The Girls

6

My father had always been in charge of pool maintenance — skimming the surface with a net, heaping wet leaves into a pile. The colored vials he used to test chlorine levels. He’d never been that assiduous with upkeep, but the pool had gotten bad since he’d left. Salamanders idling around the filter. When I propelled myself along the rim, there was some sloggy resistance, crud dispersing in my wake. My mother was at group. She’d forgotten a promise to buy me a new swimsuit, so I was wearing my old orange one: pale as cantaloupe, the stitching puckered and gaping around the leg holes. The top was too small, but the adult mass of cleavage pleased me.

It had only been a week since the solstice party, and already I’d been back to the ranch, and already I was stealing money for Suzanne, bill by bill. I like to imagine that it took more time than that. That I had to be convinced over a period of months, slowly broken down. Wooed as carefully as a valentine. But I was an eager mark, anxious to offer myself.

I kept bobbing in the water, algae speckling the hair on my legs like filings to a magnet. A forgotten paperback ruffled on the seat of the lawn chair. The leaves in the trees were silvery and spangled, like scales, everything full with June’s lazy heat. Had the trees around my house always looked like that, so strange and aquatic? Or were things already shifting for me, the dumb litter of the normal world transforming into the lush stage sets of a different life?

—

Suzanne had driven me home the morning after the solstice, my bike shoved in the backseat. My mouth was leached and unfamiliar from smoking so much, and my clothes were stale from my body and smelled of ash. I kept picking bits of straw from my hair — proof of the night before that thrilled me, like a stamped passport. It had happened, after all, and I kept up a vivid catalog of happy data: the fact that I was sitting beside Suzanne, our friendly silence. My perverse pride that I’d been with Russell. I took pleasure in replaying the facts of the act, even the messy and boring parts. The odd lulls while Russell made himself hard. There was some power in the bluntness of human functions. Like Russell had explained to me: your body could hurtle you past your hang-ups, if you let it.

Suzanne smoked steadily as she drove, occasionally offering her cigarette to me with serene ritual. The quiet between us wasn’t slack or uncomfortable. Outside the car, olive trees flashed by, the scorched summer earth. Far-off waterways, sloughing to the sea. Suzanne kept changing the radio station until she abruptly snapped it off.

“We need gas,” she announced.

We, I echoed silently, we need gas.

Suzanne pulled into the Texaco, empty except for a teal-and-white pickup towing a boat trailer.

“Hand me a card,” Suzanne said. Nodding at the glove box.

I scrambled to open it, loosing a jumble of credit cards. All with different names.

“The blue one,” she said. She seemed impatient. When I handed her the card, she saw my confusion.

“People give them to us,” she said. “Or we take them.” She fingered the blue card. “Like this one is Donna’s. She lifted it from her mom.”

“Her mom’s gas card?”

“Saved our ass — we would’ve starved,” Suzanne said. She gave me a look. “Like you hustling that toilet paper, right?”

I flushed at the mention. Maybe she’d known I had lied, but I couldn’t tell from her shuttered face — maybe not.

“Besides,” she continued, “it’s better than what they’d do with it — more crap, more stuff, more me, me, me. Russell’s trying to help people. He’s not judgmental, that’s not his trip. He doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.”

It made a kind of sense, what Suzanne was saying. They were just trying to equalize the forces in the world.

“It’s ego,” she went on, leaning against the car but keeping a sharp eye on the gas gauge: none of them ever filled up a tank more than a quarter full. “Money is ego, and people won’t give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don’t realize it keeps them slaves. It’s sick.”

She laughed.

“What’s funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it — that’s when you really have everything.”

One of the group had been detained for dumpster diving on a garbage run, and Suzanne was incensed, recounting the story as she pulled the car back onto the road.

“More and more stores get wise to it. Bullshit,” she said. “They throw something away and they still want it. That’s America.”

“That is bullshit.” The tone of the word was strange in my mouth.

“We’ll figure something out. Soon.” She glanced in the rearview. “Money’s tight. But you just can’t escape it. You probably don’t know what that’s like.”

She wasn’t sneering, not really — she spoke like she was just stating the truth. Acknowledging reality with an affable shrug. That’s when the idea came to me, fully formed, as if I had thought of it myself. And that’s how it seemed, like the exact solution, a baubled ornament shining within reach.

“I can get some money,” I said, later cringing at my eagerness. “My mom leaves her purse out all the time.”

It was true. I was always coming across money: in drawers, on tables, forgotten by the bathroom sink. I had an allowance, but my mother often gave me more, by accident, or just gestured vaguely in the direction of her purse. “Take what you need,” she’d always said. And I’d never taken more than I should have and was always conscious of returning the change.

“Oh no,” Suzanne said, flicking the last of her cigarette out the window. “You don’t have to do that. You’re a sweet kid, though,” she said. “Nice of you to offer.”

“I want to.”

She pursed her lips, affecting uncertainty, igniting a tilt in my gut.

“I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to.” She laughed a little. “That’s not what I’m about.”

“But I do want to,” I said. “I want to help.”

Suzanne didn’t speak for a minute, then smiled without looking over. “Okay,” she said. I didn’t miss the test in her voice. “You want to help. You can help.”

—

My task made me a spy in my mother’s house, my mother the clueless quarry. I could even apologize for our fight when I ran into her that night across the stillness of the hallway. My mother gave a little shrug but accepted my apology, smiling in a brave way. It would bother me, normally, that wavery brave smile, but the new me bowed my head in abject regret. I was imitating a daughter, acting like a daughter would. Part of me thrilled at the knowledge I held out of her reach, how every time I looked at her or spoke to her, I was lying. The night with Russell, the ranch, the secret space I tended to the side. She could have the husk of my old life, all the dried-up leftovers.

“You’re home so early,” she said. “I thought you might sleep at Connie’s again.”

“I didn’t feel like it.”

It was strange to be reminded of Connie, to jar back to the regular world. I’d been surprised, even, that I could feel the ordinary desire for food. I wanted the world to reorder itself visibly around the change, like a mend marking a tear.

My mother softened. “I’m just glad because I wanted to spend some time with you. Just us. It’s been a while, huh? Maybe I’ll make Stroganoff,” she said. “Or meatballs. What do you think?”

I was suspicious of her offer: she didn’t buy food for the house unless I wrote notes for her to find when she got back from group. And we hadn’t eaten meat in forever. Sal told my mother that to eat meat was to eat fear and that ingesting fear would make you gain weight.

“Meatballs would be good,” I allowed. I didn’t want to notice how happy it made her.

—

My mother turned on the radio in the kitchen, playing the kind of slight, balmy songs that I’d loved as a child. Diamond rings, cool streams, apple trees. If Suzanne or even Connie caught me listening to that sort of music, I’d be embarrassed — it was bland and cheerful and old-fashioned — but I had a grudging, private love of those songs, my mother singing along to the parts she knew. Rosy with theatrical enthusiasm, so it was easy to get caught up in her giddiness. Her posture was shaped by years of horse shows in adolescence, smiling from the backs of sleek Arabians, arena lights catching the crust of rhinestones on her collar. She had been so mysterious to me when I was younger. The shyness I had felt watching her move around the house, shuffling in her night slippers. The drawer of jewelry whose provenance I made her describe, piece by piece, like a poem.

The house was clean, the windows segmenting the dark night, the carpets plush beneath my bare feet. This was the opposite of the ranch, and I sensed I should be guilty — that it was wrong to be comfortable like this, to want to eat this food with my mother in the primness of our tidy kitchen. What were Suzanne and the others doing at that same moment? It was suddenly hard to imagine.

“How’s Connie these days?” she asked, flicking through her handwritten recipe cards.

“Fine.” She probably was. Watching May Lopes’s braces scum up.

“You know,” she said, “she can always come over here. You guys have been spending an awful lot of time at her house lately.”

“Her dad doesn’t care.”

“I miss her,” she said, though my mother had always seemed mystified by Connie, like a barely tolerated maiden aunt. “We should go on a trip to Palm Springs or something.” It was clear she’d been waiting to offer this. “You could invite Connie, if you wanted.”

“I don’t know.” It could be nice. Connie and I shoving each other in the sun-stifled backseat, drinking shakes from the date farm outside Indio.

“Mm,” she murmured. “We could go in the next few weeks. But you know, sweetheart”—a pause. “Frank might come, too.”

“I’m not going on a trip with you and your boyfriend.”

She tried to smile, but I saw that she wasn’t saying everything. The radio was too loud. “Sweetheart,” she started. “How are we ever going to live together—”

“What?” I hated how automatically my voice tilted bratty, cutting any authority.

“Not right away, definitely not.” Her mouth puckered. “But if Frank moves in—”

“I live here, too,” I said. “You were just gonna let him move in one day, without even telling me?”

“You’re fourteen.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Hey! Watch it,” she said, tucking her hands into her armpits. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude, but you need to quit it, and fast.” The nearness of my mother’s pleading face, her naked upset — it stoked a biological disgust for her, like when I smelled the bellow of iron in the bathroom and knew she had her period. “This is a nice thing I’m trying to do,” she said, “inviting your friend along. Can I get a break here?”

I laughed, but it was dripping with the sickness of betrayal. That’s why she’d wanted to make dinner. It was worse now, because I’d been so easily pleased. “Frank’s an asshole.”

Her face flared, but she pushed herself to get calm. “Watch your attitude. This is my life, understand? I’m trying to get just a little bit happy,” she said, “and you need to give me that. Can you give me that?”

She deserved her anemic life, its meager, girlish uncertainties. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. Good luck with Frank.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

“Forget it.” I could smell the raw meat coming to room temperature, a biting tinge of cold metal. My stomach tightened. “I’m not hungry anymore,” I said, and left her standing in the kitchen. The radio still playing songs about first loves, about dancing by the river, the meat thawed enough so my mother would be forced to cook it, though no one would eat it.

—

It was easy after that to tell myself that I deserved the money. Russell said that most people were selfish, unable to love, and that seemed true of my mother, and my father, too, tucked away with Tamar in the Portofino Apartments in Palo Alto. So it was a tidy trade, when I thought about it like that. Like the money I was filching, bill by bill, added up to something that could replace what had gone missing. It was too depressing to think it had maybe never been there in the first place. That none of it had — Connie’s friendship. Peter ever feeling anything for me besides annoyance at the obviousness of my kiddish worship.

My mother left her purse lying around, like always, and that made the money inside seem less valuable, something she didn’t care enough about to take seriously. Still, it was uncomfortable, poking around in her purse, like the rattly inside of my mother’s brain. The litter was too personal — the wrapper from a butterscotch candy, a mantra card, a pocket mirror. A tube of cream, the color of a Band-Aid, that she patted under her eyes. I pinched a ten, folding it into my shorts. Even if she saw me, I’d just say I was getting groceries — why would she suspect me? Her daughter, who had always been good, even if that was more disappointing than being great.

I’m surprised that I felt so little guilt. On the contrary — there was something righteous in the way I hoarded my mother’s money. I was picking up some of the ranch bravado, the certainty that I could take what I wanted. The knowledge of the hidden bills allowed me to smile at my mother the next morning, to act like we hadn’t said the things we’d said the night before. To stand patiently when she brushed at my bangs without warning.

“Don’t hide your eyes,” my mother said, her breath close and hot, her fingers raking at my hair.

I wanted to shake her off, to step back, but I didn’t.

“There,” she said, pleased. “There’s my sweet daughter.”

—

I was thinking of the money while I kicked in the pool, my shoulders above the waterline. There was a purity to the task, amassing the bills in my little zip purse. When I was alone, I liked to count the money, each new five or ten a particular boon. I folded the crisper bills on top, so the bundle looked nicer. Imagining Suzanne’s and Russell’s pleasure when I brought the money to them, lulled into the sweet wayward fog of daydreams.

My eyes were closed as I floated, and I only opened them when I heard thrashing beyond the tree line. A deer, maybe. I tensed, stirring uneasily in the water. I didn’t think that it could be a person: we didn’t worry about those kinds of things. Not until later. And it was a dalmatian anyway, the creature that came trotting out of the trees and right up to the pool’s edge. He regarded me soberly, then started to bark.

The dog was strange looking, speckled and spotted, and it barked with high, human alarm. I knew it belonged to the neighbors on our left, the Dutton family. The father had written some movie theme song, and at parties I had heard the mother hum it, mockingly, to a gathered group. Their son was younger than me — he often shot his BB gun in the yard, the dog yelping in agitated chorus. I couldn’t remember the dog’s name.

“Get,” I said, splashing halfheartedly. I didn’t want to have to haul myself out of the water. “Go on.”

The dog kept barking.

“Go,” I tried again, but the dog just barked louder.

—

My cutoffs were damp from my swimsuit by the time I made it to the Dutton house. I’d put on my cork sandals, grimed with the ghost of my feet, and taken the dog by the collar, the ends of my hair dripping. Teddy Dutton answered the door. He was eleven or twelve, his legs studded with scabs and scrapes. He’d broken his arm last year falling from a tree, and my mother had been the one to drive him to the hospital: she’d muttered darkly that his parents left him alone too much. I had never spent much time with Teddy, beyond the familiarity of being young at neighborhood parties, anyone under age eighteen herded together in a forced march to friendship. Sometimes I’d see him riding his bike along the fire road with a boy in glasses: he’d once let me pet a barn kitten they’d found, holding the tiny thing under his shirt. The kitten’s eyes were leaky with pus, but Teddy had been gentle with it, like a little mother. That was the last time I’d spoken to him.

“Hey,” I said when Teddy opened the door. “Your dog.”

Teddy was gaping at me like we hadn’t been neighbors our whole lives. I rolled my eyes a little at his silence.

“He was in our yard,” I went on. The dog moved against my hold.

