FELICE:
A tall girl tumbled out of the car that had just parked in front of ours. Her face was a cluster of pale asymmetries. My throat tightened as she came forward and offered a winningly un-self-conscious smile. We’d just stopped for coffee, but I didn’t need it now.
“Iceleaf,” the girl said.
“What?”
“Iceleaf.” She looked at me like I was stupid. I felt stupid, looking at her. She seemed both wide-awake and drowsy, watching me through narrowed lids.
“I—
I stood there a minute, my ears still ringing, head ablaze with music, wind and sleeplessness. Did they speak English, here in…Columbus?
“I’m Felice,” she said now, crisply, clearly. “It’s customary on this planet to tell people your name, you know, when you meet them?”
We stood for a second. Her Levis were spattered with paint and pale muck—I’d find out in time that this was clay, that she was a painter and a sculptor—and she wore a white, man’s Oxford shirt untucked and unironed. It was this carelessness that made her natural beauty swim to the surface. Where I came from girls seemed to work so hard, women paid to have lips that full and skin that clear. It was practically all they did, in Los Angeles, aspiring to the condition that was this girl’s strictly by chance. Her eyes were light green, hair an exaggerated, theatrical red like a doll’s. She dragged on a cigarette then picked a scrap of tobacco from its unfiltered end off her lip with her fingers. This gesture seemed sexy as hell. Where there was smoke, there had to be fire.