The tattoo story: before she transferred to Gavin’s high school Anna had run away three times in search of peace and quiet or maybe in search of adventure and change, the story shifted a bit with each telling. She’d fallen in with a dangerous crowd at her old school and a police officer had brought her home at two a.m. She’d been gone for three days but her parents hadn’t reported her missing. She was high out of her mind, laughing in the foyer while her parents talked to the cop, a black new tattoo bleeding softly on her shoulder, and the story Sasha told Gavin was that the cop had seen the squalor of the house and called Family Services, and it was the social worker’s idea to get Anna transferred to the magnet school. Something about getting her away from her sinking friends, a new environment, the positive influence of her less-screwed-up older half-sister, but Anna never talked about any of that, Anna only smiled and touched the tattoo on her shoulder and said “Even when I’m stoned I have good taste in tattoos.”
— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet
