pleasure in life.

At some point, Laurent decided that enough was enough, and it was time to drag Bell kicking and screaming back into their sphere, with me in tow. To look at me, it's clear that I can live this life. Based on looks alone, which I have addressed, I can make it. So my coloring and bone structure saved me at that age. Of course it did. Laurent loved himself, and I looked like him. Even though Laurent thought me stone dumb, at least I was polite at thirteen, and he insisted that I should be schooled. I'm not a polite person, but I was afraid of him. You see, he had this fantasy about raising a child with manners that would be devoted to him. He saw Jackie as an example, who I met when Laurent informed us that we would be moving to California. It didn't matter what I or Bell wanted. He sold the house out from under us so that we didn't have anywhere to go, and told Bell that we would be living on the grounds of his "master's" in a guest house. Bell donated his tea dresses to the local women's society, and began drinking clear grain alcohol, which knocked him out most days. Ladies and gentleman, Laurent's last "great love," poisoning himself into insensibility.

Jackie was wound up tight. I could see how there was a certain mold I was meant to fill. Don't speak unless spoken to, be gentle but be a man, dress well but take criticism, be smart but not pretentious. I wanted to be like the jetset women of Vogue, and I ordered hats and sunglasses from catalogs. I took little interest in the correspondence courses I was meant to do, and instead spent much of my time by the little pool out by the guest house, sunning myself on the wood patio. When Miou came around, he introduced me to cigarettes and cussing, and complained about the lack of coke and alcohol. He was a few years older than me, but the gap between us wasn't very large. He was intelligent but not book smart, and we were on a similar level when it came to pursuits. We were both intent on doing absolutely nothing and pretending to be filthy rich. I pretended to be Brigitte Bardot, because of my bone structure and hair, and he pretended to be Katherine Hepburn because she was a grande dame. We both couldn't be Audrey, and neither of us wanted to be Liz Taylor. We thought Marilyn Monroe vulgar but acted out her Playboy poses by the pool for a laugh. We were snobs. Don't think that we were bosom friends. Like most bitter queens, we secretly hated each other just as much as we enjoyed each other's company. I wanted to eat him and absorb all of his good qualities for myself, and I'm certain he thought the same of me. In the absence of that, we were friends.I was sixteen years old, and he was nineteen. It was 1980.

Miou and I fought a lot. We did it for a laugh, but occasionally feelings were hurt. He told me my father hated me, and wanted me to die, meaning Laurent. I laughed at him for thinking I had a father, and informed him he was an unwanted bastard like me, and to say anything else was putting on airs. 

"You don't know," he said. "My parents love me, unlike yours," meaning Jackie and Yuki. I didn't know that Yuki was his biological father.

"Shut up, you bug-eyed Chink," I told him, beginning to feel left out.

"At least my parents aren't drunks," Miou shouted, at his cattiest. "At least they are going to survive. Yours is mostly dead. He can't even kill himself properly."

"They'll kill us if we toe the line. Don't you know that? It's better to kill yourself rather than wait."

"You don't know. My parents are respected here, unlike your Bell. I do whatever I want."

"Give me a cigarette and shut your stupid mouth," I demanded. He was the only way for me to get cigarettes.

"Apologize to me for what you said, about being a bastard," he said, quietly.

"Give me a cigarette or I'll push you into the pool, bastard," I told him.

"I'm not joking."

"Oh you are a joke. Give me a cigarette."

That was the last time I saw Miou. When he died he was giving me the silent treatment and withholding cigarettes. Understand, he didn't care what I was going through and I didn't care about his issues either. We only were friends because of close quarters. When he died I was secretly glad. Part of me thought he deserved it, even though I knew that he didn't. He was far more involved in their sphere than I was. I never ranged far from the guest house. When Bell heard what had happened to my little friend, he asked me if I wanted a drink. I don't drink. I have a horror of drinking. He asked me if I wanted him to stop drinking. "I'm sorry, little baby," he told me. The day after that, Laurent came down the hill to us.

On that day, Laurent found me by the pool where I usually was. He didn't speak with me, as I was below regard, because I was often rude to him. Rudeness to him was ungentlemanly, and he thought I was trash. He went into the guest house and dragged Bell out of bed. I listened to them shouting through the upstairs window, where there was only Bell's bedroom. "Go with me to Europe. We can send Marcellus to school, like the others, or will you have done? Tell me if you will. Only tell me that I've done right by you and that you could love me," I heard Laurent begging, and it made me want to go for a swim so that I couldn't hear. I only didn't because it had grown overcast and felt a little cool for me to abandon my deck chair. 

"Cigarette?" I heard, over my shoulder.

"Ugh," I said, turning the page in my Vogue.

"Aren't you cold?" asked the stranger, sitting on the chair next to me. 

"Gross, leave me alone," I told him, covering my little bathing suit with my transparent shortie kimono. Both were new and I didn't feel quite comfortable in them yet.

"Are you Marcellus? I haven't seen you since you were an infant."

"I'm too young for you. You're disgusting," I said, refusing to raise my eyes.

"Oh," he startled, his low tone rising, "I'm not flirting with you."

"You're vile. You're a liar," I said, licking my finger and turning the page again, though I had not read a word. "You like what you see." I couldn't know if he did or not. I was just being rude.

He sat back a bit on his hands, and crossed his legs at the ankles. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. "Do you like what you see?" he asked me.

I made a popping sound with my lips. I didn't know that was something that Laurent did, but it made this stranger sit up a little bit. I liked that. It felt like control.

"Will you say or no?" he purred, in his accent, with smokiness.

I shrugged.

"Do you like money?" he asked. That Dasius, he cuts right to the chase. 

I held out my hand, still refusing to look at him. He opened his cigarette case and put $200 and three cigarettes on my palm. I waited, and two friends joined the $200 to double it. I sat on them.

"Now may I kiss you a little?" he asked me, his head turned to the side.

"Yes but you have to come behind the house where no one will see."

"How do you like to be kissed?" he asked.

"Why don't you find out?" I asked him. I didn't know how I liked it. I had never been kissed before, but he didn't know that.

"You're a coy one," he said.

He was cold, but his mouth was hot, and kissing behind the house became sucking on my skin, and more than that. I tried to stop him, because he was a stranger, but he told me he would give me more money, anything I wanted. He told me that if anyone found out what we were doing, we would both be in big trouble, and more than anything, that is why I let him do to me whatever he wanted. And because he knew what he was doing with his mouth. 

He said, in my ear, after, against the side of the house, "My name is Dasius."

I said, unable to breathe, "I don't care what your name is."

"Tell me what you want, to keep quiet," he said.

"I want a Bentley," I told him, without thinking.

"A Bentley? You want a Rolls."

I sucked in a breath to scream.

"You want a Bentley," he said quickly.

And the next week, I had one. I did not even have a driver's license. An entire world of possibilities had opened up in front of my tucked in toes.