“It’s lucky he didn’t see us sledding.” James touched my forehead. “You’d look pretty cute in a helmet actually.”

Because he was cut, I tried to send James home without me, but he wouldn’t go. He insisted on helping me pick up the camera carcasses, which I was against. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a tendency to let other people clean up my messes. I’m trying not to be that way anymore.”

I pointed out that this wasn’t his mess; it was mine.

“Still,” said James. By then, the blood was practically pouring from his thumb. I wondered if he needed stitches.

“You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.”

I didn’t have time to develop the film in the school’s lab until the following Wednesday.

There wasn’t much to look at. A few shots of sky. Some concrete. A lot of black. Still, the point wasn’t always that the pictures be pretty, was it? Sometimes it was about the process, like with Jackson Pollock paintings. As I made enlargements of the photos, I hoped that Mr. Weir would see it that way.

Mr. Weir hated my project. “It’s an interesting gimmick, but it wasn’t the assignment. Your assignment was to tell a personal story in pictures.”

“This is a personal story.” I defended my project. “This is exactly what happened to me.”

“Naomi, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that this isn’t personal. It’s simply that the assignment counts for your whole grade, and I’m expecting something deeper.”

When the bell rang, I took my pictures with me and stuffed them in my locker.

“What did Weir think?” James asked. He was standing behind me at my locker.

“He didn’t get it.”

Blank-slate time all over again.

Saturday afternoon, James, Alice, Yvette, and I took the train into the city to see a show. We hadn’t decided what we would see, and when we got there most everything was sold out. There were a couple of tickets left for the Rockettes’ Holiday Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, so we went to that, despite the fact that Alice found it “degrading to women” and James found it “campy.”

Even if you have no interest in lines of aging showgirls wearing too much makeup kicking up their legs, there’s something impressive about it. Something spectacular. It’s like a sicko cloning experiment.

At intermission, James went outside for a smoke, and I went to the bathroom. Alice and Yvette remained in the theater to argue about whether the show was “objectifying women” (Alice) or “celebrating their athleticism” (Yvette). I didn’t necessarily think the two positions were irresolvable.

There was a long line outside the bathroom. I wondered if I would make it through before the show started again. Not that it mattered. The spectacular didn’t have a story you had to follow—it was just a bunch of women standing in a row.

Someone placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Naomi Porter?”

I turned around. It was a Japanese guy, maybe in his thirties. He was wearing expensive black glasses, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, a red hoodie, charcoal pin-striped pants, and black Converse sneakers. He was holding the hand of a little girl in a gray dress with hearts on it and pink sneakers, Converses like her dad’s.

“You probably don’t remember me,” he said. “I’m Nigel Fusakawa.”

The name was familiar.

“Cass’s husband,” he added. “Everyone calls me Fuse.”

He stuck out his hand, and without thinking I shook it.

“She was supposed to come today, but she has a bit of a cold.”

I nodded.

“Could you do me a favor?” he asked. “I’m here by myself. Would you mind taking Chloe to the bathroom?”

“I—”

“It would really help us out.”

I looked at the little girl. She was sweet, shyer in person than she had been on the phone. Besides, none of what had happened was her fault. I nodded toward Fuse. We were about to enter the interior part of the bathroom, and I took Chloe’s hand.

“What’s your name?” she squeaked.

“I’m Nomi,” I said.

Her eyes grew very wide. “Nobody?”

“Sure, whatever.”

I let her go first. “Do you need any help?”

“No, I’ve been doing this myself forever,” she informed me. I wondered how long forever was. A year? Six months? “I could have gone in here myself, but my daddy doesn’t want me to get raped.”

“Raped?” I nearly burst out laughing. Did she even know what that meant?

“That happens all the time in bathrooms,” she informed me seriously.

She had Mom’s blue eyes and Fuse’s black hair. She was cute. She remembered to wash her hands without my prompting.

“Daddy says you’re my sister,” she said as we were on the way out.

