“No. I meant—”

“Hey, I’m your little brother! You look after me!”

“So you want to pimp for me? Is that your idea of a good career move?”

Christ de calyx! As her father might have said.

But Roch only smiled. “You can keep your day job.”

“Well, fuck you!”

Her reaction was involuntary. She hated him for bringing up the subject. Sure, she had done some things in the past. She was barely seventeen when they left home; Roch was younger. They slept on warehouse roofs some nights, and other nights they rented rooms in the wino hotels on Queen Street. You can’t survive on the street without doing something you don’t like. And so maybe she had done that—what he talked about—when they needed the money, and maybe once or twice just because they wanted the money … but that was the old days. He was crazy, coming here with a proposition like that.

So she stood up and said fuck you and it was a mistake, because Roch did not take well to that kind of abuse—as he had told her many times—and now he was standing up, inches away from her, so close she could smell the hot-metal reek of his breath. He did not blink at all. He took her wrist in a fierce grip. All that weight-lifting had made him strong.

He said, “You do it if I tell you to do it.” Then he slapped her.

The slap was painful and Amelie stumbled away from him. She caught her foot against the table supporting the stereo; she fell down hard on the floor and the tape player came tumbling down after her. Strange Days popped out of the cassette compartment with a streamer of tape reeling after it. Amelie closed her eyes.

Opened them, and saw Benjamin come out of the bedroom.

She looked up from the floor, blinking.

Benjamin stood in the doorway with his Levis half unbuttoned and his belt undone. He was naked from the waist up. His hair was tousled. He gave Amelie a long look and then stared at Roch. He said, “Who the hell are you?”