The Girls

1

It was the end of the sixties, or the summer before the end, and that’s what it seemed like, an endless, formless summer. The Haight populated with white-garbed Process members handing out their oat-colored pamphlets, the jasmine along the roads that year blooming particularly heady and full. Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren’t, that was a thing, too — you could be some moon creature, chiffon over the lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric.

But that was all happening somewhere else, not in Petaluma with its low-hipped ranch houses, the covered wagon perpetually parked in front of the Hi-Ho Restaurant. The sun-scorched crosswalks. I was fourteen but looked much younger. People liked to say this to me. Connie swore I could pass for sixteen, but we told each other a lot of lies. We’d been friends all through junior high, Connie waiting for me outside classrooms as patient as a cow, all our energy subsumed into the theatrics of friendship. She was plump but didn’t dress like it, in cropped cotton shirts with Mexican embroidery, too-tight skirts that left an angry rim on her upper thighs. I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.

Come September, I’d be sent off to the same boarding school my mother had gone to. They’d built a well-tended campus around an old convent in Monterey, the lawns smooth and sloped. Shreds of fog in the mornings, brief hits of the nearness of salt water. It was an all-girls school, and I’d have to wear a uniform — low-heeled shoes and no makeup, middy blouses threaded with navy ties. It was a holding place, really, enclosed by a stone wall and populated with bland, moon-faced daughters. Camp Fire Girls and Future Teachers shipped off to learn 160 words a minute, shorthand. To make dreamy, overheated promises to be one another’s bridesmaids at Royal Hawaiian weddings.

My impending departure forced a newly critical distance on my friendship with Connie. I’d started to notice certain things, almost against my will. How Connie said, “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” as if we were shopgirls in London instead of inexperienced adolescents in the farm belt of Sonoma County. We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high schools.

Every day after school, we’d click seamlessly into the familiar track of the afternoons. Waste the hours at some industrious task: following Vidal Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions.

As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school.

Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey.

Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk).

Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over. As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash, a silk bandanna around its neck. How thrilled I’d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl’s, and how vacant I’d felt when it was over, when no one needed to look at me anymore.

I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you — the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

—

That day in the park was the first time I saw Suzanne and the others. I’d ridden my bike there, aimed at the smoke streaming from the grill. No one spoke to me except the man pressing burgers into the grates with a bored, wet sizzle. The shadows of the oaks moved over my bare arms, my bike tipped in the grass. When an older boy in a cowboy hat ran into me, I purposefully slowed so he would bump into me again. The kind of flirting Connie might do, practiced as an army maneuver.

“What’s wrong with you?” he muttered. I opened my mouth to apologize, but the boy was already walking off. Like he’d known he didn’t need to hear whatever I was going to say.

The summer gaped before me — the scatter of days, the march of hours, my mother swanning around the house like a stranger. I had spoken to my father a few times on the phone. It had seemed painful for him, too. He’d asked me oddly formal questions, like a distant uncle who knew me only as a series of secondhand facts: Evie is fourteen, Evie is short. The silences between us would’ve been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse — I could hear how happy he was to be gone.

I sat on a bench alone, napkins spread across my knees, and ate my hamburger.

It was the first meat I’d had in a long time. My mother, Jean, had stopped eating meat in the four months since the divorce. She’d stopped doing a lot of things. Gone was the mother who’d made sure I bought new underwear every season, the mother who’d rolled my white bobby socks as sweetly as eggs. Who’d sewn my dolls pajamas that matched mine, down to the exact pearly buttons. She was ready to attend to her own life with the eagerness of a schoolgirl at a difficult math problem. Any spare moment, she stretched. Going up on her toes to work her calves. She lit incense that came wrapped in aluminum foil and made my eyes water. She started drinking a new tea, made from some aromatic bark, and shuffled around the house sipping it, touching her throat absently as if recovering from a long illness.

The ailment was vague, but the cure was specific. Her new friends suggested massage. They suggested the briny waters of sensory deprivation tanks. They suggested E-meters, Gestalt, eating only high-mineral foods that had been planted during a full moon. I couldn’t believe my mother took their advice, but she listened to everyone. Eager for an aim, a plan, believing the answer could come from any direction at any time, if only she tried hard enough.

She searched until there was only searching left. The astrologer in Alameda who made her cry, talking about the inauspicious shadow cast by her rising sign. The therapies that involved throwing herself around a padded room filled with strangers and whirling until she hit something. She came home with foggy tinges under the skin, bruises that deepened to a vivid meat. I saw her touch the bruises with something like fondness. When she looked up and saw me watching, she blushed. Her hair was newly bleached, stinking of chemicals and artificial roses.

“Do you like it?” she said, grazing the sheared ends with her fingers.

I nodded, though the color made her skin look washed by jaundice.

She kept changing, day by day. Little things. She bought handcrafted earrings from women in her encounter group, came back swinging primitive bits of wood from her ears, enameled bracelets the color of after-dinner mints jittery on her wrists. She started lining her eyes with an eyeliner pencil she held over a lighter flame. Turning the point until it softened and she could draw slashes at each eye, making her look sleepy and Egyptian.

She paused in my doorway on her way out for the night, dressed in a tomato-red blouse that exposed her shoulders. She kept pulling the sleeves down. Her shoulders were dusted with glitter.

“You want me to do your eyes too, sweetheart?”

But I had nowhere to be. Who would care if my eyes looked bigger or bluer?

“I might get back late. So sleep well.” My mother leaned over to kiss the top of my head. “We’re good, aren’t we? The two of us?”

She patted me, smiling so her face seemed to crack and reveal the full rush of her need. Part of me did feel all right, or I was confusing familiarity with happiness. Because that was there even when love wasn’t — the net of family, the purity of habit and home. It was such an unfathomable amount of time that you spent at home, and maybe that’s the best you could get — that sense of endless enclosure, like picking for the lip of tape but never finding it. There were no seams, no interruptions — just the landmarks of your life that had become so absorbed in you that you couldn’t even acknowledge them. The chipped willow-print dinner plate I favored for forgotten reasons. The wallpaper in the hallway so known to me as to be entirely incommunicable to another person — every fading copse of pastel palm trees, the particular personalities I ascribed to each blooming hibiscus.

My mother stopped enforcing regular mealtimes, leaving grapes in a colander in the sink or bringing home glass jars of dilled miso soup from her macrobiotic cooking class. Seaweed salads dripping with a nauseating amber oil. “Eat this for breakfast every day,” she said, “and you’ll never have another zit.”

I cringed, pulling my fingers away from the pimple on my forehead.

There had been many late-night planning sessions between my mother and Sal, the older woman she had met in group. Sal was endlessly available to my mother, coming over at odd hours, impatient for drama. Wearing tunics with mandarin collars, her gray hair cut short so her ears showed, making her look like an elderly boy. My mother spoke to Sal about acupuncture, of the movement of energies around meridian points. The charts.

“I just want some space,” my mother said, “for me. This world takes it out of you, doesn’t it?”

Sal shifted on her wide rear, nodded. Dutiful as a bridled pony.

My mother and Sal were drinking her woody tea from bowls, a new affectation my mother had picked up. “It’s European,” she’d said defensively, though I had said nothing. When I walked through the kitchen, both women stopped talking, but my mother cocked her head. “Baby,” she said, gesturing me closer. She squinted. “Part your bangs from the left. More flattering.”

I’d parted my hair that way to cover the pimple, gone scabby from picking. I’d coated it with vitamin E oil but couldn’t stop myself from messing with it, flaking on toilet paper to soak up the blood.

Sal agreed. “Round face shape,” she said with authority. “Bangs might not be a good idea at all, for her.”

I imagined how it would feel to topple Sal over in her chair, how her bulk would bring her down fast. The bark tea spilling on the linoleum.

They quickly lost interest in me. My mother rekindling her familiar story, like the stunned survivor of a car accident. Dropping her shoulders as if to settle even further into the misery.

“And the most hilarious part,” my mother went on, “the part that really gets me going?” She smiled at her own hands. “Carl’s making money,” she said. “That currency stuff.” She laughed again. “Finally. It actually worked. But it was my money that paid her salary,” she said. “My mother’s movie money. Spent on that girl.”

—

My mother was talking about Tamar, the assistant my father had hired for his most recent business. It had something to do with currency exchange. Buying foreign money and trading it back and forth, shifting it enough times so you were left, my father insisted, with pure profit, sleight of hand on a grand scale. That’s what the French language tapes in his car had been for: he’d been trying to push along a deal involving francs and lire.

Now he and Tamar were living together in Palo Alto. I’d only met her a few times: she’d picked me up from school once, before the divorce. Waving lazily from her Plymouth Fury. In her twenties, slim and cheerful, Tamar constantly alluded to weekend plans, an apartment she wished were bigger, her life textured in a way I couldn’t imagine. Her hair was so blond it was almost gray, and she wore it loose, unlike my mother’s smooth curls. At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgment. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in various crude positions. Tamar was very pretty. She gathered her hair up in a plastic comb and cracked her neck, smiling over at me as she drove.

“Want some gum?”

I unwrapped two cloudy sticks from their silver jackets. Feeling something adjacent to love, next to Tamar, thighs scudding on the vinyl seat. Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed. And that’s what I did for Tamar — I responded to her symbols, to the style of her hair and clothes and the smell of her L’Air du Temps perfume, like this was data that mattered, signs that reflected something of her inner self. I took her beauty personally.

When we arrived home, the gravel crackling under the car wheels, she asked to use the bathroom.

“Of course,” I said, vaguely thrilled to have her in my house, like a visiting dignitary. I showed her the nice bathroom, by my parents’ room. Tamar peeked at the bed and wrinkled her nose. “Ugly comforter,” she said under her breath.

Until then, it had just been my parents’ comforter, but abruptly I felt secondhand shame for my mother, for the tacky comforter she had picked out, had even been foolish enough to be pleased by.

I sat at the dining table listening to the muffled sound of Tamar peeing, of the faucet running. She was in there a long time. When Tamar finally emerged, something was different. It took me a moment to realize she was wearing my mother’s lipstick, and when she noticed me noticing her, it was as if I’d interrupted a movie she was watching. Her face rapt with the presentiment of some other life.

—

My favorite fantasy was the sleep cure I had read about in Valley of the Dolls. The doctor inducing long-term sleep in a hospital room, the only answer for poor, strident Neely, gone muddy from the Demerol. It sounded perfect — my body kept alive by peaceful, reliable machines, my brain resting in watery space, as untroubled as a goldfish in a glass bowl. I’d wake up weeks later. And even though life would slot back into its disappointing place, there would still be that starched stretch of nothing.

Boarding school was meant to be a corrective, the push I needed. My parents, even in their separate, absorbing worlds, were disappointed in me, distressed by my mediocre grades. I was an average girl, and that was the biggest disappointment of all — there was no shine of greatness on me. I wasn’t pretty enough to get the grades I did, the scale not tipping heartily enough in the direction of looks or smarts. Sometimes I would be overtaken with pious impulses to do better, to try harder, but of course nothing changed. Other mysterious forces seemed to be in play. The window near my desk left open so I wasted math class watching the shudder of leaves. My pen leaking so I couldn’t take notes. The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead.

My mother said I looked like my grandmother, but this seemed suspicious, a wishful lie meant to give false hope. I knew my grandmother’s story, repeated like a reflexive prayer. Harriet the date farmer’s daughter, plucked from the sunburned obscurity of Indio and brought to Los Angeles. Her soft jaw and damp eyes. Small teeth, straight and slightly pointed, like a strange and beautiful cat. Coddled by the studio system, fed whipped milk and eggs, or broiled liver and five carrots, the same dinner my grandmother ate every night of my childhood. The family holing up in the sprawling ranch in Petaluma after she retired, my grandmother growing show roses from Luther Burbank cuttings and keeping horses.

When my grandmother died, we were like our own country in those hills, living off her money, though I could bicycle into town. It was more of a psychological distance — as an adult, I would wonder at our isolation. My mother tiptoed around my father, and so did I — his sideways glances at us, his encouragements to eat more protein, to read Dickens or breathe more deeply. He ate raw eggs and salted steaks and kept a plate of beef tartare in the refrigerator, spooning out bites five or six times a day. “Your outer body reflects your inner self,” he said, and did his gymnastics on a Japanese mat by the pool, fifty push-ups while I sat on his back. It was a form of magic, being lifted into the air, cross-legged. The oat grass, the smell of the cooling earth.

When a coyote would come down from the hills and fight with the dog — the nasty, quick hiss that thrilled me — my father would shoot the coyote dead. Everything seemed that simple. The horses I copied from a pencil drawing book, shading in their graphite manes. Tracing a picture of a bobcat carrying away a vole in its jaws, the sharp tooth of nature. Later I’d see how the fear had been there all along. The flurry I felt when our mother left me alone with the nanny, Carson, who smelled damp and sat in the wrong chair. How they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn’t. And even moments of happiness were followed by some letdown — my father’s laugh, then the scramble to keep up with him as he strode far ahead of me. My mother’s hands on my feverish forehead, then the desperate aloneness of my sickroom, my mother disappeared into the rest of the house, talking on the phone to someone in a voice I didn’t recognize. A tray of Ritz crackers and chicken noodle soup gone cold, sallow meat breaching the scrim of fat. A starry emptiness that felt, even as a child, something like death.

I didn’t wonder how my mother spent her days. How she must have sat in the empty kitchen, the table smelling of the domestic rot of the sponge, and waited for me to clatter in from school, for my father to come home.