What was I going to do? Tell her it wasn’t true? “Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I want to be the only one.”

“You’ll still be the only one,” I said.

She pursed her tiny rosebud mouth. She didn’t look at all convinced.

Fuse was waiting for us right outside the door. “Thanks for saving me from having to be the only man in the women’s room.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Naomi,” Fuse asked, “I hope this isn’t too forward, but why don’t you come over to our apartment after the show? We live about twenty blocks up from here, and I know Cass would be so, so, so psyched to see you. Chloe and I would be glad to have you, too.”

“I’m…I can’t…I’m with friends,” I said.

“Bring them along. Really. Please. Cass would kill me if I didn’t try to get you up to our house. She’s really missed you. I know, trust me I know, things have been hard between you, but it’s nearly Christmas, and what luck us running into you, and isn’t that the coat she sent you for your birthday?”

I nodded. This guy knew so much about me without my knowing a thing about him.

“I helped her pick it out. She’d be really glad to see you in it. Did you get the pictures from your friend?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What pictures?”

“Nothing. I…I must have gotten confused. We’ll meet you right here by the bathroom, okay? The Radio City Music Hall ladies’ room. It’s our special place,” he said with a wink.

The guy sounded sort of desperate, and the little girl was staring at me. The whole situation was starting to get incredibly awkward. A light flashed indicating that intermission was over.

“Please come. I know you weren’t planning to run into us; I know this isn’t how you were thinking you would spend your day. But now we have and it’s lucky, I think. Please, Naomi.”

He was begging. I didn’t want the little girl to have to watch her father beg, so I found myself saying yes.

During the second half of the show, the kicking had lost its novelty for me and the women’s identical painted-on smiles were giving me a headache. It occurred to me that if any of the Rockettes got sick or even murdered, no one would notice. They’d just bring on an identical replacement, smack on some lipstick, and the show would go on without any noticeable decrease in quality. Somewhere, some poor Rockette would be dead and buried, and the only people who would notice or care at all would be her family. The thought made me depressed as anything.

I whispered to James that I needed to leave, and he told Alice and Yvette. “It’s her head,” he said. It was my built-in, all-purpose excuse.

“Do you want us to come with you, cookie?” Alice whispered sympathetically.

“No, watch the rest of the show,” I whispered back. “We’ll take the train back early.”

I didn’t tell James about running into Fuse and Chloe. When we got outside I said, “I couldn’t be in there anymore, you know?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I don’t feel like going back yet, though.” I was too wound up from running into my mother’s new family.

James didn’t ask me why, only what I wanted to do instead. I couldn’t think of anything—most of the things I knew were in Brooklyn—so I told him that we should just ride the subways for a while.

We rode all the way down to the South Ferry stop and then all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park and then back to Grand Central. It took three hours total.

We didn’t really talk much during that time. We watched people get off and on the train. There were lots of shopping bags owing to the time of year, and the people carrying them all seemed tired to me, but warily optimistic. It put me in mind of Fuse asking me over to Mom’s house. I wondered how long he and Chloe had waited by the restroom at Radio City Music Hall.

“I have this sister…” I said to James right before we were about to get off the subway.

“You never said.”

“Well, she’s not technically related to me, so…” All of a sudden, it seemed too difficult to explain. Where would I start? From the typewriter case in Moscow Oblast? It would be a very long story. “She’s almost four,” I said. “Roughly the same number of years I lost, you know? Like, if you could take all that time and make a person, it would be her.”

“But you can’t do that.” James shook his head. “My brother,” he began before shaking his head again. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Please, say it.”

“Sasha lived eighteen years on this earth, and all that time didn’t add up to a damn thing. What that time is to me now, is a hole. I…I wish he’d never been born or that I’d never been born. I can’t talk about this.”

He kissed me then and I suppose I was glad for the distraction.

By the time we had gotten on the Metro North Railroad back to Tarrytown, it was pretty late. Having gotten a ride from Alice that morning, we had to call James’s mom, Raina, to pick us up at the train station.