Taylor is wearing a skirt—something she’s not accustomed to, but Lou Ann insisted on loaning her a nice beige suit for Oprah Winfrey. She claimed it was against some regulation to wear jeans on television. Jax got a good laugh ut of that, but to his credit, he is nicer to Lou Ann than most guys would be.

Taylor gets a nervous stomach when she thinks about the taping tomorrow morning. She suspects these shows are just a way of making a spectacle out of bad things that happen to people. But Turtle really wanted to do it. She’d never understood before that actual people could appear on television.

She seems to have a vague idea they will meet the Ninja Turtles.

The garbage guy is still looking. He has curly hair and a terrific smile. Taylor crosses her legs and raises her hand just a little. If he can really see in, he’ll take it as a wave.

He does. He makes a small motion with his chin, indicat-ing that she and Turtle should abandon their limo in favor of his garbage truck. Taylor gives it some thought, but decides to go ahead with Oprah.

“It’s an adorable outfit,” the wardrobe woman tells Taylor,

“but I’m just suggesting something a little more feminine.

We have this little jumper from wardrobe, see? The color would look absolutely super on the set.”

Lou Ann can have the last laugh now: Oprah Winfrey’s people don’t want Turtle to wear her overalls on television.

The overalls are brand new, bright green, perfectly decent.

“That dress is ten sizes too big for Turtle,” Taylor says.

“Doesn’t matter. We just pin it in back, see? Nobody sees the back. That’s the secret of TV—you only have to worry about what shows up front, your back can be a mess. And we’ll put this bow in her hair, okay, sweetheart? She’ll look super.”

“She’ll look younger,” Taylor says. “If that’s what you’re going for. She’ll look like a baby doll that saved somebody’s life.”

The woman crosses her arms and frowns. Her short, black hair looks wet and oiled, like a sea otter. The comb rakes through it stay perfectly in place. “It’s going to be difficult,”she says. “We’d have to run her mike wire up from the back.”

“You can manage,” Taylor says, knowing this can’t be the problem. Men wear pants on television every day of the week.

The other guests are not being harassed about wardrobe concerns. Taylor met them all in the hotel lobby this morning while they waited for the limos. There’s a Cub Scout who flagged down help when his scoutmaster collapsed on their tenderfoot survival hike; a fourth-grader who saved her sister from a pit-bull attack by hitting it with a dog dish and the whole Barbie Dream Date ensemble, including the convert-ible; and an eleven-year-old who drove the car home when her baby-sitter passed out from multiple bee stings in a city park. Taylor feels, frankly, that the eleven-year-old showed bad judgment all around, and the other two probably just acted without thinking. Turtle is the youngest and has the best story. She doesn’t see why they need to blow it out of proportion by dressing her up like Barbie’s baby sister.

The small green room where they are waiting is crowded and tense. Turtle fidgets, and the wardrobe woman hovers, her raised eyebrows still pushing the question.

“What do you want to wear?” Taylor asks Turtle.

Turtle hugs herself. “This,” she says.

Taylor smiles at the sea-otter woman. “Looks like she’s made up her mind.”

The woman pushes the purple jumper against Turtle’s front, looking at Taylor. “I really think, look, don’t you? It’s so much more of a visual.”

“My daughter said no, thank you.” Turtle recoils from the bunched fabric, and Taylor narrows her eyes at the woman, who seems nevertheless to be holding her ground. A makeup man comes over at a trot. He’s wearing the laced-up, tassely loafers that people call “boating shoes,” even though most of them will never lay leather to a boat. Taylor wonders why everyone here seems dressed for some kind of sport—the secretaries in leggings, the camera crew in running shoes, all bustling around frowning, with nothing the least bit sporty on their agendas. It’s as if they’re expecting at any minute a sudden announcement: Vacation starts now.

“You have wonderful cheekbones, dear,” the makeup man tells Taylor, and he lobs her in the face with a powder puff.

6

THIEVES OF CHILDREN

ANNAWAKE FOURKILLER LOOKS UP FROM her law briefs, startled. “Could you turn that up?”

The secretary, Jinny, automatically reaches to turn down the volume on the little TV at the end of her desk.