My father, who kissed her with a formality that embarrassed us all, who left beer bottles on the steps that trapped wasps and beat his bare chest in the morning to keep his lungs strong. He clung tight to the brute reality of his body, his thick ribbed socks showing above his shoes, flecked from the cedar sachets he kept in his drawers. The way he made a joke of checking his reflection in the hood of the car. I tried to save up things to tell him, combing through my days for something to provoke a glint of interest. It didn’t occur to me, until I was an adult, that it was strange to know so much about him when he seemed to know nothing about me. To know that he loved Leonardo da Vinci because he invented solar power and was born poor. That he could identify the make of any car just by the sound of the engine and thought everyone should know the names of trees. He liked when I agreed that business school was a scam or nodded when he said that the teenager in town who’d painted his car with peace signs was a traitor. He’d mentioned once that I should learn classical guitar, though I had never heard him listen to any music except for those theatrical cowboy bands, tapping their emerald cowboy boots and singing about yellow roses. He felt that his height was the only thing that had prevented him from achieving success.

“Robert Mitchum is short too,” he’d said to me once. “They make him stand on orange crates.”

—

As soon as I’d caught sight of the girls cutting their way through the park, my attention stayed pinned on them. The black-haired girl with her attendants, their laughter a rebuke to my aloneness. I was waiting for something without knowing what. And then it happened. Quick, but still I saw it: the girl with black hair pulled down the neckline of her dress for a brief second, exposing the red nipple of her bare breast. Right in the middle of a park swarming with people. Before I could fully believe it, the girl yanked her dress back up. They were all laughing, raunchy and careless; none of them even glanced up to see who might be watching.

The girls moved into the alley alongside the restaurant, farther past the grill. Practiced and smooth. I didn’t look away. The older one lifted the lid of a dumpster. The redhead bent down and the black-haired girl used her knee as a step, hoisting herself over the edge. She was looking for something inside, but I couldn’t imagine what. I stood to throw away my napkins and stopped at the garbage can, watching. The black-haired girl was handing things from the dumpster to the others: a bag of bread, still in its packaging, an anemic-looking cabbage that they sniffed, then tossed back in. A seemingly well-established procedure — would they actually eat the food? When the black-haired girl emerged for the last time, climbing over the rim and slinging her weight onto the ground, she was holding something in her hands. It was a strange shape, the color of my own skin, and I edged closer.

When I realized it was an uncooked chicken, sheened in plastic, I must have stared harder, since the black-haired girl turned and caught my glance. She smiled and my stomach dropped. Something seemed to pass between us, a subtle rearranging of air. The frank, unapologetic way she held my gaze. But she jarred back to attention when the screen door of the restaurant banged open. Out came a hefty man, already shouting. Shooing them like dogs. The girls grabbed the bag of bread and the chicken and took off running. The man stopped and watched them for a minute. Wiping his large hands on his apron, his chest moving with effort.

By then the girls were a block away, their hair streaming behind them like flags, and a black school bus heaved past and slowed, and the three of them disappeared inside.

—

The sight of them; the gruesomely fetal quality of the chicken, the cherry of the girl’s single nipple. All of it was so garish, and maybe that’s why I kept thinking of them. I couldn’t put it together. Why these girls needed food from the dumpster. Who had been driving the bus, what kind of people would paint it that color. I’d seen that they were dear to one another, the girls, that they’d passed into a familial contract — they were sure of what they were together. The long night that stretched ahead, my mother out with Sal, suddenly seemed unbearable.

—

That was the first time I ever saw Suzanne — her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. She seemed as strange and raw as those flowers that bloom in lurid explosion once every five years, the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty. And what had the girl seen when she looked at me?

I used the bathroom inside the restaurant. Keep truckin’, scrawled with a marker. Tess Pyle eats dick! The accompanying illustrations had been crossed out. All the silly, cryptic marks of humans who were resigned to being held in a place, shunted through the perfunctory order of things. Who wanted to make some small protest. The saddest: Fuck, written in pencil.

While I washed my hands, drying them with a stiff towel, I studied myself in the mirror over the sink. For a moment, I tried to see myself through the eyes of the girl with the black hair, or even the boy in the cowboy hat, studying my features for a vibration under the skin. The effort was visible in my face, and I felt ashamed. No wonder the boy had seemed disgusted: he must have seen the longing in me. Seen how my face was blatant with need, like an orphan’s empty dish. And that was the difference between me and the black-haired girl — her face answered all its own questions.

I didn’t want to know these things about myself. I splashed water on my face, cold water, like Connie had once told me to do. “Cold water makes your pores close up,” and maybe it was true: I felt my skin tighten, water dripping down my face and neck. How desperately Connie and I thought that if we performed these rituals — washed our faces with cold water, brushed our hair into a static frenzy with a boar-bristle brush before bed — some proof would solve itself and a new life would spread out before us.

2

Cha ching, the slot machine in Connie’s garage went, like a cartoon, Peter’s features soaked in its rosy glow. He was eighteen, Connie’s older brother, and his forearms were the color of toast. His friend Henry hovered at his side. Connie decided she had a crush on Henry, so our Friday night would be devoted to perching on the weight-lifting bench, Henry’s orange motorcycle parked beside us like a prize pony. We’d watch the boys play the slot machine, drinking the off-brand beer Connie’s father kept in the garage fridge. Later they’d shoot the empty bottles with a BB gun, crowing at each glassy burst.

I knew I’d see Peter that night, so I’d worn an embroidered shirt, my hair foul with hairspray. I’d dotted a pimple on my jaw with a beige putty of Merle Norman, but it collected along the rim and made it glow. As long as my hair stayed in place, I looked nice, or at least I thought so, and I tucked in my shirt to show the tops of my small breasts, the artificial press of cleavage from my bra. The feeling of exposure gave me an anxious pleasure that made me stand straighter, holding my head on my neck like an egg in a cup. Trying to be more like the black-haired girl in the park, that easy cast of her face. Connie narrowed her eyes when she saw me, a muscle by her mouth twitching, but she didn’t say anything.

—

Peter had really only spoken to me for the first time two weeks before. I’d been waiting for Connie downstairs. Her bedroom was much smaller than mine, her house meaner, but we spent most of our time there. The house done up in a maritime theme, her father’s misguided attempt to approximate female decoration. I felt bad for Connie’s father: his night job at a dairy plant, the arthritic hands he clenched and unclenched nervously. Connie’s mother lived somewhere in New Mexico, near a hot spring, had twin boys and another life no one ever spoke of. For Christmas, she had once sent Connie a compact of cracked blush and a Fair Isle sweater that was so small neither of us could squeeze our head through the hole.

“The colors are nice,” I said hopefully.

Connie just shrugged. “She’s a bitch.”

Peter crashed through the front door, dumping a book on the kitchen table. He nodded at me in his mild way and started making a sandwich — pulling out slices of white bread, an acid-bright jar of mustard.

“Where’s the princess?” he said. His mouth was chapped a violent pink. Slightly coated, I imagined, with pot resin.

“Getting a jacket.”

“Ah.” He slapped the bread together and took a bite. He watched me while he chewed.

“Looking good these days, Boyd,” he said, then swallowed hard. His assessment knocked me so off balance that I felt I had almost imagined it. Was I even supposed to say anything back? I’d already memorized the sentence.

He turned then at a noise from the front door, a girl in a denim jacket, her shape muffled by the screen. Pamela, his girlfriend. They were a constant couple, porous with each other; wearing similar clothes, silently passing the newspaper back and forth on the couch or watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Picking lint off each other as if from their own selves. I had seen Pamela at the high school, those times I’d ridden my bike past the dun-colored building. The rectangles of half-dry grass, the low, wide steps where older girls were always sitting in poor-boy shirts, pinkies linked, palming packs of Kents. The whiff of death among them, the boyfriends in humid jungles. They were like adults, even in the way they flicked the ashes of their cigarettes with weary snaps of the wrist.

“Hey, Evie,” Pamela said.

It was easy for some girls to be nice. To remember your name. Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful. The sleeves of her jean jacket were bulked at her elbows, her eyes doped looking from liner. Her legs were tan and bare. My own legs were dotted with the pricks of mosquito bites I worried into open wounds, my calves hatched with pale hairs.

“Babe,” Peter said with his mouth full, and loped over to give her a hug, burying his face in her neck. Pamela squealed and pushed him away. When she laughed, her snaggletooth flashed.

“Beyond foul,” Connie whispered, entering the room. But I was quiet, trying to imagine how that would feel: to be so known to someone that you had become almost the same person.

—

We were upstairs, later, smoking weed Connie had stolen from Peter. Stuffing the space below the door with the fat twist of a towel. She kept having to pinch the rolling paper shut again with her fingers, the two of us smoking in our solemn, hothouse silence. I could see Peter’s car out the window, parked awry like he’d had to abandon it under great duress. I’d always been aware of Peter, in the way I liked any older boy at that age, their mere existence demanding attention. But my feelings were suddenly amplified and pressing, as exaggerated and inevitable as events seem in dreams. I stuffed myself on banalities of him, the T-shirts he wore in rotation, the tender skin where the back of his neck disappeared into his collar. The looping horns of Paul Revere and the Raiders sounding from his bedroom, how he’d sometimes stumble around with a proud, overt secrecy, so I would know he had taken acid. Filling and refilling a glass of water in the kitchen with extravagant care.

I’d gone into Peter’s bedroom while Connie was showering. It reeked of what I’d later identify as masturbation, a damp rupture in the air. All his possessions suffused with a mysterious import: his low futon, a plastic bag full of ashy-looking nugs by his pillow. Manuals to become a trainee mechanic. The glass on the floor, greased with fingerprints, was half-full of stale-looking water, and there was a line of smooth river stones on the top of his dresser. A cheap copper bracelet I had seen him wear sometimes. I took in everything as if I could decode the private meaning of each object, puzzle together the interior architecture of his life.

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes.

—

When I was young, I’d seen magazines in a drawer of the bathroom, my father’s magazines, the pages bloated with humidity. The insides crowded with women. The tautness of mesh pulled across crotches, the gauzy light that made their skin illuminate and pale. My favorite girl had a gingham ribbon tied around her throat in a bow. It was so odd and stirring that someone could be naked but also wear a ribbon around her neck. It made her nakedness formal.

I visited the magazine with the regularity of a penitent, replacing it carefully each time. Locking the bathroom door with breathless, ill pleasure that quickly morphed into rubbing my crotch along the seams of carpets, the seam of my mattress. The back of a couch. How did it work, even? That by holding the hovering image of the girl in my mind, I could build the sensation, a sheet of pleasure that grew until it was compulsive, the desire to feel that way again and again. It seemed strange that it was a girl I was imagining, not a boy. And that the feeling could be reignited by other oddities: a color-plate illustration in my fairy-tale book of a girl trapped in a spider’s web. The faceted eyes of evil creatures, watching her. The memory of my father cupping a neighbor’s ass through her wet swimsuit.

I’d done things before — not quite sex, but close. The dry fumbles in the hallways of school dances. The overheated suffocation of a parent’s couch, the backs of my knees sweaty. Alex Posner worming his hand down my shorts in his exploratory, detached fashion, jerking away roughly when we heard footsteps. None of it — the kissing, the clawing hand in my underwear, the raw jumpiness of a penis in my fist — seemed in any way kin to what I did alone, the spread of pressure, like stairs going up. I imagined Peter almost as a corrective to my own desires, whose compulsion sometimes frightened me.

—

I lay back on the thin tapestry covering Connie’s bed. She had a bad sunburn; I watched her rub cloudy skin loose from her shoulder and roll it into tiny gray balls. My faint revulsion was tempered by the thought of Peter, who lived in the same house as Connie, who breathed the same air. Who ate from the same utensils. They were conflated in an essential way, like two different species raised in the same laboratory.

From downstairs, I heard Pamela’s tripping laugh.

“When I get a boyfriend, I’m going to make him take me out to dinner,” Connie said with authority. “She doesn’t even mind Peter just brings her here to screw.”

Peter never wore underwear, Connie had complained, and the fact grew in my mind, making me nauseous in a not unpleasant way. The sleepy crease of his eyes from his permanent high. Connie paled in comparison: I didn’t really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you.

Connie stood at the mirror and tried to harmonize with one of the sweet, sorrowful forty-fives we listened to with fanatic repetition. Songs that overheated my own righteous sadness, my imagined alignment with the tragic nature of the world. How I loved to wring myself out that way, stoking my feelings until they were unbearable. I wanted all of life to feel that frantic and pressurized with portent, so even colors and weather and tastes would be more saturated. That’s what the songs promised, what they trawled out of me.

One song seemed to vibrate with a private echo, as if marked. The simple lines about a woman, about the shape of her back when she turns it on the man for the last time. The ashes she leaves in bed from her cigarettes. The song played once through, and Connie hopped up to flip the record.

“Play it again,” I said. I tried to imagine myself in the same way the singer saw the woman: the dangle of her silver bracelet, tinged with green, the fall of her hair. But I only felt foolish, opening my eyes to the sight of Connie at the mirror, separating her eyelashes with a safety pin, her shorts wedged into her ass. It wasn’t the same to notice things about yourself. Only certain girls ever called forth that kind of attention. Like the girl I’d seen in the park. Or Pamela and the girls on the high school steps, waiting for the lazy agitation of their boyfriends’ idling cars, the signal to leap to their feet. To brush off their seat and trip out into the full sun, waving goodbye to the ones left behind.

—

Soon after that day, I’d gone to Peter’s room while Connie was sleeping. His comment to me in the kitchen felt like a time-stamped invitation I had to redeem before it slipped away. Connie and I had drunk beer before bed, lounging against the wicker legs of her furniture and scooping cottage cheese from a tub with our fingers. I drank much more than she had. I wanted some other momentum to take over, forcing action. I didn’t want to be like Connie, never changing, waiting around for something to happen, eating an entire sleeve of sesame crackers, then doing ten jumping jacks in her room. I stayed awake after Connie passed into her deep, twitchy sleep. Listening for Peter’s footsteps on the stairs.

He crashed to his room, finally, and I waited for what seemed like a long time before I followed. Creeping along the hallway like a specter in shortie pajamas, their polyester slickness stuck in the broody stretch between princess costumes and lingerie. The silence of the house was a living thing, oppressive and present but also coloring everything with a foreign freedom, filling the rooms like a denser air.

