Free Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow

get those?” Julie asked. Beer. Budweiser.
    “Free.” Phoebe pulled up a dusty chair and sat. “When you’re a thief, stuff is free.” The mural across the room showed a frowning stone idol rising amid a cluster of palm trees on a South Seas island. Blue waters lapped against sands as clean and white as artificial sweetener. “Let’s go there sometime.” Phoebe peeled off two Buds. “We can’t spend our whole lives in this yucko city.” She ripped open her beer, jamming the circular tab onto her little finger like a ring.
    “Good idea,” said Julie. The idol’s eyes were crescent-shaped, like half-moons on the doors of two adjacent outhouses. Its thick lips were puckered in a perfect circle.
    Phoebe guzzled half the can. “Bud’s the best, Katz, and that’s the truth. Bud’s the best.” Burping with satisfaction, she dragged her wrist across her foamy smile.
    Julie opened her A & P grocery bag and drew out the rest of their feast—a box of pretzels, a bag of chocolate-chip cookies, a big bottle of Diet coke, and four waxily wrapped packages of Tastykake Krumpets.
    “Excellent selections. Truly excellent.” Phoebe polished off her beer in three greedy gulps. “Hey, know how I’m feeling right now? Know how? I’m feeling how it feels to be drunk. Try some, kid. Come in here with me.”
    Julie pulled the tab from her Bud and took a mouthful. She shuddered. Ants in spiked heels danced on her tongue. Wincing, she swallowed. “Yech.”
    “This is the life, eh?” Phoebe laughed like a roomful of morons and tore open her second Bud. “Hey, now that I’m drunk, I can tell you just how weird I think you are, how totally and completely weird. You’re weird, Katz.”
    “Weird? I’m weird. You’re the one who pees off bridges.”
    “Last night I heard our parents talking about your godhead. What’s your godhead?”
    “I don’t know.” She didn’t, though it probably had something to do with her mother.
    “Sure you do. Tell me. No secrets.”
    “I think it’s what makes a girl a virgin.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    The Tastykake Krumpets came three to a package: three wondrous bricks of sponge cake mortared together with butterscotch icing. Phoebe ate an entire set in one stupendous bite, washing them down with beer. “Bud’s so good,” she said weakly, limping toward the wall like somebody walking barefoot on a hot sidewalk. “Let’s save those other Krumpets for later.”
    “Happy birthday, Phoebe.”
    “Thanks, Katz. I have an announcement to make. Guess what?”
    “What?”
    “I’m going to be sick.” A dopey smile crossed Phoebe’s face, and she threw up on the South Seas mural.
    Julie jumped to her feet. The stone idol wore a beard of puke. “Gosh, Phoebe—you okay?” The restaurant already smelled so bad that Phoebe’s vomit made no difference.
    “The beer’s too damn warm, that’s the problem.” Phoebe pulled a tattered cloth from the nearest table and wiped her mouth. “Never drink beer when it’s warm. Now you know.”
    “Now I know.”
    Julie wanted to go home, but Phoebe insisted the party had barely begun. Together they explored the Deauville’s upper floors, wandering the rubble-strewn hallways, swallowing dust, inhaling mildew. They shouted “Asshole!” and “Pissface!” into the elevator shafts, giggling at the dirty echoes.
    “Let’s split up,” said Phoebe. Standing on one thin brown leg, leaning toward the empty shaft, she looked like a pair of scissors. “You take the high road.”
    “Huh? Why?”
    “More of an adventure that way. Whoever finds the neatest stuff gets to eat the other Krumpets.”
    “The Krumpets? I thought you were feeling sick.”
    “Nothing like a good barf to make a person hungry.”
    “What sort of stuff?”
    “I don’t know. Something real neat. Meet me in the lobby in half an hour. Bring something neat.”
    The rooms were all the same. Glass fragments. Ratty carpets. Bare mattresses, their springs breaking through