37.

After the incident, Audrey is detained in jail. Her father is called, collect. Jab to the old guy. An attorney is appointed by the courts because Audrey can’t afford one. Bond is set at only $5,000 but is not posted. Jab to Audrey.

She spends two weeks in a holding cell while waiting to enter a guilty plea for reckless destruction of property and creating a public disturbance. During Audrey’s confinement, McKenna takes a Greyhound to Kalamazoo every other day. Sometimes Audrey comes out to talk to her. Usually, she doesn’t.

One day, she does. Tapping her sandal nervously on the concrete floor in the visitation room, McKenna asks Audrey why she doesn’t chew her way out and come home. “I’ve got the getaway bus and everything,” she says.

Audrey flashes a crooked smile. Her smiles are maps of Tunisia—jagged, desolate. “I eat myself into situations,” she says. “Not out of them. Situations are more fun.”

“Yes,” McKenna says, nodding like she always does for Audrey, eager to please. “Because what’s the alternative, right?”

“I’m looking at it,” Audrey answers. The gum in her mouth is being murdered.

McKenna blurts it out: “You shouldn’t have eaten that restaurant.” She feels the ground buzzing beneath her feet. It’s what she’s wanted to say every time she’s visited. It’s what she has rehearsed a hundred times. Still, her voice shakes. “Now people know, Audrey. What are we going to do?”

Audrey stares. Her eyes strip McKenna naked. This isn’t love. There’s risk in love. Audrey’s malignance risks nothing, puts nothing at stake, exposes none of her own vulnerabilities. Her stare is pure and purposeless, like the desert sun, like cappuccino foam. Hot, frothy disdain. No room for salvation.

McKenna is unable to move. In the windowless room, the air is tropical. McKenna feels comforted that the security guard, an arm’s length away, could withdraw his nightstick and swat Audrey if she decides to lunge across the table and bite off McKen-na’s head.

But Audrey wouldn’t do that to her own sister, would she?

Would she?

The cop gnaws his thumbnail. Looks at it. Bites it in the same spot. Looks at it. Bites it again. The idle smirk under his moustache says he’s damn amused to be the guy—the guy!—who gets to stand guard over Kalamazoo’s biggest, dishiest news story in decades. To night, his buddies and their wives will gather around the electronic dartboard, stuffig their faces with jalapeno poppers, and ask him: What’s it like, man, what the hell is she like? Do you think she really did it ? What’s her problem, man, is she a psycho? How did she fake it, ‘cuz she couldn’t have actually done that, could she? And is it true she doesn’t have any feet? That’s fucking weird, but who gives a shit, right? She doesn’t need feet does she, she sure is hot, man, she can eat me anytime !

At Audrey’s arraignment, the bombshell:

The Caboose owners drop all charges. They’ve gotten so much free publicity! They were even mentioned in Jay Leno’s opening monologue on The To night Show ! And besides, the insurance is covering all the damages and then some, with enough to install a modern kitchen and hands-free faucets in the bathrooms.

“Your Honor,” Bart Cooper tells the judge, “We can’t in good conscience punish the girl who brought us this bounty. She is like a forest fie whose hellish destruction is an ugly but necessary pu-rifiation to allow precious new fauna to spring forth from the earth.”

His Honor accepts their wishes but wants to know one thing before Audrey is dismissed: “How, my dear, did you do it?”

She doesn’t react to the demeaning “my dear,” except for a barely perceptible clenching of her jaw. (Brave girl, spineless girl—you decide.)

Audrey’s response, channeling the soothing, emotionless tone of KITT, the Knight Rider car: “I chewed and swallowed, Your Honor.”

The judge gazes onto the sea—nay, the ocean—of chuckling faces in the courtroom. Out there, adrift, suffering from seasickness, sit Murray, Toby, and McKenna. The color of snow, all of them. They don’t understand the outside world. They want to be safe at home, far away, behind closed doors.

The judge turns to Audrey: “If you won’t divulge how you did it, will you please tell the court why you did it?”

Audrey: “I heard it was a good place to eat.”

Amid the uproarious laughter, a psychiatric evaluation is ordered.