Peter’s form under the blankets was still, his knobby man’s feet exposed. I heard his breathing, brambled from the aftereffects of whatever drugs he’d taken. His room seemed to cradle him. This might have been enough — to watch him sleep as a parent would, indulging the privilege of imagining happy dreams. His breaths like the beads of a rosary, each in and out a comfort. But I didn’t want it to be enough.

When I got closer, his face clarified, his features completing as I adjusted to the dark. I let myself watch him without shame. Peter opened his eyes, suddenly, and somehow didn’t seem startled by my presence at his bedside. Giving me a look as mild as a glass of milk.

“Boyd,” he said, his voice still drifty from sleep, but he blinked and there was a resignation in the way he said my name that made me feel he’d been waiting for me. That he’d known I would come.

I was embarrassed to be standing like I was.

“You can sit,” he said. I crouched by the futon, hovering foolishly. My legs already starting to burn with effort. Peter reached a hand to pull me fully onto the mattress and I smiled, though I wasn’t sure he could even see my face. He was quiet and so was I. His room looked strange, as seen from the floor; the bulk of the dresser, the slivered doorway. I couldn’t imagine Connie in the rooms beyond. Connie mumbling in her sleep, as she often did, sometimes announcing a number like an addled bingo player.

“You can get under the blankets if you’re cold,” he said, caping open the covers so I saw his bare chest, his nakedness. I got in beside him with ritual silence. It was as easy as this — I’d entered a possibility that had always been there.

He didn’t speak, after that, and neither did I. He hitched me close so my back was pressed against his chest and I could feel his dick rear against my thighs. I didn’t want to breathe, feeling that it would be an imposition on him, even the fact of my ribs rising and falling too much of a bother. I was taking tiny breaths through my nose, a light-headedness overtaking me. The strident rank of him in the dark, his blankets, his sheets — it was what Pamela got all the time, this easy occupation of his presence. His arm was around me, a weight I kept identifying as the weight of a boy’s arm. Peter acted like he was going to sleep, the casual sigh and shuffle, but that kept the whole thing together. You had to act as if nothing strange were happening. When he brushed my nipple with his finger, I kept very still. I could feel his steady breath on my neck. His hand taking an impersonal measurement. Twisting the nipple so I inhaled audibly, and he hesitated for a moment but kept going. His dick smearing at my bare thighs. I would be shunted along whatever would happen, I understood. However he piloted the night. And there wasn’t fear, just a feeling adjacent to excitement, a viewing from the wings. What would happen to Evie?

When the floorboards creaked from the hall, the spell cracked. Peter withdrew his hand, rolling abruptly onto his back. Staring at the ceiling so I could see his eyes.

“I’ve gotta get some sleep,” he said in a voice carefully drained. A voice like an eraser, its insistent dullness meant to make me wonder if anything had happened. And I was slow to get to my feet, a little stunned, but also in a happy swoon, like even that little bit had fed me.

—

The boys played the slot machine for what seemed like hours. Connie and I sat on the bench, vibrating with forced inattention. I kept waiting for some acknowledgment from Peter of what had happened. A catch in the eye, a glance serrated with our history. But he didn’t look at me. The humid garage smelled of chilly concrete and the funk of camping tents, folded while still wet. The gas station calendar on the wall: a woman in a hot tub with the stilled eyes and bared teeth of taxidermy. I was grateful for Pamela’s absence that night. There’d been some fight between her and Peter, Connie had told me. I wanted to ask for more details, but there was a warning in her face — I couldn’t be too interested.

“Don’t you kids have somewhere better to be?” Henry asked. “Some ice-cream social somewhere?”

Connie tossed her hair, then walked over to get more beer. Henry watched her approach with amusement.

“Give those to me,” she whined when Henry held two bottles out of reach. I remember noticing for the first time how loud she was, her voice hard with silly aggressiveness. Connie with her whines and feints, the grating laugh that sounded, and was, practiced. A space opened up between us as soon as I started to notice these things, to catalog her shortcomings the way a boy would. I regret how ungenerous I was. As if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease.

“What are you gonna give me for them?” Henry said. “Nothing’s free in this world, Connie.”

She shrugged, then lunged for the beers. Henry pressed the solid mass of his body against her, grinning as she struggled. Peter rolled his eyes. He didn’t like this kind of thing either, the bleating vaudeville. He had older friends who’d disappeared in sluggish jungles, rivers thick with sediment. Who’d returned home babbling and addicted to tiny black cigarettes, their hometown girlfriends cowering behind them like nervous little shadows. I tried to sit up straighter, to compose my face with adult boredom. Willing Peter to look over. I wanted the parts of him I was sure Pamela couldn’t see, the pricks of sorrow I sometimes caught in his gaze or the secret kindness he showed to Connie, taking us to Arrowhead Lake the year their mother had forgotten Connie’s birthday entirely. Pamela didn’t know those things, and I held on to that certainty, whatever leverage might belong to me alone.

Henry pinched the soft skin above the waist of Connie’s shorts. “Hungry lately, huh?”

“Don’t touch me, perv,” she said, hitting his hand away. She giggled a little. “Fuck you.”

“Fine,” he said, grabbing Connie’s hands by the wrist. “Fuck me.” She tried halfheartedly to pull away, whining until Henry finally let her go. She rubbed her wrists.

“Asshole,” she muttered, but she wasn’t really mad. That was part of being a girl — you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.

I didn’t like the taste of beer, the granular bitterness nothing like the pleasing hygienic chill of my father’s martinis, but I drank one and then another. The boys fed the slot machine from a shopping bag full of nickels until they were almost out of coins.

“We need the machine keys,” Peter said, lighting a thin joint he pulled from his pocket. “So we can open it up.”

“I’ll get them,” Connie said. “Don’t miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry’s attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine.

That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything.

Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces.

They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I’d seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-iam, like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr.

“He’s always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing’s different. He can’t even drive anymore, I don’t think.”

This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter’s face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn’t have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell?

“It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.”

“Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn’t turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.”

“He’s proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That’s what’s crazy.”

The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too. I was stirred by the alcohol, the burn in my chest I exaggerated until I became moved by an authority not my own. I stood up. The boys didn’t notice. They were talking about a movie they had seen in San Francisco. I recognized the title — they hadn’t shown it in town because it was supposed to be perverted, though I couldn’t remember why.

When I finally watched the movie, as an adult, the palpable innocence of the sex scenes surprised me. The humble pudge of fat above the actress’s pubic hair. How she laughed when she pulled the yacht captain’s face to her saggy, lovely breasts. There was a good-natured quality to the raunch, like fun was still an erotic idea. Unlike the movies that came later, girls wincing while their legs dangled like a dead thing’s.

Henry was fluttering his eyelids, tongue in an obscene rictus. Aping some scene from the movie.

Peter laughed. “Sick.”

They wondered aloud whether the actress had actually been getting fucked. They didn’t seem to care that I was standing right there.

“You can tell she liked it,” Henry said. “Ooh,” he crowed in a high feminine voice. “Ooh, yeah, mmm.” He banged the slot machine with his hips.

“I saw it, too.” I spoke before thinking. I wanted an entry point in the conversation, even if it was a lie. They both looked at me.

“Well,” Henry said, “the ghost finally speaks.”

I flushed.

“You saw it?” Peter seemed doubtful. I told myself he was being protective.

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty wild.”

They exchanged a glance. Did I really think they’d believe I had somehow gotten a ride to the city? That I’d gone to see what was, essentially, a porno?

“So.” Henry’s eyes glinted. “What was your favorite part?”

“That part you were talking about,” I said. “With the girl.”

“But what part of that did you like best?” Henry said.

“Leave her alone,” Peter said mildly. Already bored.

“Did you like the Christmas scene?” Henry continued. His smile lulled me into thinking we were having a real conversation, that I was making progress. “The big tree? All the snow?”

I nodded. Almost believing my own lie.

Henry laughed. “The movie was in Fiji. The whole thing’s on an island.” Henry was snorting, helpless with laughter, and cut a look at Peter, who seemed embarrassed for me, like you would be embarrassed for a stranger who tripped on the street, like nothing had ever happened between us at all.

I pushed Henry’s motorcycle. I hadn’t expected it to tip over, not really: maybe just wobble, just enough to interrupt Henry so he’d be scared for a second, so he’d make some jokey exclamations of dismay and forget my lie. But I had pushed with real force. The motorcycle fell over and crunched hard on the cement floor.

Henry stared at me. “You little bitch.” He hurried to the downed motorcycle like it was a shot pet. Practically cradling it in his arms.

“It’s not broken,” I said inanely.

“You’re a fucking nutcase,” he muttered. He ran his hands along the body of the bike and held a shard of orange metal up to Peter. “You believe this shit?”

When Peter looked at me, his face solidified with pity, which was somehow worse than anger. I was like a child, warranting only abbreviated emotions.

Connie appeared in the doorway.

“Knock knock,” she called, the keys hanging from a crooked finger. She took in the scene: Henry squatting by the motorcycle; Peter’s arms crossed.

Henry let out a harsh laugh. “Your friend’s a real bitch,” he said, shooting me a look.

“Evie knocked it over,” Peter said.

“You fucking kids,” Henry said. “Get a babysitter next time, don’t hang around with us. Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice small, but nobody was listening.

Even after Peter helped Henry right the motorcycle, peering closely at the break—“It’s just cosmetic,” he announced, “we can fix it pretty easy”—I understood that other things had broken. Connie studied me with cold wonder, like I’d betrayed her, and maybe I had. I’d done what we were not supposed to do. Illuminated a slice of private weakness, exposed the twitchy rabbit heart.

3

The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity.

I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting — I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I’d tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he’d accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home.

—

I’d gone back a few days later — Connie’s father answered the door almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home.

“Connie’s upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn’t pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence.

Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking.

“Nice makeup,” she said. “Did you do that just for me?” She threw herself back on the pillow. “You’ll like this news. Peter’s gone. Like, gone gone. With Pamela, quelle surprise.” She rolled her eyes but articulated Pamela’s name with a perverse happiness. Cutting me a look.

“What do you mean, left?” Panic was already dislocating my voice.

“He’s so selfish,” she said. “Dad told us we might have to move to San Diego. The next day, Peter takes off. He took a bunch of his clothes and stuff. I think they went to her sister’s house in Portland. I mean, I’m pretty sure they went there.” She blew at her bangs. “He’s a coward. And Pamela is the kind of girl who’s gonna get fat after she has a baby.”

“Pamela’s pregnant?”

She gave me a look. “Surprise — you don’t even care I might have to move to San Diego?”

I knew I was supposed to start enumerating the ways I loved her, how sad I would be if she left, but I was hypnotized by an image of Pamela next to Peter in his car, falling asleep against his shoulder. Avis maps at their feet gone translucent with hamburger grease, the backseat filled with clothes and his mechanic manuals. How Peter would look down and see the white line of Pamela’s scalp through her part. He might kiss her, moved by a domestic tenderness, even though she was sleeping and would never know.

“Maybe he’s just messing around,” I said. “I mean, couldn’t he still show up?”

“Screw you,” Connie said. She seemed surprised by these words, too.

“What’d I even do to you?” I said.

Of course we both knew.

“I think I’d rather be alone right now,” Connie announced primly, and stared hard out the window.

Peter, fleeing north with the girlfriend who might even have his baby — there was no imagining the biology away, the fact of the multiplying proteins in Pamela’s stomach. But here was Connie, her chubby shape on the bed so familiar that I could map her freckles, point out the blip on her shoulder from chicken pox. There was always Connie, suddenly beloved.

“Let’s go to a movie or something,” I said.

She sniffed and studied the pale rim of her nails. “Peter’s not even around anymore,” she said. “So you really have no reason to be here. You’re gonna be at boarding school, anyway.”

The hum of my desperation was obvious. “Maybe we can go to the Flying A?”

She bit her lip. “May says you’re not very nice to me.”

May was the dentist’s daughter. She wore plaid pants with matching vests, like a junior accountant.

“You said May was boring.”

Connie was quiet. We used to feel sorry for May, who was rich but ridiculous, but I understood that now Connie was feeling sorry for me, watching me pant after Peter, who’d probably been planning to go to Portland for weeks. Months.

“May’s nice,” Connie said. “Real nice.”

“We could all see a movie together.” I was pedaling now, for any kind of traction, a bulwark against the empty summer. May wasn’t so bad, I told myself, even though she wasn’t allowed to eat candy or popcorn because of her braces, and yes, I could imagine it, the three of us.

“She thinks you’re trashy,” Connie said. She turned back to the window. I stared at the lace curtains I had helped Connie hem with glue when we were twelve. I had waited too long, my presence in the room an obvious error, and it was clear that there was nothing to do but leave, to say a tight-throated goodbye to Connie’s father downstairs — he gave me a distracted nod — and clatter my bike out into the street.

—

Had I ever felt alone like this before, the whole day to spend and no one to care? I could almost imagine the ache in my gut as pleasure. It was about keeping busy, I told myself, a frictionless burning of hours. I made a martini the way my father had taught me, sloshing the vermouth over my hand and ignoring the spill on the bar table. I’d always hated martini glasses — the stem and the funny shape seemed embarrassing, like the adults were trying too hard to be adults. I poured it in a juice cup instead, rimmed with gold, and forced myself to drink. Then I made another and drank that, too. It was fun to feel loose and amused with my own house, realizing, in a spill of hilarity, that the furniture had always been ugly, chairs as heavy and mannered as gargoyles. To notice the air was candied with silence, that the curtains were always drawn. I opened them and struggled to lift a window. It was hot outside — I imagined my father, snapping that I was letting the warm air in — but I left the window open anyway.

My mother would be gone all day, the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness. I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire. I forced myself to like the taste, to breathe slowly when I felt nauseous. I burbled acrid vomit onto my blankets, then cleaned so there was just a tart, curdled spice in the air that I almost liked. I knocked over a lamp and put on dark eye makeup with inexpert but avid attention. Sat in front of my mother’s lighted mirror with its different settings: Office. Daylight. Dusk. Washes of colored light, my features spooking and bleaching as I clicked through the artificial day.

