The itching started that night. She wondered if the change in climate had given her dandruff, but there were no flakes, only a crawling sensation that kept her awake half the night. She figured it was lice, picked up from Dusty’s couch cushions. She waited for the lice to die of old age, but they only seemed to multiply.
A week later, Dusty patiently examined Greta’s scalp with the metal comb she used on her cats. She didn’t find anything. Greta passed her the magnifying glass and reminded her that they were the size of sesame seeds, that their eggs looked like specks of dirt.
Dusty peered at Greta’s scalp under the glass. “There’s nothing here,” Dusty said finally. “You must have… phantom lice.”
Stacy gasped. “Phantom lice!”
The phantoms seemed to gather in one place near the back of Greta’s head. They took turns sucking her scalp as if waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and the sucking was incessant. Greta’s instinct was to blast them with heat, so she burned her scalp with a hair dryer for thirty minutes a day, four days in a row, and then emptied a bottle of peroxide on her head and sat in the blazing sun for six straight hours.
“Anyway, long story short, the itch never went away,” Greta whispered. “I’m still scratching that same spot, twenty years later.”
Greta was supposed to be in eighth grade that year, graduating with the same twenty-four kids she’d known since kindergarten. Now she was enrolled at a school called Wallace, which had the look and feel of a detention center. Her closest friends in California had been Chinese and Korean, so she tried to ingratiate herself with the Asian Arizonans, but they were hesitant to accept her. Looking back, it was probably her hair—the peroxide had turned it orange—and her way of wearing fishnets with gym shorts, not a popular look at the time.
Greta started writing stories and passing them to the girls in English class. The stories were inspired by but much tamer than the ones she’d studied in Penthouse, a stack of which she’d found on the sidewalk, in a box labeled “Larry’s business papers.” Greta hated the word “cum,” for example, but the stories still qualified as erotica, with sex between female students and teachers. The girls had sex in various classrooms and closets while Ralph, the janitor, polished the linoleum with an industrial buffer and touched himself. She made sure to include as many sensory details as possible, such as the clicking noise of the slide projector, the smell of Bactine, the last words written on the chalkboard.
The girls were easily seduced, but Greta was more interested in her English teacher, Mr. Galucci. Hopefully, he would intercept one of these missives and see how firmly she’d embraced his lectures on specificity. She’d been flirting with him for weeks, to no avail. When she brought him an African lily, he said, “This is beautiful, but do you know who would really love it? Ms. Garcia, the Spanish teacher.” When she brought him a long rope of red licorice, he insisted on cutting it into twenty-three pieces to share with the whole class. When she offered to rub his shoulders one day, he asked if she was feeling all right and sent her to the nurse, and when he finally confiscated her stories, he delivered them straight to the principal, who suspended Greta for five days.
When the school year ended, Greta was returned to Los Angeles and passed off to Uncle Derek, who lived in a modest ranch house in Inglewood. Derek was quiet and conservative. He’d met his wife at church. Her name was Petra.
Petra was a curvy chatterbox from Croatia, only ten years older than Greta and unemployed, so they were alone together in the house all day. After showering, Petra would wander into the den with a hair dryer, stand naked in the harsh sunlight, unashamed of her rolls and folds, and blow-dry her massive bush, which put Greta in hysterics. At fourteen, Greta was sexually precocious but otherwise weirdly na?ve. Petra seemed… not stupid, exactly, but superstitious. Greta would often walk by the master bedroom and see Petra on the bed, naked from the waist down, her shapely legs resting against the wall.
“You didn’t heard us?” Petra would say in her adorable accent. “I took love from your uncle before. It was very special feeling. I wished for more. I wanted baby before one years.”
Poor Petra couldn’t seem to get pregnant. That’s why her legs were elevated, to encourage the sperm to swim in the right direction. At least she had Greta, who was still technically a child even though she felt forty-five. Since almost everything Petra uttered was in the past tense, Greta felt like they’d lived together for years and were constantly reminiscing. Greta’s tactic was to play dumb—or young, rather—so that Petra might keep her forever. She asked as many stupid questions as possible and pretended not to know how to use basic appliances.
“What you is doing?” Petra said, shaking her head. “I will learn you to cook coffee, and I have informations for dishwasher.” She seemed defeated. “I think I turn on cigarette again.”
Cigarettes were something you turned off and on, like television. Over the next few weeks, it became clear that Petra wanted Greta to be older, not younger. She taught Greta interesting Croatian insults like “pi?ka ti materina” （your mother’s vagina） and “idi u tri pi?ke materine” （go into your mother’s vagina three times）。 She gave Greta adult gifts: miracle bras, thongs, makeup, hair dye.
“Your eyes was brown,” Petra explained. “So you wear blue shadow. But my eyes was blue, so I wear brown.”
On Saturdays, they visited bridal shops all over Los Angeles. Petra would tell the salespeople that Greta was engaged, which they couldn’t have really believed, but she’d browbeat them into bringing out the gowns. With her new burgundy hair and blue eyeshadow, Greta looked like a mail-order bride from Lithuania. One of the salespeople, an older man wearing a suit, took Greta aside and asked if she wanted him to call the police. He seemed certain that Petra was a trafficker, that Greta was about to be sold into sex slavery.
“She’s my aunt,” Greta said, and laughed. “She’s from Croatia.”
“Listen to your gut,” the man said ominously. “If it doesn’t feel right, don’t be afraid to tell someone. Go to a neighbor’s house. Where do you live?”
“Inglewood,” Greta said.
“Call 911,” he said.
Other than on Sundays, which Petra and Derek spent at the swap meet alone, and Greta’s daily walk to the store, she and Petra spent nearly every minute together. They watched soaps, ate ice cream from the same bowl, sometimes held hands.
“You have fourteen years?” Petra asked one day.
Greta nodded.
“You were virgin, right?”
Greta knew what Petra meant but was unsure what Petra wanted to hear. Tentatively, she said yes, she were virgin but had been to third base. Petra seemed intrigued. Were Greta bleeding? Greta nodded. Were she masturbating? Greta said sure. How? Greta described her technique, leaving out the part about imagining Petra naked with the UPS guy.
It was all a setup, unfortunately. Now, instead of bridal shops, Petra was dragging Greta to a megachurch and begging her to “find Lord,” as if He were in the crowd somewhere, or hiding under a folding chair. As it turned out, everyone at the church knew who Greta was, because there was this whole other life Petra had been hiding, and they were all waiting for Greta to be saved. Now Petra warned Greta about hell every five minutes. Greta had never thought of hell as a real place, but according to Petra, you showed up as yourself, a human being with thoughts and feelings, and Satan performed elaborate CIA interrogation techniques on you. Noise torture, bone breaking, force-feeding, enemas, and don’t forget about the lake of fire, and the river made of molten lava, and the thirst, the horrible, horrible thirst.