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—I’m Sandrine, she said. And you are . . . ?

—Louie.

She repeated the name, pronouncing it like she was giving it a long, slow lick.

—If you want to go, I won’t stop you, but it’s been such a long time since I had someone to talk to. Sit with me? For a little while?

I didn’t have any run left and I felt drowsy, scattered. My eyes skated across the mirror pieces. In each of them was Sandrine’s face—pensive, fearful, frowning, in repose, moving as if alive. Hundreds of Sandrines, almost all of her, were trapped in those fragmented silver surfaces.

I must have spoken, because Sandrine laughed and said, I’ve been talking to them forty years and they haven’t answered yet. For a pretty girl like you, though, they might just whisper a little something.

Cracker Paradise lies about four miles east of DuBarry on State Road 17 and consists of a spacious one-story structure of navy blue concrete block set on a weedy patch of white sand that’s round as a bald spot and surrounded by slash pine. It doesn’t sport a huge neon sign like some roadhouses, just a little plastic MILLER HIGH LIFE sign above the door, and it has a slit window that’s been painted over so you can’t see in. When I was younger, Momma would leave me locked in the car while she partied, assuming glass would protect me from the men who peered in. I used to create fantasies about the place based on glimpses I had of the interior when the door swung open. Even today, now I’ve been inside a few times, it remains a kind of fantasy. I’ll hang out in the parking lot, sipping on a wine cooler slipped me by one of Momma’s friends, and picture slinky waitress queens dancing barefoot on sizzling short-order grills and serving slices of fried poison to travelers in bathroom fixtures, while out on the purple-lit bash and rumble of the dance floor, checkout girls from the Piggly Wiggly, acne-blemished counter girls from Buy-Rite, pretty-for-a-season Walmart girls with clownish face paint and last decade’s hairdo, they shake themselves into a low-grade fever, they make suggestions with their hips that turn the loose change in men’s pockets green, they slice hearts and pentagrams on the beer-slickered floor with their spike heels, looking to give it up for love-only-love and a cute duplex in Jax Beach.

A few nights ago, a hot July night with the moon causing the sand to give off sparkles and silvering the hoods of the cars encircling the club, and a couple of hundred rednecks jammed inside, I stood in the parking lot smoking with two girls from New Jersey, Ann Jeanette and Carmen, who intended to compete in the wet T-shirt contest later that night. They were good-looking, gum-snapping, tough-talking girls in their early twenties, with frosted hair and big boobs, and they wore bikini thongs and Cracker Paradise T-shirts. They told me they were on the run from Ann Jeanette’s boyfriend, who was connected and owned a recycling company in East Orange. Both girls were secretaries with the company, and they had stumbled across some paperwork they weren’t supposed to see. The boyfriend ratted them out to a Mafia guy, and they had to leave town in a hurry. Since then they’d worked their way down the East Coast, heading for Miami, where Carmen had friends, entering wet T-shirt contests to pay for a few months out of the country. They claimed to win most of the contests they entered and considered themselves pros on the circuit.

Carmen nudged my breasts and said, You should enter, hon. They’re paying out to fifth place.

I told her I was sixteen.

—Sixteen! My gawd! Ann Jeanette flicked ash from her Kool—her fake nails were gold with tiny black diamonds. You’re very mature for sixteen. Don’tcha think she’s mature, Carmen?

—Extremely, Carmen said. You gotta watch it with a figure like yours. Ann Jeanette’s little sister was wearing a C cup in junior high and by the time she’s your age, she needed a reduction.

—I’ll be seventeen soon, I said. I don’t think they’re going to get much bigger.

—Oh my gawd! Ann Jeanette rolled