I tried reading parts of books I’d liked when I was young. A spoiled girl gets banished underground, to a city ruled by goblins. The girl’s bared knees in her childish dress, the woodcuts of the dark forests. The illustrations of the bound girl stirred me so I had to parcel how long I could look at them. I wished I could draw something like that, like the terrifying inside of someone’s own mind. Or draw the face of the black-haired girl I’d seen in town — studying her long enough so I could see how the features worked together. The hours I lost to masturbation, face pressed into my pillow, passing some point of caring. I’d get a headache after a while, muscles jumpy, my legs quivering and tender. My underpants wet, the tops of my thighs.

Another book: a silversmith accidentally spills molten silver on his hand. His arm and hand probably looked skinned after the burn had scabbed over and peeled. The skin tight and pink and fresh, without hair or freckles. I thought of Willie and his stump, the warm hose water he sloshed over his car. How the puddles would slowly evaporate from the asphalt. I practiced peeling an orange as if my arm were burned to the elbow and I had no fingernails.

Death seemed to me like a lobby in a hotel. Some civilized, well-lit room you could easily enter or leave. A boy in town had shot himself in his finished basement after getting caught selling counterfeit raffle tickets: I didn’t think of the gore, the wet insides, but only the ease of the moment before he pulled the trigger, how clean and winnowed the world must have seemed. All the disappointments, all of regular life with its punishments and indignities, made surplus in one orderly motion.

—

The aisles of the store seemed new to me, my thoughts formless from drinking. The constant flickering of the lights, stale lemon drops in a bin, the makeup arranged in pleasing, fetishistic groupings. I uncapped a lipstick, to test it on my wrist like I’d read I should. The door rang its chime of commerce. I looked up. It was the black-haired girl from the park, in denim sneakers, a dress whose sleeves had been cut at the shoulder. Excitement moved through me. Already I was trying to imagine what I would say to her. Her sudden appearance made the day seem tightly wound with synchronicity, the angle of sunlight newly weighted.

The girl wasn’t beautiful, I realized, seeing her again. It was something else. Like pictures I had seen of the actor John Huston’s daughter. Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty.

The man behind the counter scowled.

“I told you,” he said. “I won’t let any of you in here, not anymore. Get on.”

The girl gave him a lazy smile, holding up her hands. I saw a prick of hair in her armpits. “Hey,” she said, “I’m just trying to buy toilet paper.”

“You stole from me,” the man said, shading red. “You and your friends. Not wearing shoes, running around with your filthy feet. Trying to confuse me.”

I would have been terrified in the focus of his anger, but the girl was calm. Even jokey. “I don’t think that’s true.” She cocked her head. “Maybe it was someone else.”

He crossed his arms. “I remember you.”

The girl’s face shifted, something hardening in her eyes, but she remained smiling. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever your thing is.” She looked over at me, her glance cool and distant. Like she hardly saw me. Desire moved through me: I surprised myself with how much I didn’t want her to disappear.

“Get on outside,” the man said. “Go.”

Before she left, she stuck out her tongue at the man. Just a peep, like a droll little cat.

—

I’d only hesitated for a moment before following the girl outside, but she was already cutting across the parking lot, keeping up a brisk pace. I hurried behind.

“Hey,” I called. She kept walking.

I said it again, louder, and she stopped. Letting me catch up to her.

“What a jerk,” I said. I must have looked shiny as an apple. Cheeks flushed with half-drunk effort.

She glared in the direction of the store. “Fat fuck,” she muttered. “I can’t even buy toilet paper.”

She finally seemed to acknowledge me, studying my face for a long moment. I could tell she saw me as young. That my bib shirt, a gift from my mother, was considered fancy. I wanted to do something bigger than those facts. I made the offer before I’d really thought about it.

“I’ll lift it,” I said, my voice unnaturally bright. “The toilet paper. Easy. I steal stuff from there all the time.”

I wondered if she believed me. It must have been obvious how lightly I was wearing the lie. But maybe she respected that. The desperation of my desire. Or maybe she wanted to see how it would play out. The rich girl, trying out kid-glove criminality.

“You sure?” she said.

I shrugged, my heart hammering. If she felt sorry for me, I didn’t see that part.

—

My unexplained return agitated the man behind the counter.

“Back again?”

Even if I’d really planned to try to steal something, it would have been impossible. I dawdled down the aisles, making an effort to wipe my face of any delinquent glimmer, but the man didn’t look away. He glared until I grabbed the toilet paper and brought it to the register, shamed at how easily I snapped into the habit. Of course I wasn’t going to steal anything. That was never going to happen.

He got on a tear as he rang up the toilet paper. “A nice girl like you shouldn’t hang out with girls like that,” he said. “So filthy, that group. Some guy with a black dog.” He looked pained. “Not in my store.”

Through the pocked glass, I could see the girl ambling in the parking lot outside. Hand shading her eyes. This sudden and unexpected fortune: she was waiting for me.

After I paid, the man looked at me for a long moment. “You’re just a kid,” he said. “Why don’t you go on home?”

I had felt bad for him until then. “I don’t need a bag,” I said, and stuffed the toilet paper in my purse. I was silent while the man gave me change, licking his lips as if to chase away a bad taste.

—

The girl perked up as I came over.

“You get it?”

I nodded, and she huddled me around the corner, her arm hurrying me along. I could almost believe I had actually stolen something, adrenaline brightening my veins as I held out my bag.

“Ha,” she said, peeking inside. “Serves him right, the asshole. Was it easy?”

“Pretty easy,” I said. “He’s so out of it, anyway.” I was thrilling at our collusion, the way we’d become a team. A triangle of stomach showed where the girl’s dress wasn’t fully buttoned. How easily she invoked a kind of sloppy sexual feeling, like her clothes had been hurried on a body still cooling from sweat.

“I’m Suzanne,” she said. “By the way.”

“Evie.” I stuck out my hand. Suzanne laughed in a way that made me understand shaking hands was the wrong thing to do, a hollow symbol from the straight world. I flushed. It was hard to know how to act without all the usual polite gestures and forms. I wasn’t sure what took their place. There was a silence: I scrambled to fill it.

“I think I saw you the other day,” I said. “By the Hi-Ho?”

She didn’t respond, giving me nothing to grab on to.

“You were with some girls?” I said. “And a bus came?”

“Oh,” she said, her face reanimating. “Yeah, that idiot was real mad.” She relaxed into the memory. “I have to keep the other girls in line, you know, or they’d just fall all over themselves. Get us caught.” I was watching Suzanne with an interest that must have been obvious: she let me look at her without any self-consciousness.

“I remembered your hair,” I said.

Suzanne seemed pleased. Touching the ends, absently. “I never cut it.”

I would find out, later, that this was something Russell told them not to do.

Suzanne nestled the toilet paper to her chest, suddenly proud. “You want me to give you some money for this?”

She had no pockets, no purse.

“Nah,” I said. “It’s not like it cost me anything.”

“Well, thanks,” she said, with obvious relief. “You live around here?”

“Pretty close,” I said. “With my mom.”

Suzanne nodded. “What street?”

“Morning Star Lane.”

She made a hum of surprise. “Fancy.”

I could see it meant something to her, me living in the nice part of town, but I couldn’t imagine what, beyond the vague dislike for the rich that all young people had. Mashing up the wealthy and the media and the government into an indistinct vessel of evil, perpetrators of the grand hoax. I was only just starting to learn how to rig certain information with apology. How to mock myself before other people could.

“What about you?”

She made a fluttery motion with her fingers. “Oh,” she said, “you know. We’ve got some things going on. But a lot of people in one place”—she held up the bag—“means a lot of asses that need wiping. We’re low on money, at this exact moment, but that’ll turn, soon, I’m sure.”

We. The girl was part of a we, and I envied her ease, her surety of where she was aimed after the parking lot. Those two other girls I’d seen with her in the park, whoever else she lived with. People who’d notice her absence and exclaim at her return.

“You’re quiet,” Suzanne said after a moment.

“Sorry.” I willed myself not to scratch my mosquito bites, though my skin was twisting with itchiness. I reeled for conversation, but all the possibilities that appeared were the things I couldn’t say. I should not tell her how often and idly I had thought of her since that day. I should not tell her I had no friends, that I was being shunted to boarding school, that perpetual municipality of unwanted children. That I was not even a blip to Peter.

“It’s cool.” She waved her hand. “People are the way they are, you know? I could tell when I saw you,” she continued. “You’re a thoughtful person. On your own trip, all caught up in your mind.”

I was not used to this kind of unmediated attention. Especially from a girl. Usually it was only a way of apologizing for being zeroed in on whatever boy was around. I let myself imagine I was a girl people saw as thoughtful. Suzanne shifted: I could tell this was a prelude to departure, but I couldn’t think of how to extend our exchange.

“Well,” she said. “That’s me over there.” She nodded to a car parked in the shade. It was a Rolls-Royce, shrouded in dirt. When she saw my confusion, she smiled.

“We’re borrowing it,” she said. As if that explained everything.

I watched her walk away without trying to stop her. I didn’t want to be greedy: I should be happy I had gotten anything at all.

4

My mother was dating again. First, a man who introduced himself as Vismaya and kept massaging my mother’s scalp with his clawed fingers. Who told me that my birthday, on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, meant my two phrases were “I believe” and “I know.”

“Which is it?” Vismaya asked me. “Do you believe you know, or do you know you believe?”

Next, a man who flew small silver planes and told me that my nipples were showing through my shirt. He said it plainly, as if this were helpful information. He made pastel portraits of Native Americans and wanted my mother to help open a museum of his work in Arizona. Next, a real estate developer from Tiburon who took us out for Chinese food. He kept encouraging me to meet his daughter. Repeating again and again how sure he was that we’d get along like a house on fire. His daughter was eleven, I came to realize. Connie would have laughed, dissecting the way the man’s teeth gummed up with rice, but I hadn’t spoken to her since the day at her house.

“I’m fourteen,” I said. The man looked to my mother, who nodded.

“Of course,” he said, a tang of soy sauce on his breath. “I see now you’re practically a grown-up.”

“I’m sorry,” my mother mouthed across the table, but when the man turned to feed her a slimy-looking snow pea from his fork, she opened her mouth obediently, like a bird.

—

The pity I felt for my mother in these situations was new and uncomfortable, but also I sensed that I deserved to carry it around — a grim and private responsibility, like a medical condition.

There had been a cocktail party my parents had thrown, the year before the divorce. It was my father’s idea — until he left, my mother wasn’t social, and I could sense a deep agitation in her during parties or events, a heave of discomfort she willed into a stiff smile. It had been a party to celebrate the investor my father had found. It was the first time, I think, that he’d gotten money from someone other than my mother, and he got even bigger in the heat of that, drinking before the guests arrived. His hair saturated with the dense fatherly scent of Vitalis, his breath notched with liquor.

My mother had made Chinese ribs with ketchup and they had a glandular sheen, like a lacquer. Olives from a can, buttered nuts. Cheese straws. Some sludgy dessert made from mandarin oranges, a recipe she’d seen in McCall’s. She asked me before the guests arrived if she looked all right. Smoothing her damask skirt. I remember being taken aback by the question.

“Very nice,” I said, feeling strangely unsettled. I’d been allowed some sherry in a cut pink glass: I liked the rotted pucker and snuck another glass.

The guests were my father’s friends, mostly, and I was surprised at the breadth of his other life, a life I saw only from the perimeter. Because here were people who seemed to know him, to hold a vision of him informed by lunches and visits to Golden Gate Fields and discussions of Sandy Koufax. My mother hovered nervously around the buffet: she’d put out chopsticks, but no one was using them, and I could tell this disappointed her. She tried to urge them on a heavyset man and his wife, and they shook their heads, the man making some joke I couldn’t hear. I saw something desperate pass over my mother’s face. She was drinking, too. It was the kind of party where everyone was drunk early, a communal haze slurring over conversation. Earlier, one of my father’s friends had lit a joint, and I saw my mother’s expression downshift from disapproval to patient indulgence. Certain lines were getting dim. Wives staring up at the pass of an airplane, arcing toward SFO. Someone dropped a glass in the pool. I saw it drift slowly to the bottom. Maybe it was an ashtray.

I floated around the party, feeling like a much younger child, that desire for invisibility coupled with a wish to participate in an adjacent way. I was happy enough to point out the bathroom when asked, to parcel into a napkin buttered nuts that I ate by the pool, one by one, their salty grit fleecing my fingers. The freedom of being so young that no one expected anything from me.

I hadn’t seen Tamar since the day she’d dropped me off after school, and I remember feeling disappointed when she arrived — I’d have to act like a grown-up now that she was there as witness. She had a man with her, slightly older. She introduced him around, kissing someone on the cheek, shaking hands. Everyone seemed to know her. I was jealous of how Tamar’s boyfriend rested his hand on her back while she spoke, on the sliver of skin between her skirt and top. I wanted her to see that I was drinking: I made my way to the bar table when she did, pouring myself another glass of sherry.

“I like your outfit,” I said, pushed to speak by the burn in my chest. She had her back to me and didn’t hear. I repeated myself and she startled.

“Evie,” she said, pleasantly enough. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” I felt foolish, blunt in my shift dress. Her outfit was bright and new looking, wavy diamonds in violet and green and red.

“Fun party,” she said, her eyes scanning the crowd.

Before I could think of a rejoinder, some crack to show that I knew the tiki torches were stupid, my mother joined us. I quickly put my glass back on the table. Hating the way I felt: all my comfort before Tamar’s arrival had transformed into painful awareness of every object in my house, every detail of my parents, as if I were responsible for all of it. I was embarrassed for my mother’s full skirt, which seemed outdated next to Tamar’s clothes, for the eager way my mother greeted her. Her neck getting blotchy with nerves. I slunk away while they were distracted with their polite chatter.