It took Teddy a second to speak, but before he did, I saw him cut a helpless look at my swimsuit top, the exaggerated swell of cleavage. Teddy saw that I had noticed and got more flustered. He scowled at the dog, taking his collar. “Bad Tiki,” he said, hustling the animal into the house. “Bad dog.”

The thought that Teddy Dutton might be somehow nervous around me was a surprise. Though I hadn’t even owned a bikini the last time I’d seen him, and my breasts were bigger now, pleasing even to me. I found his attention almost hilarious. A stranger had once shown Connie and me his dick by the movie theater bathrooms — it had taken a moment to understand why the man was gasping like a fish for air, but then I saw his penis, out of his zipper like an arm out of a sleeve. He’d looked at us like we were butterflies he was pinning to a board. Connie had grabbed my arm, and we’d turned and run, laughing, the Raisinets clutched in my hand starting to melt. We recounted our disgust to each other in strident tones, but there was pride, too. Like the satisfied way Patricia Bell had once asked me after class whether I’d seen how Mr. Garrison had been staring at her, and didn’t I think it was weird?

“His paws are all wet,” I said. “He’s gonna mess up the floors.”

“My parents aren’t home. It doesn’t matter.” Teddy stayed in the doorway, awkward with an air of expectancy; did he think we were going to hang out?

He stood there, like the unhappy boys who sometimes got erections at the chalkboard for no reason at all — he was obviously under the command of some other force. Maybe the proof of sex was visible on me in a new way.

“Well,” I said. I worried I would start laughing — Teddy looked so uncomfortable. “See you.”

Teddy cleared his throat, trying to throttle his voice deeper. “Sorry,” he said. “If Tiki was bothering you.”

How did I know I could mess with Teddy? Why did my mind range immediately to that option? I’d only been to the ranch twice since the solstice party, but I’d already started to absorb certain ways of seeing the world, certain habits of logic. Society was crowded with straight people, Russell told us, people in paralyzed thrall to corporate interests and docile as dosed lab chimps. Those of us at the ranch functioned on a whole other level, fighting against the miserable squall, and so what if you had to mess with the straight people to achieve larger goals, larger worlds? If you checked yourself out of that old contract, Russell told us, refused all the bullshit scare tactics of civics class and prayer books and the principal’s office, you’d see there was no such thing as right and wrong. His permissive equations reduced these concepts to hollow relics, like medals from a regime no longer in power.

—

I asked Teddy for a drink. Lemonade, I figured, soda, anything but what he brought me, his hand shaking nervously when he passed me the glass.

“Do you want a napkin?” he said.

“Nah.” The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice. I coughed.

“Your parents let you drink?” I asked, wiping at my mouth.

“I do what I want,” he said, proud and uncertain at the same time. His eyes gleamed; I watched him decide what to say next. It was strange to watch someone else calibrate and worry over their actions instead of being the one who was worrying. Was this what Peter had felt around me? A limited patience, a sense of power that felt heady and slightly distressing. Teddy’s freckled face, ruddy and eager — he was only two years younger than me, but the distance seemed definitive. I took a large swallow from the glass, and Teddy cleared his throat.

“I have some dope if you want it,” he said.

—

Teddy led me to his room, expectant as I glanced around at his boyish novelties. They seemed arranged for viewing, though it was all junk: a captain’s clock whose hands were dead, a long-forgotten ant farm, warped and molding. The glassy stipple of a partial arrowhead, a jar of pennies, green and scuzzy as sunken treasure. Usually I’d make some crack to Teddy. Ask him where he got the arrowhead or tell him about the whole one I’d found, the obsidian point sharp enough to draw blood. But I sensed a pressure to preserve a haughty coolness, like Suzanne that day in the park. I was already starting to understand that other people’s admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it. The weed Teddy produced from under his mattress was brown and crumbled, barely smokable, though he held out the plastic bag with gruff dignity.

I laughed. “It’s like dirt or something. No, thanks.”

He seemed stung and stuffed the bag deep in his pocket. It had been his trump card, I understood, and he hadn’t expected its failure. How long had the bag been there, crushed by the mattress, waiting for deployment? I suddenly felt sorry for Teddy, the neckline of his striped shirt gone limp with grime. I told myself there was still time to leave. To put down the now empty glass, to say a breezy thank-you and go back to my own house. There were other ways to get money. But I stayed. He eyed me, sitting on his bed, with a bewildered and attentive air, as if looking away would break the rare spell of my presence.

“I can get you some real stuff, if you want,” I said. “Good stuff. I know a guy.”

His gratitude was embarrassing. “Really?”

“Sure.” I saw him notice as I adjusted my swimsuit strap. “You have any money on you?” I asked.

