If you had seen her stepping off the 186 bus about 3:30 PM, just across the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, your eyes would have glanced off this plain, nondescript young woman. You would not have bothered to catalog the reasons she was nondescript, but these were medium height, dull brown hair and eyes, no makeup or jewelry, loose denim shirt, worn cords, flat shoes, a scuffed down vest, and a lumpy blue backpack on her back.
Actually, beneath the clothes was an underfed but abundant female shape. And tattoos—a spinal cord down her back, with snakes writhing around it; two severed heads, one on each breast; dead baby on her belly; huge cock on her right upper thigh; swastikas on both arms; and along her left side, a caricature of herself in naked embrace with a giant cockroach. No ink on her face, but close-up you could see where skin had been pierced by ear rivets, nose rings, cheek chains, and eyebrow studs; these vacated holes and her vacant expression made her look like she had walked away from an encounter with a firing squad.
Her name was Deena. Her original first name, Mary Ann, was imposed by her lying parents, so she'd gotten rid of it as soon as she got away from them, more than four years ago. Since then she had renamed herself many times. She had derived Deena from DNA, in honor of the test results that humiliated her father and may have helped kill him.
She had skipped the creep's funeral, shunned the family for years. Deena had never felt like a Hale, and from the age of twelve, she rebelled: hence the tattoos and piercings, the variegated hair, and enough makeup to obliterate every trace of her birth face. She took every kind of drug, stole without qualm, despised sex but would sleep with anyone, male or female, as long as she was paid. She sought out dangerous, violent men—bikers, drug dealers, dirty cops. Yet she would never harm animals or insects, and was a strict vegan even when on heroin. In truth she only loved violence that was visited upon her. After the stupid events that made her disown her father forever, this need intensified, and she skirted death many times.
But when David Hale died it was like a buzzer went off. Her extreme behavior hadn't changed her a bit. She was no different from anyone else. Crack was no different from her father's scotch, and body piercings were merely variations on the self-punishment of her mother's heels, wire bra, and girdle. Even the name she thought so clever, Deena, was an accidental contraction of David and Jean—her parents' names. So she removed all the makeup and metal, let her hair fade to brown, covered her tats with long-sleeved shirts, and kept the name, to punish herself.