Queasy and sunbaked with discomfort, I wanted to sit in one place without having to talk to anyone, without having to track Tamar’s gaze or see my mother using her chopsticks, announcing gaily that it wasn’t so hard, even as a mandarin orange slithered back onto her plate. I wished Connie were there — we were still friends then. My spot by the pool had been occupied by a gossipy scrum of wives: from across the yard, I heard my father’s booming laugh, the group surrounding him laughing as well. I pulled my dress down, awkwardly, missing the weight of a glass in my hands. Tamar’s boyfriend was standing nearby, eating ribs.

“You’re Carl’s daughter,” he said, “right?”

I remember thinking it was strange that he and Tamar had floated apart, that he was just standing by himself, powering through his plate. It was strange that he would even want to talk to me. I nodded.

“Nice house,” he said, his mouth full. Lips bright and wet from the ribs. He was handsome, I saw, but there was something cartoonish about him, the upturn of his nose. The extra ruff of skin under his chin. “So much land,” he added.

“It was my grandparents’ house.”

His eyes shifted. “I heard about her,” he said. “Your grandmother. I used to watch her when I was little.” I didn’t realize how drunk he was until that moment. His tongue lingering in the corner of his mouth. “That episode where she finds the alligator in the fountain. Classic.”

I was used to people speaking of my grandmother fondly. How they liked to perform their admiration, tell me that they’d grown up with her on their television screens, beamed into their living rooms like another, better, family member.

“Makes sense,” the boyfriend said, looking around. “That this was her place. ’Cause your old man couldn’t afford it, no way.”

I understood that he was insulting my father.

“It’s just strange,” he said, wiping his lips with his hand. “What your mother puts up with.”

My face must have been blank: he waggled his fingers in the direction of Tamar, still at the bar. My father had joined her. My mother was nowhere in sight. Tamar’s bracelets were making noise as she waved her glass. She and my father were just talking. Nothing was happening. I didn’t get why her boyfriend was smiling so rabidly, waiting for me to say something.

“Your father fucks anything he can,” he said.

“Can I take your plate?” I asked, too stunned to flinch. That was something I’d learned from my mother: revert to politeness. Cut pain with a gesture of civility. Like Jackie Kennedy. It was a virtue to that generation, an ability to divert discomfort, tamp it down with ceremony. But it was out of fashion now, and I saw something like disdain in his eyes when he handed me his plate. Though maybe that is something I imagined.

—

The party ended after dark. A few of the tiki torches stayed lit, sending their bleary flames streaking into the navy night. The vivid oversize cars lumbering down the driveway, my father calling out goodbyes while my mother stacked napkins and brushed olive pits, washed in other people’s saliva, into her open palm. My father restarted the record; I looked out my bedroom window and saw him trying to get my mother to dance. “I’ll be looking at the moon,” he sang, the moon’s far-off face the focus of so much longing back then.

I knew I should hate my father. But I only felt foolish. Embarrassed — not for him, but for my mother. Smoothing her full skirt, asking me how she looked. The way she sometimes had flecks of food in her teeth and blushed when I told her so. The times she stood at the window when my father was late coming home, trying to decode new meaning out of the empty driveway.

She must know what was going on — she had to have known — but she wanted him anyway. Like Connie, jumping for the beer knowing she would look stupid. Even Tamar’s boyfriend, eating with his frantic, bottomless need. Chewing faster than he could swallow. He knew how your hunger could expose you.

The drunk was wearing off. I was sleepy and hollow, cast uncomfortably back to myself. I had scorn for everything: my room with my childhood leftovers, the trim of lace around my desk. The plastic record player with a chunky Bakelite handle, a wet-looking beanbag chair that stuck to the backs of my legs. The party with its eager hors d’oeuvres, the men wearing aloha shirts in a sartorial clamor for festivity. It all seemed to add up to an explanation for why my father would want something else. I imagined Tamar with her throat circled by a ribbon, lying on some carpet in some too-small Palo Alto apartment. My father there — watching her? sitting in a chair? The perverse voltage of Tamar’s pink lipstick. I tried to hate her but couldn’t. I couldn’t even hate my father. The only person left was my mother, who’d let it happen, who’d been as soft and malleable as dough. Handing money over, cooking dinner every night, and no wonder my father had wanted something else — Tamar’s outsize opinions, her life like a TV show about summer.

It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe — all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn’t love me the way I loved you.

The most frightening thing: It was impossible to detect the source, the instant when things changed. The sight of a woman’s back in her low dress mingled with the knowledge of the wife in another room.

—

When the music stopped, I knew my mother would come say good night. It was a moment I’d been dreading — having to notice how her curls had wilted, the haze of lipstick around her mouth. When she knocked, I thought about pretending to be asleep. But my light was on: the door edged open.

She grimaced a little. “You’re still all dressed.”

I would’ve ignored her or made some joke, but I didn’t want to cause her any pain. Not then. I sat up.

“That was nice, wasn’t it?” she said. She leaned against the door frame. “The ribs came out good, I thought.”

Maybe I genuinely thought my mother would want to know. Or maybe I wanted to be soothed by her, for her to offer a calming adult summary.

I cleared my throat. “Something happened.”

I felt her tense in the doorway.

“Oh?”

Later I cringed, thinking of it. She must have already known what was coming. Must have willed me to be quiet.

“Dad was talking.” I turned back to my shoes, working intently at the buckle. “With Tamar.”

She let out a breath. “And?” She was smiling a little. An untroubled smile.

I was confused: she must know what I meant. “That’s all,” I said.

My mother looked at the wall. “That dessert was the one thing,” she said. “Next time I would do macaroons instead, coconut macaroons. Those mandarins were too hard to eat.”

I was silent, shock making me wary. I slipped off my shoes and put them under my bed, side by side. I murmured good night, tilted my head to receive her kiss.

“You want me to turn off the light?” my mother asked, pausing in the doorway.

I shook my head. She shut the door gently. How conscientious she was, turning the handle so it clicked shut. I stared at my red feet, marked by the outline of my shoes. Thought about how strangled and strange they looked, all out of proportion, and who would ever love someone whose feet could look like this?

—

My mother spoke of the men she dated, after my father, with the desperate optimism of the born-again. And I saw the devout labor it took: she did exercises on a bath towel in the living room, her leotard striped with sweat. Licked her palm and sniffed to test her own breath. She went out with men whose necks raised boils where they cut themselves shaving, men who fumbled for the check but looked grateful when my mother removed her Air Travel Card. She found men like this and seemed happy about it.

I’d imagine Peter, during our dinners with these men. Asleep with Pamela in a basement apartment in an unfamiliar Oregon town. Jealousy mingled strangely with a protectiveness for the two of them, for the child growing inside Pamela. There were only so many girls, I understood, that could be marked for love. Like that girl Suzanne, who commanded that response just by existing.

—

The man my mother liked best was a gold miner. Or that’s how Frank introduced himself, laughing, a scud of spit in the corner of his mouth.

“Pleased to meet you, darlin’,” he said the first night, his big arm reining me toward him in a clumsy hug. My mother was giddy and a little drunk, as if life were a world where nuggets of gold were hidden in streambeds or clustered at cliff bases, picked off as easily as peaches.

I had heard my mother tell Sal that Frank was still married but wouldn’t be for long. I didn’t know if that was true. Frank didn’t seem the type to leave his family. He wore a shirt with creamy buttons, peonies embroidered in raised red thread on the shoulders. My mother was acting nervous, touching her hair, slipping her fingernail between her front teeth. She looked from me to Frank. “Evie’s a very smart girl,” she said. She was talking too loud. Still, it was nice to hear her say it. “She’ll really blossom at Catalina.” This was the boarding school I’d attend, though September seemed years away.

“Big brains,” Frank boomed. “Can’t go wrong there, can you?”

I didn’t know if he was joking or not, and my mother didn’t seem to know either.

We ate a casserole in silence in the dining room, and I picked out the blats of tofu and built a pile on my plate. I watched my mother decide not to say anything.

Frank was good-looking, even if his shirt was strange, too fussy and feminine, and he made my mother laugh. He was not as handsome as my father, but still. She kept reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips.

“Fourteen years old, huh?” Frank said. “Bet you have a ton of boyfriends.”

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.

“Oh, heaps,” I said, and my mother perked to attention, hearing the coldness in my voice. Frank didn’t seem to notice, smiling widely at my mother, patting her hand. She was smiling, too, in a masklike way, her eyes bouncing from me to him across the table.

Frank had gold mines in Mexico. “No regulations down there,” he said. “Cheap labor. It’s pretty much a sure thing.”

“How much gold have you found?” I asked. “So far, I mean.”

“Well, once all the equipment is in place, I’ll be finding a ton.” He drank from a wineglass, his fingers leaving ghosts of grease. My mother went soft, in his glance; her shoulders relaxing, her lips parting. She was young looking that night. I had a queer twinge of motherly feeling for her, and the discomfort of it made me wince.

“Maybe I’ll take you down there,” Frank said. “Both of you. Little trip to Mexico. Flowers in your hair.” He burped under his breath, swallowing it, and my mother blushed, wine moving in her glass.

My mother liked this man. Did her stupid exercises so she would look beautiful to him without any clothes on. She was groomed and oiled, her face eager for love. It was a painful thought, my mother needing anything, and I looked over at her, wanting to smile, to show her how we were fine, the two of us. But she wasn’t watching me. She was alert to Frank instead, waiting to receive whatever he wanted to give her. I balled my hands tight under the table.

“What about your wife?” I asked.

“Evie,” my mother hissed.

“That’s all right,” Frank said, holding up his hands. “That’s a fair question.” He rubbed his eyes hard, then put down his fork. “It’s complicated stuff.”

“It’s not that complicated,” I said.

“You’re a rude girl,” my mother said. Frank put his hand on her shoulder, but she’d already stood up to clear the plates, a grim busyness fixed on her face, and Frank handed over his plate with a concerned smile. Wiping his dry hands on his jeans. I didn’t look at her or him. I was picking at the skin around my fingernail, tugging until there was a satisfying tear.

When my mother left the room, Frank cleared his throat.

“You shouldn’t make your mom so mad,” he said. “She’s a nice lady.”

“None of your business.” My cuticle was bleeding a little: I pressed to feel the sting.

“Hey,” he said, his voice easy, like he was trying to be my friend. “I get it. You wanna be out of the house. Tired of living with ol’ mom, huh?”

“Pathetic,” I mouthed.

He didn’t understand what I had said, only that I hadn’t responded how he wanted. “Biting your nails is an ugly habit,” he said hotly. “An ugly, dirty habit for dirty people. Are you an ugly person?”

My mother reappeared in the doorway. I was sure she had overheard, and now she knew that Frank wasn’t a nice man. She would be disappointed, but I resolved to be kinder, to help more around the house.

But my mother just wrinkled her face. “What’s happening?”

“I was just telling Evie she shouldn’t bite her nails.”

“I tell her that, too,” my mother said. Her voice rattled, her lips twitching. “She could get sick, ingesting germs.”

I cycled through the possibilities. My mother was simply stalling. She was taking a moment to figure out how best to drive Frank from our lives, to tell him I was no one else’s business. But when she sat down and allowed Frank to rub her arm, even leaning toward him, I understood how it would go.

When Frank went to the bathroom, I figured there would be some kind of an apology from her.

“That shirt is too tight,” she whispered harshly. “It’s inappropriate, at your age.”

I opened my mouth to speak.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “You better believe we’ll talk.” When she heard Frank’s footsteps returning, she gave me one last look, then rose to meet him. They left me alone at the table. The overhead light on my arms and hands was severe and unlovely.

They went on the porch to sit, my mother keeping her cigarette butts in a mermaid tin. From my bedroom I heard their staggered talk late into the night, my mother’s laugh, simple and thoughtless. The smoke from their cigarettes drifting through the screen. The night boiled inside me. My mother thought life was as easy as picking gold from the ground, as if things could be that way for her. There was no Connie to temper my upset, just the suffocating constancy of my own self, that numb and desperate company.

—

There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked at herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans.

—

In the morning, I came into the kitchen and found my mother at the table, her bowl of tea already drained, sediment flecking the bottom. Her lips were tight, her eyes wounded. I walked past her without speaking, opening a bag of ground coffee, purple and heady, my mother’s replacement for the Sanka that my father liked.

“What was that about?” She was trying to be calm, I could tell, but the words were rushed.

I shook the grounds into the maker, turned on the burner. Keeping a Buddhist calm on my face as I went about my tasks, untroubled. This was my best weapon, and I could feel her getting agitated.

“Well, now you’re quiet,” she said. “You were very rude to Frank last night.”

I didn’t respond.

“You want me to be unhappy?” She got to her feet. “I’m talking to you,” she said, reaching to snap the stove off.

“Hey,” I said, but her face made me shut up.

“Why can’t you let me have anything?” she said. “Just one little thing.”

“He’s not going to leave her.” The intensity of my feeling startled me. “He’s never going to be with you.”

“You don’t know anything about his life,” she said. “Not anything. You think you know so much.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Gold. Right. Big success there. Just like Dad. I bet he asked you for money.”

My mother flinched.

“I try with you,” she said. “I’ve always tried, but you aren’t trying at all. Look at yourself. Doing nothing.” She shook her head, tightening her robe. “You’ll see. Life will come up on you so fast, and guess what, you’ll be stuck with the person you are. No ambition, no drive. You have a real chance at Catalina, but you have to try. You know what my mother was doing at your age?”

“You never did anything!” Something tipped over inside me. “All you did was take care of Dad. And he left.” My face was burning. “I’m sorry I disappoint you. I’m sorry I’m so awful. I should pay people to tell me I’m great, like you do. Why did Dad leave if you’re so fucking great?”

She reached forward and slapped me, not hard, but hard enough so there was an audible sound. I smiled, like a crazed person, showing too many teeth.