He had three dollars in his pocket, wadded and limp, and didn’t hesitate to hand them over. I tucked the bills away, all business. Even possessing that small amount of money tindered an obsessive need in me, a desire to see how much I was worth. The equation excited me. You could be pretty, you could be wanted, and that could make you valuable. I appreciated the tidy commerce. And maybe it was something I already perceived in relationships with men — that creep of discomfort, of being tricked. At least this way the arrangement was put toward some use.

“What about your parents?” I said. “Don’t they have money somewhere?”

He cut a quick glance at me.

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” I sighed, impatient. “So who cares?”

Teddy coughed. Rearranged his face. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me check.”

—

The dog banged at our heels while I followed Teddy up the stairs. The dimness of his parents’ room, a room that seemed both familiar — the stale glass of water on the nightstand, the lacquered tray of perfume bottles — and foreign, his father’s slacks collapsed in the corner, an upholstered bench at the foot of the bed. I was nervous, and I could tell Teddy was, too. It seemed perverse to be in his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the day. The sun was hot outside the shades, outlining them brightly.

Teddy went into the closet in the far corner, and I followed. If I stayed close, I was less like an intruder. He reached up on his toes to feel blindly through a cardboard box. While he searched, I shuffled through the clothes hanging from fussy silken hangers. His mother’s. Paisley pussy-bow blouses, the grim, tight tweeds. They all seemed like costumes, impersonal and not quite real, until I pinched the sleeve of an ivory blouse. My mother had the same one, and it made me uneasy, the familiar gold of the I. Magnin label like a rebuke. I dropped the shirt back on its hanger. “Can’t you hurry up?” I hissed at Teddy, and he made a muffled reply, rummaging farther, until he finally pulled out some new-looking bills.

He shoved the box back onto the high shelf, breathing hard, while I counted.

“Sixty-five,” I said. Neatening the stack, folding it to a more substantial thickness.

“Isn’t that enough?”

I could tell by his face, the effort of his breathing, that if I demanded more, he would find a way to get it. Part of me almost wanted to. To gorge myself on this new power, see how long I could keep it going. But then Tiki trotted in the doorway, startling us both. The dog panting as he nudged at Teddy’s legs. Even the dog’s tongue was spotted, I saw, the crimped pink freckled with black.

“This’ll be fine,” I said, putting the money in my pocket. My damp shorts gave off an itch of chlorine.

“So when will I get the stuff?” Teddy said.

It took a second to understand the significant look he gave me: the dope I’d promised. I’d almost forgotten that I hadn’t just demanded money. When he saw my expression, he corrected himself. “I mean, no rush. If it takes time or whatever.”

“Hard to say.” Tiki was sniffing at my crotch; I pushed his nose away more roughly than I’d meant to, his snout wetting my palm. My desire to get out of the room was suddenly overwhelming. “Pretty soon, probably,” I said, starting to back toward the door. “I’ll bring it over when I get it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Teddy said. “Yeah, okay.”

—

I had the uncomfortable sense, at the front door, that Teddy was the guest and I was the host. The wind chime over the porch rippling a thin song. The sun and trees and blond hills beyond seemed to promise great freedoms, and I could already start to forget what I’d done, washed over by other concerns. The pleasing meaty rectangle of the folded bills in my pocket. When I looked at Teddy’s freckled face, a surge of impulsive, virtuous affection passed through me — he was like a little brother. The gentle way he’d mothered the barn kitten.

“I’ll see you,” I said, leaning to kiss him on the cheek.

I was congratulating myself for the sweetness of my gesture, the kindness, but then Teddy adjusted his hips, hunching them protectively; when I pulled away, I saw his erection pushing stubbornly against his jeans.

7

I could ride my bike most of the way there. Adobe Road empty of cars, except for the occasional motorcycle or horse trailer. If a car passed, it was usually heading to the ranch, and they’d give me a lift, my bicycle half hanging out a window. Girls in shorts and wood sandals and plastic rings from the dispensers outside the Rexall. Boys who kept losing their train of thought, then coming to with a stunned smile, as if returned from cosmic tourism. The barest of nods we’d give one another, tuned to the same unseen frequencies.

—

It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember my life before Suzanne and the others, but it had been limited and expected, objects and people occupying their temperate orbits. The yellow cake my mother made for birthdays, dense and chilly from the freezer. The girls at school eating lunch on the asphalt, sitting on their overturned backpacks. Since I’d met Suzanne, my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase. I’d catch myself eating an apple, and even the wet swallow of apple could incite gratitude in me. The arrangement of oak leaves overhead condensing with a hothouse clarity, clues to a riddle I hadn’t known you could try to solve.

