Chapter 1: Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash

NEW HAMPSHIRE 1983

THE FIRST COURTROOM I EVER SAW WAS ON AN EPISODE OF ONE Life to Live. My older sister, Éclair, was a soap opera fanatic. Days of Our Lives was her favorite, but she watched them all. I was six at the time, and she was thirteen. For a long time our family didn’t have a TV, because our parents were hippies and thought television was the harbinger of doom. “If you want to rot your brain, you can pay for it yourself someday,” my mom said.

So one summer Éclair called her bluff and worked her ass off laying mulch for half the farmers in the county, quitting as soon as she had her $560. The TV she bought lived in her room like a devoted pet. I was permitted the special privilege of watching her shows with her only if I promised not to ask dumb questions (“Why did Tony give the diamond necklace to the island girl?” “What does ‘blackmail’ mean?”), which meant I had to fill in the blanks myself, creating an even more dizzying web of amnesia plotlines and secret agendas on top of the existing ones.

In the One Life to Live episode that’s seared into my memory, Karen the tormented housewife is forced to testify as a witness, in defense of her best friend, Viki Lord Riley, who’s been accused of murdering an evil tycoon. In the climactic scene, the merciless prosecutor rips Karen to shreds, exposing the truth that she was secretly a prostitute, a word that shocked the characters so much I could not even imagine what it meant.

What really confused me was why Karen was being attacked by the lawyer in the first place. Wasn’t Viki Lord Riley the one on trial? Wasn’t Karen just the witness?

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Éclair explained. “The point is, if you have a secret, you’re fucked.”

It’s still probably the wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say.