“Get out.” Her neck was mottled with hives, her wrists thin. “Get out,” she hissed again, weakly, and I darted away.

—

I took the bicycle down the dirt road. My heart thudding, the tightness of pressure behind my eyes. I liked feeling the sting of my mother’s slap, the aura of goodness she had so carefully cultivated for the last month — the tea, the bare feet — curdled in an instant. Good. Let her be ashamed. All her classes and cleanses and readings had done nothing. She was the same weak person as always. I pedaled faster, a flurry in my throat. I could go to the Flying A and buy a bag of chocolate stars. I could see what was playing at the movie theater or walk along the brothy soup of the river. My hair lifted a little in the dry heat. I felt hatred hardening in me, and it was almost nice, how big it was, how pure and intense.

My furious pedaling went abruptly slack: the chain slipped its bearings. The bike was slowing. I lurched to a stop in the dirt by the fire road. My armpits were sweating, the backs of my knees. The sun hot through the cutwork lattice of a live oak. I was trying not to cry. I crouched on the ground to realign the chain, tears skimming off my eyes in the sting of the breeze, my fingers slippery with grease. It was too hard to grip, the chain falling away.

“Fuck,” I said, then said it louder. I wanted to kick the bicycle, silence something, but that would be too pitiful, the theater of upset performed for no one. I tried one more time to hook the chain onto the spoke, but it wouldn’t catch, snapping loose. I let the bike drop into the dirt and sank down beside it. The front wheel spun a little, then slowed to a stop. I stared at the bike, splayed and useless: the frame was “Campus Green,” a color that had conjured, in the store, a hale college boy walking you home from an evening class. A prissy fantasy, a stupid bike, and I let the string of disappointments grow until they looped into a dirge of mediocrity. Connie was probably with May Lopes. Peter and Pamela buying houseplants for an Oregon apartment and soaking lentils for supper. What did I have? The tears dripped off my chin into the dirt, pleasing proof of my suffering. This absence in me that I could curl around like an animal.

I heard it before I saw it: the black bus lumbering heavily up the road, dust rising behind the wheels. The windows were pocked and gray, the blurred shapes of people within. Painted on the hood was a crude heart, crowned with drippy lashes, like an eye.

—

A girl wearing a man’s shirt and knitted vest stepped down from the bus, shaking back her flat orange hair. I could hear other voices, a flurry at the windows. A moony face appeared: watching me.

The girl’s voice was singsongy. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“The bike,” I said, “the chain’s messed up.” The girl toed the wheel with her sandaled foot. Before I could ask who she was, Suzanne came down the steps, and my heart surged. I got to my feet, trying to brush the dirt from my knees. Suzanne smiled but seemed distracted. I realized I had to remind her of my name.

“From the store on East Washington,” I said. “The other day?”

“Oh yeah.”

I expected her to say something about the bizarre luck of encountering each other again, but she looked a little bored. I kept glancing at her. I wanted to remind her of our conversation, how she’d said I was thoughtful. But she wouldn’t exactly meet my eye.

“We saw you sitting there and thought, Oh shit, poor thing,” the redhead said. This was Donna, I was to learn. She had a touched look, her eyebrows invisible so her face took on an alien blankness. She squatted to study my bike. “Suzanne said she knew you.”

—

The three of us worked together to get the chain back on. The smell of their sweat as we propped the bike on its stand. I’d bent the gears somehow when the bike fell, and the teeth wouldn’t line up with the spokes.

“Fuck.” Suzanne sighed. “This is all messed up.”

“You need pliers or something,” Donna said. “You aren’t gonna fix it now. Stick it in the bus, come hang with us for a while.”

“Let’s just give her a ride into town,” Suzanne said.

She spoke briskly, like I was a mess that needed to be cleaned up. Even so, I was glad. I was used to thinking about people who never thought about me.

“We’re having a solstice party,” Donna said.

I didn’t want to go back to my mother, to the forlorn guardianship of my own self. I had the sense that if I let Suzanne go, I would not see her again.

“Evie wants to come,” Donna said. “I can tell she’s up for it. You like to have fun, don’t you?”

“Come on,” Suzanne said. “She’s a kid.”

I surged with shame. “I’m sixteen,” I lied.

“She’s sixteen,” Donna repeated. “Don’t you think Russell would want us to be hospitable? I think he’d be upset if I told him we weren’t being hospitable.”

I didn’t read any threat in Donna’s voice, only teasing.

Suzanne’s mouth was tight; she finally smiled.

“Okay,” she said. “Put the bike in the back.”

—

I saw that the bus had been emptied and rebuilt, the interior cruddy and overworked in the way things were back then — the floor gridded with Oriental carpets, grayed with dust, the drained tufts of thrift store cushions. The stink of a joss stick in the air, prisms ticking against the windows. Cardboard scrawled with dopey phrases.

There were three other girls in the bus, and they turned to me with eagerness, a feral attention I read as flattering. Cigarettes going in their hands while they looked me up and down, an air of festivity and timelessness. A sack of green potatoes, pasty hot dog buns. A crate of wet, overripe tomatoes. “We were on a food run,” Donna said, though I didn’t really understand what that meant. My mind was preoccupied with this sudden shift of luck, with monitoring the slow trickle of sweat under my arms. I kept waiting to be spotted, to be identified as an intruder who didn’t belong. My hair too clean. Little nods toward presentation and decorum that seemed to concern no one else. My hair cut crazily across my vision from the open windows, intensifying the dislocation, the abruptness of being in this strange bus. A feather hanging from the rearview with a cluster of beads. Some dried lavender on the dashboard, colorless from the sun.

“She’s coming to the solstice,” Donna chimed, “the summer solstice.”

It was early June and I knew the solstice was at the end of the month: I didn’t say anything. The first of many silences.

“She’s gonna be our offering,” Donna told the others. Giggling. “We’re gonna sacrifice her.”

I looked to Suzanne — even our brief history seemed to ratify my presence among them — but she was sitting off to the side, absorbed by the box of tomatoes. Applying pressure to the skins, sifting out the rot. Waving away the bees. It would occur to me later that Suzanne was the only one who didn’t seem overjoyed to come upon me, there on the road. Something formal and distant in her affect. I can only think it was protective. That Suzanne saw the weakness in me, lit up and obvious: she knew what happened to weak girls.

—

Donna introduced me around, and I tried to remember their names. Helen, a girl who seemed close to my age, though maybe it was just her pigtails. She was pretty in the youthful way of hometown beauties, snub-nosed, her features accessible, though with an obvious expiration date. Roos. “Short for Roosevelt,” she told me. “As in, Franklin D.” She was older than the other girls, with a face as round and rosy as a storybook character.

I couldn’t remember the name of the tall girl who was driving: I never saw her again after that day.

Donna made a space, patting the nub of an embroidered cushion.

“Come here,” she said, and I sat down on the itchy pile. Donna seemed odd, slightly oafish, but I liked her. All of her greed and pettiness was right on the surface.

The bus lurched forward: my gut went jostled and tight, but I took the jug of cheap red wine when they passed it, splashing out over my hands. They looked happy, smiling, their voices sometimes breaking into snippets of song like campers around a fire. I was picking up the particularities — how they held hands without any self-consciousness and dropped words like “harmony” and “love” and “eternity.” How Helen acted like a baby, pulling on her pigtails and talking in her baby voice, abruptly sinking into Roos’s lap like she could trick Roos into taking care of her. Roos didn’t complain: she seemed stolid, nice. Those pink cheeks, her lank blond hair falling in her eyes. Though later I’d think maybe it was less niceness than a muted void where niceness should be. Donna asked me about myself, and so did the others, a constant stream of questions. I couldn’t help my pleasure at being the focus of their attention. Inexplicably, they seemed to like me, and the thought was foreign and cheering, a mysterious gift I didn’t want to probe too much. I could even cast Suzanne’s silence in a welcoming light, imagining she was shy, like me.

“Nice,” Donna said, touching my shirt. Helen pinched a sleeve, too.

“You’re just like a little doll,” Donna said. “Russell’s gonna love you.”

She tossed out his name just like that, as if it were unimaginable that I might not know who Russell was. Helen giggled at the sound of his name, rolling her shoulders with pleasure, like she was sucking on a sweet. Donna saw my blink of uncertainty and laughed.

“You’ll love him,” she said. “He’s not like anyone else. No bullshit. It’s like a natural high, being around him. Like the sun or something. That big and right.”

She looked over to be sure I was listening, seemed pleased that I was.

She said that the place we were headed was about a way of living. Russell was teaching them how to discover a path to truth, how to free their real selves from where it was coiled inside them. She talked about someone named Guy, who’d once trained falcons but had joined their group and now wanted to be a poet.

“When we met him, he was on some weird trip, just eating meat. He thought he was the devil or something. But Russell helped him. Taught him how to love,” Donna said. “Everyone can love, can transcend the bullshit, but so many things get us all stopped up.”

—

I didn’t know how to imagine Russell. I had only the limited reference point of men like my father or boys I’d had crushes on. The way these girls spoke of Russell was different, their worship more practical, with none of the playful, girlish longing I knew. Their certainty was unwavering, invoking Russell’s power and magic as though it were as widely acknowledged as the moon’s tidal pull or the earth’s orbit.

Donna said Russell was unlike any other human. That he could receive messages from animals. That he could heal a man with his hands, pull the rot out of you as cleanly as a tumor.

“He sees every part of you,” Roos added. As if that were a good thing.

The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.

The hint of sex that crossed their faces when they spoke of Russell, a prom-night giddiness. I understood, without anyone exactly saying so, that they all slept with him. The arrangement made me blush, inwardly shocked. No one seemed jealous of anyone else. “The heart doesn’t own anything,” Donna chimed. “That’s not what love is about,” she said, squeezing Helen’s hand, a look passing between them. Even though Suzanne was mostly silent, sitting apart from us, I saw her face change at the mention of Russell. A wifely tenderness in her eyes that I wanted to feel, too.

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I’d grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn’t even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that had always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.

—

They discussed plans for the solstice party. Helen up on her knees, tightening her pigtails with happy, brisk habit. Thrilling while they described the dresses they’d change into, some goofy solstice song Russell had made up. Someone named Mitch had given them enough money to buy alcohol: Donna said his name with a confusing emphasis.

“You know,” she repeated. “Mitch. Like Mitch Lewis?”

I hadn’t recognized Mitch’s name, but I’d heard of his band — I’d seen them on TV, playing in the hot lights of a studio set, sweat needling their foreheads. The background was a shag of tinsel, the stage revolving so the band members turned like jewelry-box ballerinas.

I affected nonchalance, but here it was: the world I had always suspected existed, the world where you called famous musicians by their first names.

“Mitch did a recording session with Russell,” Donna told me. “Russell blew his mind.”

There it was again, their wonder at Russell, their certainty. I was jealous of that trust, that someone else could stitch the empty parts of your life together so you felt there was a net under you, linking each day to the next.

“Russell’s gonna be famous, like that,” Helen added. “He has a record deal, already.” It was like she was recounting a fairy tale, but this was even better, because she knew it would happen.

“You know what Mitch calls Russell?” Donna spooked her hands dreamily. “The Wizard. Isn’t that a trip?”

—

After I’d been at the ranch a while, I saw how everyone spoke of Mitch. Of Russell’s imminent record deal. Mitch was their patron saint, sending Clover Dairy shipments to the ranch so the kids could get calcium, supporting the place financially. I wouldn’t hear the whole story until much later. Mitch had met Russell at Baker Beach, at a love-in of sorts. Russell attending in his buckskins, a Mexican guitar strapped to his back. Flanked by his women, begging for change with their air of biblical poverty. The cold, dark sand, a bonfire, Mitch on a break between records. Someone in a porkpie hat tending a pot of steamed clams.

Mitch, I’d learn, had been having a crisis — money disputes with a manager who’d been a childhood friend, a marijuana arrest that had been expunged, but still — and Russell must have seemed like a citizen of a realer world, stoking Mitch’s guilt over the gold records, the parties where he covered the pool in Perspex. Russell offered up a mystic salvation, buttressed by the young girls who cast their eyes down in adoration when Russell spoke. Mitch invited the whole group back to his house in Tiburon, letting them gorge on the contents of his refrigerator, crash in his guest room. They drained bottles of apple juice and pink champagne and tracked mud onto the bed, thoughtless as an occupying army. In the morning, Mitch gave them a lift back to the ranch: by then Russell had seduced Mitch, speaking softly of truth and love, those invocations especially potent to wealthy searchers.

I believed everything the girls told me that day, their buzzy, swarming pride as they spoke of Russell’s brilliance. How pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without getting mobbed. How he’d be able to tell the whole world how to be free. And it was true that Mitch had set up a recording session for Russell. Thinking maybe Mitch’s label would find Russell’s vibe interesting and of the moment. I didn’t know it until much later, but the session had gone badly, the failure legendary. This was before everything else happened.

—

There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before.

Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge? The bees glittering and crawling in the crate of tomatoes? An unusual lack of cars on the road? The question I remember Donna asking me in the bus — casually, almost as an afterthought.

“You ever hear anything about Russell?”

The question didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand that she was trying to gauge how many of the rumors I’d heard: about orgies, about frenzied acid trips and teen runaways forced to service older men. Dogs sacrificed on moonlit beaches, goat heads rotting in the sand. If I’d had friends besides Connie, I might’ve heard chatter of Russell at parties, some hushed gossip in the kitchen. Might’ve known to be wary.

But I just shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything.

5

Even later, even knowing the things I knew, it was impossible, that first night, to see beyond the immediate. Russell’s buckskin shirt, smelling of flesh and rot and as soft as velvet. Suzanne’s smile blooming in me like a firework, losing its colored smoke, its pretty, drifting cinders.

—

“Home on the range,” Donna said as we climbed down from the bus that afternoon.