—

I followed Suzanne past the motorcycles parked at the front of the main house, as big and heavy looking as cows. Men in denim vests sat on the nearby boulders, smoking cigarettes. The air was prickly from the llamas in their pen, the funny smell of hay and sweat and sunbaked shit.

“Hey, bunnies,” one of the men called. Stretching so his belly strained pregnant against his shirt.

Suzanne smiled back but pulled me along. “If you stand around too much, they’ll jump on you,” she said, though she was pushing her shoulders back to emphasize her breasts. When I cut a glance over my shoulder, the man flicked his tongue at me, quick as a snake.

“Russell can help all kinds of people, though,” Suzanne said. “And you know, the pigs don’t mess with the motorcycle guys. That’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, like it was obvious. “The cops hate Russell. They hate anyone who tries to free people from the system. But they stay away if those guys are here.” She shook her head. “The pigs are trapped, too, that’s the bullshit. Their fucking shiny black shoes.”

I stoked my own righteous agreement: I was in league with truth. I followed her to the clearing beyond the house, toward the campfire hum of voices in chorus. The money was banded tightly in my pocket, and I kept starting to tell Suzanne I’d brought it, then losing my nerve, concerned it was too meager an offering. Finally I stopped her, touching her shoulder before we joined the others.

“I can get more,” I said, flustered. I just wanted her to know the money existed, imagining I would be the one to give it to Russell. But Suzanne quickly corrected that idea. I tried not to mind how swiftly she took the bills from my hand, counting them with her eyes. I saw that she was surprised by the amount.

“Good girl.”

—

The sun hit the tin outbuildings and broke up the smoke in the air. Someone had lit a joss stick that kept going out. Russell’s eyes moved around each of our faces, the group sitting at his feet, and I flushed when he caught my gaze — he seemed unsurprised by my return. Suzanne’s hand touched my back lightly, possessively, and a hush came over me like in a movie theater or church. My awareness of her hand was almost paralyzing. Donna was playing with her orange hair. Weaving sections into tight, lacy braids, using her pinched fingernails to flay split ends.

Russell looked younger when he sang, his mess of hair tied back, and he played the guitar in a funny, mocking way, like a TV cowboy. His voice wasn’t the nicest I’d ever heard, but that day — my legs in the sun, the stubble of oat grass — that day, his voice seemed to slide all over me, to saturate the air, so that I felt pinned in place. I couldn’t move even if I wanted to, even if I could imagine there was any place I could go.

In the lull that followed Russell’s singing, Suzanne got to her feet, her dress already thick with dust, and picked her way to his side. His face changed as she whispered to him, and he nodded. Squeezing her shoulder. I saw her slip him my wad of money, which Russell put in his pocket. Resting his fingers there for a moment as if giving a blessing.

Russell’s eyes crinkled. “We’ve got good news. We’ve got some resources, sweethearts. Because someone has opened themselves up to us, they’ve opened their hearts.”

A shimmer passed through me. And all at once, it seemed worth it — trawling my mother’s purse. The stillness of Teddy’s parents’ bedroom. How cleanly that worry had been transmuted into belonging. Suzanne seemed gratified as she hurried to settle back beside me.

“Little Evie’s shown us her big heart,” Russell said. “She’s shown us her love, hasn’t she?” And the others turned to look at me, a current of goodwill pulsed in my direction.

—

The rest of the afternoon passed in a drowsy span of sunlight. The skinny dogs retreating under the house, tongues heaving. We sat alone on the porch steps — Suzanne rested her head on my knees and recounted scraps of a dream she’d had. Pausing to take ripping bites from a length of French bread.

“I was convinced I knew sign language, but it was obvious to me I didn’t, that I was just flailing my hands around. But the man understood everything I was saying, like I actually did know sign language. But later it just turned out he was only pretending to be deaf,” she said, “in the end. So it was all fake — him, me, the whole train.”

Her laugh was an afterthought, a sharp addendum — how happy I was for any news of her interior, a secret meant for me alone. I couldn’t say how long we sat there, the two of us cut adrift from the rhythms of normal life. But that’s what I wanted — for even time to feel different and new, washed with special import. Like she and I were occupying the same song.

—

We were, Russell told us, starting a new kind of society. Free from racism, free from exclusion, free from hierarchy. We were in service of a deeper love. That’s how he said it, a deeper love, his voice booming from the ramshackle house in the California grasslands, and we played together like dogs, tumbling and biting and breathless with sun shock. We were barely adults, most of us, and our teeth were still milky and new. We ate whatever was put in front of us. Oatmeal that gummed up in the throat. Ketchup on bread, chipped beef from a can. Potatoes soggy with PAM.

“Miss 1969,” Suzanne called me. “Our very own.”

