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where I first heard the word “Mick.” It was just there, like the monument, a word hard as stone.
    We all dispersed. I didn’t go home right away. I went up the Hill, alone, to the Fairy Rock. The way was strange in the dark; it took me some time to get there, and when I found it I wished I hadn’t. It looked like a gaping mouth, the small pale stones around it like broken teeth. I thought I saw the Rock itself shift, change shape, lurch toward me. I turned and ran, bumping and sliding down the slope, my feet going so fast the rest of me could barely keep up.
    When I got home I slid through the back door like a shadow, went up the stairs. A light shone under my parents’ bedroom door. For a moment I thought my father had come home and my heart leapt, but then I heard my mother in there, her voice muffled. She was crying.
    I went into my own dark room and climbed under the covers, still wearing all my clothes. The cold had gotten into my bones, and the crying. I shivered for a long time before falling asleep.

CHAPTER 3
    At last the subway arrived at my stop. The car reeled and I fell against a stranger.
    â€œWatch it, b’y!” – a Newfoundlander.
    â€œFuck off!” So much for solidarity.
    Outside, I charged across the street and through the door of the glorified greasy spoon, waving guiltily at the other day-shift waitress. She looked grim. Jim had opened up a patio in May, essentially doubling the seating in the restaurant, but did he hire more staff? Of course not. The place had become trendy, and as the weather warmed up so did Jim’s greed. Two of us covered the entire restaurant inside and out, and the bus boy was Jim’s step-son, the kind of slug who stands around smoking when he should be clearing tables, then steals your tips.
    I changed into my uniform in the back room. I hadn’t shaved my legs in days and they looked like cacti sticking out from the ugly blue polyester dress with the sewn-on apron. I scuffed into my regulation red shoes, reminded as always of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the girl who got stuck in red shoes and danced until she dropped dead. Fucking morbid European tale. Customers were already pouring in by the time I emerged. The other waitress grabbed my arm.
    â€œYou take the back, okay?”
    â€œYou’re a champion, girl.” The back was hell, but the front was worse; you were farther from the kitchen. She smiled and hurried on her way, saying, “I already took an order for you. Number four wants the special, sausage, over-easy, brown toast, homefries.”
    I rushed to the kitchen to give the order and scrounge a pen and pad. Two tables nabbed me on my way, and so it went. Breakfast was a miserable blur. The patio wasn’t popular with the early diners, but as the breakfast crowd segued into lunch the place got blocked. People asking what the soup du jour was, and for all I knew, it was soup du my-arse. A table ran out on me without paying, and when I told Jim, he shook his head.
    â€œThat’ll have to come out of your pay, Ruby.”
    â€œ What ?”
    â€œIt’s a standard management procedure. Gives you more incentive to be attentive to the patrons.” That’s what he called people who ate at his trashy place: patrons .
    â€œBut it’s not my fault they hopped the fence.”
    â€œRuby…” he said. And then he actually wagged his finger at me.
    I looked at him. I imagined placing a nail gun to his lips and firing metal prong after metal prong into his face.
    â€œIncentive,” I said. “Sure thing, Jim.”
    By one o’clock I couldn’t think, I couldn’t talk, I could barely keep my legs moving, and I’d had to do my own table-clearing so that the slug could have his smoke breaks. I was relieved to see Brendan at his favourite table, right on time, with his inevitable newspaper. Brendan was a painter, an old guy, and a gentleman. I’d modeled for him