It took me a moment to see where I was. The bus had gone far from the highway, bumping down a dirt road that ended deep in the blond summer hills, cupped with oaks. An old wooden house: the knobby rosettes and plaster columns giving it the air of a minor castle. It was part of a grid of ad hoc existence that included, as far as I could see, a barn and a swampy-looking pool. Six fleecy llamas drowsing in a pen. Far-off figures were hacking at brush along the fence. They raised their hands in greeting, then bent again to their work.

“The creek is low, but you can still swim,” Donna said.

It seemed magical to me that they actually lived there together. The Day-Glo symbols crawling up the side of the barn, clothes on a line ghosting in a breeze. An orphanage for raunchy children.

They had once filmed a car commercial at the ranch, Helen said in her baby voice. “A while ago, but still.”

Donna nudged me. “Pretty wild out here, huh?”

I said, “How’d you even find this place?”

“This old guy used to live here, but he had to move out ’cause the roof was bad.” Donna shrugged. “We fixed it, kind of. His grandson rents it to us.”

To make money, she explained, they took care of the llamas and worked for the farmer next door, harvesting lettuce with their pocketknives and selling his haul at the farmer’s market. Sunflowers and jars of marmalade gluey with pectin.

“Three bucks an hour. Not bad,” Donna said. “But money gets tight.”

I nodded, like I understood such concerns. I watched a young boy, four or five, hurtle himself at Roos, crash-landing into her leg. He was badly sunburned, his hair bleached white, and he seemed too old to still be wearing a diaper. I assumed the boy was Roos’s child. Was Russell the father? The quick thought of sex raised a queasy rush in my chest. The boy lifted his head, like a dog roused from sleep, and looked at me with a bored, suspicious squint.

Donna leaned into me. “Come meet Russell,” she said. “You’ll love him, I swear.”

“She’ll meet him at the party,” Suzanne said, cutting into our conversation. I hadn’t noticed her approach: her closeness startled me. She handed a sack of potatoes to me and took up a cardboard box in her arms. “We’re gonna dump this stuff in the kitchen, first. For the feast.”

Donna pouted, but I followed Suzanne.

“Bye, dolly,” she called, frittering her thin fingers and laughing, not unkindly.

—

I followed Suzanne’s dark hair through a jumble of strangers. The ground was uneven, a disorienting slope. It was the smell, too, a heavy smokiness. I was flattered Suzanne had enlisted my help, like it confirmed I was one of them. There were young people milling around in bare feet or boots, their hair drifty and sun lightened. I overheard feverish invocations of the solstice party. I didn’t know it yet, but it was rare for the ranch, all this efficient work. Girls wore their best thrift store rags and carried instruments in their arms as gently as babies, the sun catching the steel of a guitar and fractaling into hot diamonds of light. The tambourines rattling tuneless in their arms.

“Those fuckers bite me all night,” Suzanne said, swatting at one of the vicious horseflies that droned around us. “I wake up all bloody from scratching.”

Beyond the house, the land was scarred with boulders and the filtery oaks, a few hollow cars in a state of disrepair. I liked Suzanne but couldn’t shake the feeling that I was struggling to keep pace with her: it was an age when I often conflated liking people with feeling nervous around them. A boy with no shirt and a chunky silver belt buckle catcalled when we passed. “What you got there? A solstice present?”

“Shut up,” Suzanne said.

The boy smiled, raffish, and I tried to smile back. He was young, his hair long and dark, a medieval droop to his face I took as romantic. Handsome with the feminine duskiness of a cinematic villain, though I’d find out he was just from Kansas.

This was Guy. A farm boy who’d defected from Travis AFB when he’d discovered it was the same bullshit scene as his father’s house. He’d worked in Big Sur for a while, then drifted north. Gotten caught up in a group fermenting around the borders of the Haight, the hobby Satanists who wore more jewelry than a teenage girl. Scarab lockets and platinum daggers, red candles and organ music. Then Guy had come across Russell playing guitar in the park one day. Russell in the frontier buckskins that maybe reminded Guy of the adventure books of his youth, serials starring men who scraped caribou hides and forded frigid Alaskan rivers. Guy had been with Russell ever since.

Guy was the one who would drive the girls later that summer. Tighten his own belt around the caretaker’s wrists, that big silver buckle notching into the tender skin and leaving behind an oddly shaped stamp, like a brand.

But that first day he was just a boy, giving off a dirty fritz like a warlock, and I glanced back at him with a thrilled shiver.

Suzanne stopped a girl walking by: “Tell Roos to get Nico back to the nursery. He shouldn’t be out here.”

The girl nodded.

Suzanne glanced at me as we kept going, reading my confusion. “Russell doesn’t want us to get too attached to the kids. Especially if they’re ours.” She let out a grim laugh. “They aren’t our property, you know? We don’t get to fuck them up just because we want something to cuddle.”

It took me a moment to process this idea that parents didn’t have the right. It suddenly seemed blaringly true. My mother didn’t own me just because she had given birth to me. Sending me to boarding school because the spirit moved her. Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn’t be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you’d hoped.

—

The kitchen was much darker than outside, and I blinked in the sudden wash. All the rooms smelled pungent and earthy, some mix of high-volume cooking and bodies. The walls were mostly bare, except for streaks of a daisy-patterned wallpaper and another funny heart painted there, too, like on the bus. The window sashes were crumbling, T-shirts tacked up instead of curtains. Somewhere nearby, a radio was on.

There were ten or so girls in the kitchen, focused on their cooking tasks, and everyone was healthy looking, their arms slim and tan, their hair thick. Bare feet gripping the rough boards of the floor. They cackled and snipped at one another, pinching exposed flesh and swatting with spoons. Everything seemed sticky and a little rotten. As soon as I put the bag of potatoes on the counter, a girl started picking through them.

“Green potatoes are poisonous,” she said. Sucking her teeth, sifting through the sack.

“Not if you cook them,” Suzanne shot back. “So cook them.”

—

Suzanne slept in a small outbuilding with a dirt floor, a bare twin mattress against each of the four walls. “Mostly girls crash here,” she said, “it depends. And Nico, sometimes, even though I don’t want him to. I want him to grow up free. But he likes me.”

A square of stained silk was tacked above a mattress, a Mickey Mouse pillowcase on the bed. Suzanne passed me a rolled cigarette, the end wet with her saliva. Ash fell on her bare thigh, but she didn’t seem to notice. It was weed, but it was stronger than what Connie and I smoked, the dry refuse from Peter’s sock drawer. This was oily and dank, and the cloying smoke it produced didn’t dissipate quickly. I waited to start feeling differently. Connie would hate all this. Think this place was dirty and strange, that Guy was frightening — this knowledge made me proud. My thoughts were softening, the weed starting to surface.

“Are you really sixteen?” Suzanne asked.

I wanted to keep up the lie, but her gaze was too bright.

“I’m fourteen,” I said.

Suzanne didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll give you a ride home, if you want. You don’t have to stay.”

I licked my lips — did she think I couldn’t handle this? Or maybe she thought I would embarrass her. “I don’t have to be anywhere,” I said.

Suzanne opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated.

“Really,” I said, starting to feel desperate. “It’s fine.”

There was a moment, when Suzanne looked at me, when I was sure she’d send me home. Pack me back to my mother’s house like a truant. But then the look drained into something else, and she got to her feet.

“You can borrow a dress,” she said.

—

There was a rack of clothes hanging and more spilling out of a garbage bag — torn denim. Paisley shirts, long skirts. The hems stuttering with loose stitching. The clothes weren’t nice, but the quantity and unfamiliarity stirred me. I’d always been jealous of girls who wore their sister’s hand-me-downs, like the uniform of a well-loved team.

“This stuff is all yours?”

“I share with the girls.” Suzanne seemed resigned to my presence: Maybe she’d seen that my desperation was bigger than any desire or ability she had to shoo me off. Or maybe the admiration was flattering, my wide eyes, greedy for the details of her. “Only Helen makes a fuss. We have to go get things back; she hides them under her pillow.”

“Don’t you want some for yourself?”

“Why?” She took a draw from the joint and held her breath. When she spoke, her voice was crackled. “I’m not on that kind of trip right now. Me me me. I love the other girls, you know. I like that we share. And they love me.”

She watched me through the smoke. I felt shamed. For doubting Suzanne or thinking it was strange to share. For the limits of my carpeted bedroom at home. I shoved my hands in my shorts. This wasn’t bullshit dabbling, like my mother’s afternoon workshops.

“I get it,” I said. And I did, and tried to isolate the flutter of solidarity in myself.

The dress Suzanne chose for me stank like mouse shit, my nose twitching as I pulled it over my head, but I was happy wearing it — the dress belonged to someone else, and that endorsement released me from the pressure of my own judgments.

“Good,” Suzanne said, surveying me. I ascribed more meaning to her pronouncement than I ever had to Connie’s. There was something grudging about Suzanne’s attention, and that made it doubly valued. “Let me braid your hair,” she said. “Come here. It’ll tangle if you dance with it loose.”

I sat on the floor in front of Suzanne, her legs on either side of me, and tried to feel comfortable with the closeness, the sudden, guileless intimacy. My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum. It was an unexplained blessing. Her tangy breath on my neck as she swept my hair to one side. Walking her fingers along my scalp, drawing a straight part. Even the pimples I’d seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible.

—

Both of us were silent as she braided my hair. I picked up one of the reddish rocks from the floor, lined up beneath the mirror like the eggs of a foreign species.

“We lived in the desert for a while,” Suzanne said. “That’s where I got that.”

She told me about the Victorian they had rented in San Francisco. How they’d had to leave after Donna had accidentally started a fire in the bedroom. The time spent in Death Valley where they were all so sunburned they couldn’t sleep for days. The remains of a gutted, roofless salt factory in the Yucatán where they’d stayed for six months, the cloudy lagoon where Nico had learned to swim. It was painful to imagine what I had been doing at the same time: drinking the tepid, metallic water from my school’s drinking fountain. Biking to Connie’s house. Reclining in the dentist’s chair, hands politely in my lap, while Dr. Lopes worked in my mouth, his gloves slick with my idiot drool.

—

The night was warm and the celebration started early. There were maybe forty of us, swarming and massing in the stretch of dirt, hot air gusting over the run of tables, the wavy light from a kerosene lamp. The party seemed much bigger than it actually was. There was an antic quality that distorted my memory, the house looming behind us so everything gained a cinematic flicker. The music was loud, the sweet thrum occupying me in an exciting way, and people were dancing and grabbing for one another, hand over wrist: they skipped in circles, threading in and out. A drunken, yelping chain that broke when Roos sat down hard in the dirt, laughing. Some little kids skulked around the table like dogs, full and lonesome for the adult excitement, their lips scabby from picking.

“Where’s Russell?” I asked Suzanne. She was stoned, like me, her black hair loose. Someone had given her a shrub rose, half-wilted, and she was trying to knot it in her hair.

“He’ll be here,” she said. “It doesn’t really start till he’s here.”

She brushed some ash off my dress and the gesture stirred me.

“There’s our little doll,” Donna cooed when she saw me. She had a tinfoil crown on her head that kept falling off. She’d drawn an Egyptian pattern on her hands and freckled arms with kohl before clearly losing interest — it was all over her fingers, smeared on her dress, along her jaw. Guy swerved, avoiding her hands.

“She’s our sacrifice,” Donna told him, her words already careening around. “Our solstice offering.”

Guy smiled at me, his teeth stained from wine.

—

They burned a car that night in celebration, and the flames were hot and jumpy and I laughed out loud, for no reason — the hills were so dark against the sky and no one from my real life knew where I was and it was the solstice, and who cared if it wasn’t actually the solstice? I had distant thoughts of my mother, houndish nips of worry, but she’d assume I was at Connie’s. Where else would I be? She couldn’t conceive of this kind of place even existing, and even if she could, even if by some miracle she showed up, she wouldn’t be able to recognize me. Suzanne’s dress was too big, and it often slipped off my shoulders, but pretty soon I wasn’t as quick to pull the sleeves back up. I liked the exposure, the way I could pretend I didn’t care, and how I actually started not to care, even when I accidentally flashed most of a breast as I hitched up the sleeves. Some stunned, blissed-out boy — a painted crescent moon on his face — grinned at me like I’d always been there among them.

The feast was not a feast at all. Bloated cream puffs sweating in a bowl until someone fed them to the dogs. A plastic container of Cool Whip, green beans boiled to structureless gray, augmented by the winnings of some dumpster. Twelve forks clattered in a giant pot — everyone took turns scooping out a watery vegetal pabulum, the mash of potatoes and ketchup and onion soup packets. There was a single watermelon, rind patterned like a snake, but no one could find a knife. Finally Guy cracked it open violently on the corner of a table. The kids descended on the pulpy mess like rats.

It was nothing like the feast I’d been imagining. The distance made me feel a little sad. But it was only sad in the old world, I reminded myself, where people stayed cowed by the bitter medicine of their lives. Where money kept everyone slaves, where they buttoned their shirts up to the neck, strangling any love they had inside themselves.

—

How often I replayed this moment again and again, until it gained a meaningful pitch: when Suzanne nudged me so I knew the man walking toward the fire was Russell. My first thought was shock — he’d looked young as he approached, but then I saw he was at least a decade older than Suzanne. Maybe even as old as my mother. Dressed in dirty Wranglers and a buckskin shirt, though his feet were bare — how strange that was, how they all walked barefoot through the weeds and the dog shit as if nothing were there. A girl got to her knees beside him, touching his leg. It took me a moment to remember the girl’s name — my brain was sludgy from the drugs — but then I had it, Helen, the girl from the bus with her pigtails, her baby voice. Helen smiled up at him, enacting some ritual I didn’t understand.

I knew Helen had sex with this man. Suzanne did, too. I experimented with that thought, imagining the man hunched over Suzanne’s milky body. Closing his hand on her breast. I knew only how to dream about boys like Peter, the unformed muscles under their skin, the patchy hair they tended along their jaws. Maybe I would sleep with Russell. I tried on the thought. Sex was still colored by the girls in my father’s magazines, everything glossy and dry. About beholding. The people at the ranch seemed beyond that, loving one another indiscriminately, with the purity and optimism of children.