And they treated me like that, like their new toy, taking turns hooking their arms through mine, clamoring to braid my long hair. Teasing me about the boarding school I’d mentioned, my famous grandmother, whose name some of them recognized. My clean white socks. The others had been with Russell for months, or years, even. And that was the first worry that the days slowly melted in me. Where were their families, girls like Suzanne? Or baby-voiced Helen — she spoke sometimes of a house in Eugene. A father who gave her enemas every month and rubbed her calves after tennis practice with mentholated balm, among other dubious hygienic practices. But where was he? If any of their homes had given them what they needed, why would they be here, day after day, their time at the ranch stretching on endlessly?

—

Suzanne slept late, barely up by noon. Groggy and lingering, her movements at half-speed. Like there would always be more time. By then, I was already sleeping in Suzanne’s bed every few nights. Her mattress wasn’t comfortable, gritty with sand, but I didn’t mind. Sometimes she reached over blindly from sleep to sling her arm around me, a warmth coming off her body like baked bread. I would lie awake, painfully alert to Suzanne’s nearness. She turned in the night so she kicked off the sheet, exposing her bare breasts.

Her room was dark and jungly in the mornings, the tar roof of the outbuilding getting bubbly in the heat. I was already dressed but knew we wouldn’t join the others for another hour. Suzanne always took a long time to get ready, though preparation was mostly a matter of time and not action — a slow shrug into herself. I liked to watch her from the mattress, the sweet, blank way she studied her reflection with the directionless gaze of a portrait. Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness. Noticing how her ankles were gruff with stubble, or the pin dots of blackheads.

Suzanne had been a dancer in San Francisco. The flashing neon snake outside the club, the red apple that cast an alien glow on the passersby. One of the other girls burned off Suzanne’s moles backstage with a caustic pencil.

“Some girls hated being up there,” she said, tugging a dress over her nakedness. “Dancing, the whole thing. But I didn’t think it was so bad.”

She assessed the dress in the mirror, cupping her breasts through the fabric. “People can be so prudish,” she said. She made a lewd face, laughing a little at herself, and let her breasts drop. She told me, then, how Russell fucked her gently and how sometimes he didn’t, and how you could like it either way. “There’s nothing sick about that,” she said. “The people who act so uptight, who act like it’s so evil? They’re the real perverts. It’s like some of the guys who’d come to see us dance. All mad at us that they were there. Like we’d tricked them.”

Suzanne didn’t often talk about her hometown or family, and I didn’t ask. There was a glossy pucker of scar tissue along one of her wrists that I’d seen her tracing with a tragic pride, and once she slipped and mentioned a humid street outside Red Bluff. But then she caught herself. “That cunt,” she called her mother, peaceably. My dizzy solidarity overwhelmed me, the weary justice in her tone — I thought we both knew what it was to be alone, though it seems silly to me now. To think we were so alike, when I had grown up with housekeepers and parents and she told me she had sometimes lived in a car, sleeping in the reclined passenger seat with her mother in the driver’s side. If I was hungry, I ate. But we had other things in common, Suzanne and I, a different hunger. Sometimes I wanted to be touched so badly I was scraped by longing. I saw the same thing in Suzanne, too, perking up like an animal smelling food whenever Russell approached.

—

Suzanne went into San Rafael with Russell to look at a truck. I stayed behind — there were chores, and I threw myself into them with an eagerness born of fear. I didn’t want to give them any excuse to make me leave. Feeding the llamas, weeding the garden, scrubbing and bleaching the kitchen floors. Work was just another way to show your love, to offer up the self.

Filling the llamas’ trough took a long time, the water pressure sluggish at best, but it was nice to be out in the sun. Mosquitoes hovered around my bare skin and I kept having to shiver them off. They didn’t bother the llamas, who just stood there, as sultry and heavy-lidded as screen sirens.

I could see Guy beyond the main house, messing with the bus engine with the low-stakes curiosity of a science fair project. Taking breaks to smoke cigarettes and do downward dog. He went to the main house every once in a while to get another beer from Russell’s stash, checking to make sure everyone did their chores. He and Suzanne were like the head counselors, keeping Donna and the others in line with a stray word or glance. Operating as satellite versions of Russell, though Guy’s deference was different from Suzanne’s. I think he stayed around because Russell was a way to get things he wanted — girls, drugs, a place to crash. He wasn’t in love with Russell, didn’t cower or pant in his presence — Guy was more like a sidekick, and all his blustery tales of adventure and hardship continued to star himself.

He approached the fence, his beer and cigarette in the same hand, his jeans low on his hips. I knew he was watching me, and I concentrated on the hose, the warm fill of water in the trough.