The man held up his hands and boomed out a greeting: the group surged and twitched like a Greek chorus. At moments like that, I could believe Russell was already famous. He seemed to swim through a denser atmosphere than the rest of us. He walked among the group, giving benedictions: a hand on a shoulder, a word whispered in an ear. The party was still going, but everyone was now aimed at him, their faces turned expectantly, as if following the arc of the sun. When Russell reached Suzanne and me, he stopped and looked in my eyes.

“You’re here,” he said. Like he’d been waiting for me. Like I was late.

—

I’d never heard another voice like his — full and slow, never hesitating. His fingers pressed into my back in a not unpleasant way. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was strong and compact, pressurized. The hair haloed around his head was coarsened by oil and dirt into a boggy mass. His eyes didn’t seem to water, or waver, or flick away. The way the girls had spoken of him finally made sense. How he took me in, like he wanted to see all the way through.

“Eve,” Russell said when Suzanne introduced me. “The first woman.”

I was nervous I’d say the wrong thing, expose the error of my presence. “It’s Evelyn, really.”

“Names are important, aren’t they?” Russell said. “And I don’t see any snake in you.”

Even this mild approval relieved me.

“What do you think of our solstice celebration, Evie?” he said. “Our spot?”

All the while his hand was pulsing a message on my back I couldn’t decode. I slivered a glance at Suzanne, aware that the sky had darkened without me noticing, the night gliding deeper. I felt drowsy from the fire and the dope. I hadn’t eaten and there was an empty throb in my stomach. Was he saying my name a lot? I couldn’t tell. Suzanne’s whole body was directed at Russell, her hand moving uneasy in her hair.

I told Russell I liked it here. Other meaningless, nervous remarks, but even so, he was getting other information from me. And I never did lose that feeling. Even after. That Russell could read my thoughts as easily as taking a book from a shelf.

When I smiled, he tilted my chin up with his hand. “You’re an actress,” he said. His eyes were like hot oil, and I let myself feel like Suzanne, the kind of girl a man would startle at, would want to touch. “Yeah, that’s it. I see it. You gotta be standing on a cliff and looking out to sea.”

I told him I wasn’t an actress, but my grandmother was.

“Right on,” he said. As soon as I said her name, he was even more attentive. “I picked that up right off. You look like her.”

Later I’d read about how Russell sought the famous and semifamous and hangers-on, people he could court and wring for resources, whose cars he could borrow and houses he could live in. How pleased he must have been at my arrival, not even needing to be coaxed. Russell reached out to draw Suzanne closer. When I caught her eye, she seemed to retreat. I hadn’t thought, until that moment, that she might be nervous about me and Russell. A new feeling of power flexed within me, a quick tightening of ribbon so unfamiliar I didn’t recognize it.

“And you’ll be in charge of our Evie,” Russell said to Suzanne. “Won’t you?”

Neither looked at me. The air between them crisscrossed with symbols. Russell held my hand for a moment, his eyes avalanching over me.

“Later, Evie,” he said.

Then a few whispered words to Suzanne. She rejoined me with a new air of briskness.

“Russell says you can stick around, if you want,” she said.

I felt how energized she was by seeing Russell. Alert with renewed authority, studying me as she spoke. I didn’t know if the jump I felt was fear or interest. My grandmother had told me about getting movie roles — how quickly she was plucked from a group. “That’s the difference,” she’d told me. “All the other girls thought the director was making the choice. But it was really me telling the director, in my secret way, that the part was mine.”

I wanted that — a sourceless, toneless wave carried from me to Russell. To Suzanne, to all of them. I wanted this world without end.

—

The night began to show ragged edges. Roos was naked from the waist up, her heavy breasts flushed from the heat. Falling into long silences. A black dog trotted into the darkness. Suzanne had disappeared to find more grass. I kept searching for her, but I’d get distracted by the flash and shuffle, the strangers who danced by and smiled at me with blunt kindness.

Little things should have upset me. Some girl burned herself, raising a ripple of skin along her arm, and stared down at the scorch with idle curiosity. The outhouse with its shit stench and cryptic drawings, walls papered in pages torn from porno mags. Guy describing the warm entrails of the pigs he’d gutted on his parents’ farm in Kansas.

“They knew what was coming,” he said to a rapt audience. “They’d smile when I brought food and flip out when I had the knife.”

He adjusted his big belt buckle, cackling something I couldn’t hear. But it was the solstice, I explained to myself, pagan mutterings, and whatever disturbance I felt was just a failure to understand the place. And there was so much else to notice and favor — the silly music from the jukebox. The silver guitar that caught the light, the melted Cool Whip dripping from someone’s finger. The numinous and fanatic faces of the others.

Time was confusing on the ranch: there were no clocks, no watches, and hours or minutes seemed arbitrary, whole days pouring into nothing. I don’t know how much time passed. How long I was waiting for Suzanne to return before I heard his voice. Right next to my ear, whispering my name.

“Evie.”

I turned, and there he was. I twisted with happiness: Russell had remembered me, he’d found me in the crowd. Had maybe even been looking for me. He took my hand in his, working the palm, my fingers. I was beaming, indeterminate; I wanted to love everything.

—

The trailer he brought me to was larger than any of the other rooms, the bed covered with a shaggy blanket that I’d realize later was actually a fur coat. It was the only nice thing in the room — the floor matted with clothes, empty cans of soda and beer glinting among the detritus. A peculiar smell in the air, a cut of fermentation. I was being willfully naïve, I suppose, pretending like I didn’t know what was happening. But part of me really didn’t. Or didn’t fully dwell on the facts: it was suddenly difficult to remember how I’d gotten there. That lurching bus ride, the cheap sugar of the wine. Where had I left my bike?

Russell was watching me intently. Tilting his head when I looked away, forcing me to catch his eyes. He brushed my hair behind my ear, letting his fingers fall to my neck. His fingernails uncut so I felt the ridge of them.

I laughed, but it was uneasy. “Is Suzanne gonna be here soon?” I said.

He’d told me, back at the fire, that Suzanne was coming, too, though maybe that was only something I wished.

“Suzanne’s just fine,” Russell said. “I wanna talk about you right now, Evie.”

My thoughts slowed to the pace of drifting snow. Russell spoke slowly and with seriousness, but he made me feel as though he had been waiting all night for the chance to hear what I had to say. How different this was from Connie’s bedroom, listening to records from some other world we’d never be a part of, songs that just reinforced our own static misery. Peter seemed drained to me, too. Peter, who was just a boy, who ate oleo on white bread for dinner. This was real, Russell’s gaze, and the flattered sickness in me was so pleasurable, I could barely keep hold of it.

“Shy Evie,” he said. Smiling. “You’re a smart girl. You see a lot with those eyes, don’t you?”

He thought I was smart. I grabbed on to it like proof. I wasn’t lost. I could hear the party outside. A fly buzzed in the corner, hitting the walls of the trailer.

“I’m like you,” Russell went on. “I was so smart when I was young, so smart that of course they told me I was dumb.” He let out a fractured laugh. “They taught me the word dumb. They taught me those words, then they told me that’s what I was.” When Russell smiled, his face soaked with a joy that seemed foreign to me. I knew I’d never felt that good. Even as a child I’d been unhappy — I saw, suddenly, how obvious that was.

As he talked, I hugged myself with my arms. It all started making sense to me, what Russell was saying, in the drippy way things could make sense. How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.

“There’s something in you,” he said. “Some part that’s real sad. And you know what? That really makes me sad. They’ve tried to ruin this beautiful, special girl. They’ve made her sad. Just because they are.”

I felt the press of tears.

“But they didn’t ruin you, Evie. ’Cause here you are. Our special Evie. And you can let all that old shit float away.”

He sat back on the mattress with the dirty soles of his bare feet on the fur coat, a strange calm in his face. He would wait as long as it took.

I don’t remember what I said at that point, just that I chattered nervously. School, Connie, the hollow nonsense of a young girl. My gaze slid around the trailer, fingers nipping at the fabric of Suzanne’s dress. Eyes coursing the fleur-de-lis pattern of the filthy bedspread. I remember that Russell smiled, patiently, waiting for me to lose energy. And I did. The trailer silent except for my own breathing and Russell shifting on the mattress.

“I can help you,” he said. “But you have to want it.”

His eyes fixed on mine.

“Do you want it, Evie?”

The words slit with scientific desire.

“You’ll like this,” Russell murmured. Opening his arms to me. “Come here.”

I edged toward him, sitting on the mattress. Struggling to complete the full circuit of comprehension. I knew it was coming, but it still surprised me. How he took down his pants, exposing his short, hairy legs, his penis in his fist. The hesitant catch in my gaze — he watched me watching him.

“Look at me,” he said. His voice was smooth, even while his hand worked furiously. “Evie,” he said, “Evie.”

The undercooked look of his dick, clutched in his hand: I wondered where Suzanne was. My throat tightened. It confused me at first, that it was all Russell wanted. To stroke himself. I sat there, trying to impose sense on the situation. I transmuted Russell’s behavior into proof of his good intentions. Russell was just trying to be close, to break down my hang-ups from the old world.

“We can make each other feel good,” he said. “You don’t have to be sad.”

I flinched when he pushed my head toward his lap. A singe of clumsy fear filled me. He was good at not seeming angry when I reared away. The indulgent look he gave me, like I was a skittish horse.

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Evie.” Holding out his hand again. The strobe of my heart going fast. “I just want to be close to you. And don’t you want me to feel good? I want you to feel good.”

When he came, he gasped, wetly. The salt damp of semen in my mouth, the alarming swell. He held me there, bucking. How had I gotten here, in the trailer, found myself in the dark woods without any crumbs to follow home, but then Russell’s hands were in my hair, and his arms were around me, pulling me up, and he said my name with intention and surety so it sounded strange to me, but smooth, too, valuable, like some other, better, Evie. Was I supposed to cry? I didn’t know. I was crowded with idiot trivia. A red sweater I had lent Connie and never gotten back. Whether Suzanne was looking for me or not. A curious thrill behind my eyes.

Russell handed me a bottle of Coke. The soda was tepid and flat, but I drank the whole thing. As intoxicating as champagne.

—

I experienced the whole night as fated, me as the center of a singular drama. But Russell had put me through a series of ritual tests. Perfected over the years that he had worked for a religious organization near Ukiah, a center that gave away food, found shelter and jobs. Attracting the thin, harried girls with partial college degrees and neglectful parents, girls with hellish bosses and dreams of nose jobs. His bread and butter. The time he spent at the center’s outpost in San Francisco in the old fire station. Collecting his followers. Already he’d become an expert in female sadness — a particular slump in the shoulders, a nervous rash. A subservient lilt at the end of sentences, eyelashes gone soggy from crying. Russell did the same thing to me that he did to those girls. Little tests, first. A touch on my back, a pulse of my hand. Little ways of breaking down boundaries. And how quickly he’d ramped it up, easing his pants to his knees. An act, I thought, calibrated to comfort young girls who were glad, at least, that it wasn’t sex. Who could stay fully dressed the whole time, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

But maybe the strangest part — I liked it, too.

—

I floated through the party in a stunned hush. The air on my skin insistent, my armpits sliding with sweat. It had happened — I had to keep telling myself so. I assumed everyone would see it on me. An obvious aura of sex. I wasn’t anxious anymore, wasn’t roaming the party squeezed by nervous need, the certainty that there was a hidden room I wasn’t allowed access to — that worry had been satisfied, and I took dreamy steps, looked back into passing faces with a smile that asked nothing.

When I saw Guy, tapping a pack of cigarettes, I stopped without hesitation.

“Can I have one?”

He grinned at me. “The girl wants a cigarette, she shall have her cigarette.” He held it to my mouth and I hoped people were watching.

I finally found Suzanne in a group near the fire. When she caught my eye, she gave me an odd, airless smile. I’m sure she recognized the inward shift you sometimes see in young girls, newly sexed. It’s that pride, I think, a solemnity. I wanted her to know. Suzanne was giddy from something, I could tell. Not alcohol. Something else, her pupils seeming to eat the iris, a flush lacing up her neck like a trippy Victorian collar.

Maybe Suzanne felt some hidden disappointment when the game fulfilled itself, when she saw that I’d gone with Russell, after all. But maybe she’d expected it. The car was still smoldering, the noise of the party cutting up the darkness. I felt the night churn in me like a wheel.

“When’s the car gonna stop burning?” I said.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her, the air soft between us.

“Jesus, I don’t know,” she said. “Morning?”

In the flicker, my arms and hands in front of me looked scaly and reptilian, and I welcomed the distorted vision of my body. I heard the brood of a motorcycle ignition, someone’s wicked hoot — they’d thrown a box spring in the fire, and the flames soared and deepened.

“You can crash in my room if you want,” Suzanne said. Her voice gave away nothing. “I don’t care. But you have to actually be here, if you’re going to be here. Get it?”

Suzanne was asking me something else. Like those fairy tales where goblins can enter a house only if invited by its inhabitants. The moment of crossing the threshold, the careful way Suzanne constructed her statements — she wanted me to say it. And I nodded, and said I understood. Though I couldn’t understand, not really. I was wearing a dress that didn’t belong to me in a place I had never been, and I couldn’t see much farther than that. The possibility that my life was hovering on the brink of a new and permanent happiness. I thought of Connie with a beatific indulgence — she was a sweet girl, wasn’t she — and even my father and mother fell under my generous purview, sufferers of a tragic foreign malady. The beam of motorcycle headlights blanched the tree branches and illuminated the exposed foundation of the house, the black dog crouching over an unseen prize. Someone kept playing the same song over and over. Hey, baby, the first lines went. The song repeated enough times that I started to get the phrase in my head, Hey, baby. I worked the words around with unspecific effort, like the idle rattle of a lemon drop against the teeth.