“The smoke keeps ’em away,” Guy said, and I turned as if I’d just noticed his presence. “The mosquitoes,” he said, holding out his cigarette.

“Yeah,” I said, “sure. Thanks.” I took the cigarette over the fence, careful to keep the hose trained on the trough.

“You seen Suzanne?”

Already Guy assumed I’d know her movements. I was flattered to be the keeper of her whereabouts.

“Some guy in San Rafael was selling his truck,” I said. “She went with Russell to look at it.”

“Hm,” Guy said. Reaching to take his cigarette back. He seemed amused by my professionalism, though I’m sure he saw, too, the worship that hijacked my face whenever I spoke of Suzanne. My half-hitch step those times I hurried to her side. Maybe it confused him not to be the focus of all that desire — he was a handsome boy, used to the attention of girls. Girls who sucked in their stomachs when he put his hand down their jeans, girls who believed the jewelry he wore was the pretty evidence of his untapped emotional depths.

“They’re probably at the free clinic,” Guy said. He mimed scratching his crotch, his cigarette waving around. He was trying to get me to snicker at Suzanne, collude in some way — I didn’t respond, beyond a grim smile. He tilted back on the heels of his cowboy boots. Studying me.

“You can go on and help Roos,” he said in between the final slugs of his beer. “She’s in the kitchen.”

I’d already finished my chores for the day, and working with Roos in the hot kitchen would be tedious, but I nodded with a martyr’s air.

Roos had been married to a policeman in Corpus Christi, Suzanne had told me, which seemed about right. She floated around the border with the dreamy solicitude of beaten wives, and even my offer of help with the dishes was met with a mild cower. I scrubbed gelatinous fug from their biggest stew pot, the colorless scraps of food gumming up the sponge. Guy was punishing me in his petty fashion, but I didn’t care. Any irritation was softened by Suzanne’s return. She gusted into the kitchen, breathless.

“The guy gave Russell the truck,” Suzanne said, her face bright, casting around for an audience. She opened a cabinet, rooting inside. “It was so perfect,” she said, “ ’cause he wanted, like, two hundred bucks. And Russell said, all calm, You should just give it to us.”

She laughed, still residually thrilled, and sat up on the counter. Starting to crack her way through a bag of dusty-looking peanuts. “The guy was real angry, at first, that Russell was just asking for it. For free.”

Roos was only half listening, picking through the makings of that night’s dinner, but I turned off the faucet, watching Suzanne with my whole body.

“And Russell said, Let’s just talk for a minute. Just let me tell you what I’m about.” Suzanne spit a shell back into the bag. “We had some tea with the guy, in his weird log cabin house. For an hour or something. Russell gave him the whole vision, laid it all out. And the guy was real interested in what we were doing out here. Showed Russell his old army pictures. Then he said we could just have the truck.”

I wiped my hands on my shorts, her giddiness making me so shy I had to turn away. I finished the dishes to the sound of her snapping open peanut after peanut from her perch on the counter, amassing an unruly pile of damp shells until the bag was gone and she went looking for someone else to tell her story to.

—

The girls would hang out near the creek because it was cooler, the breeze carrying a chill, though the flies were bad. The rocks capped with algae, the sleepy shade. Russell had come back from town in the new truck, bearing candy bars, comic books whose pages grew limp from our hands. Helen ate her candy immediately and looked around at the rest of us with a seethe of jealousy. Though she’d also come from a wealthy family, we weren’t close. I found her dull except around Russell, when her brattiness took on a directed aim. Preening under his touch like a cat, she acted younger, even than me, stunted in a way that would later seem pathological.

“Jesus. Stop staring at me,” Suzanne said, hunching her candy away from Helen. “You already ate yours.” Her shape on the bank next to me, her toes curling into the dirt. Jerking when a mosquito swarmed by her ear.

“Just a bite,” Helen whined. “Just the corner.”

Roos glanced up from the chambray mess of cloth in her lap. She was mending a work shirt for Guy, her tiny stitches made with absent precision.

“You can have some of mine,” Donna said, “if you be quiet.” She picked her way to Helen, her chocolate bar craggy with peanuts.

Helen took a bite. When she giggled, her teeth washed with chocolate.

“Candy yoga,” she pronounced. Anything could be yoga: doing the dishes, grooming the llamas. Making food for Russell. You were supposed to bliss out on it, to settle into whatever the rhythms were going to teach you.

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.

—

All the books made it sound like the men forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not all the time. Suzanne wielded her Swinger camera like a weapon. Goading men to drop their jeans. To expose their penises, tender and naked in dark nests of hair. The men smiled shyly in the pictures, paled from the guilty flash, all hair and wet animal eyes. “There isn’t any film in the camera,” Suzanne would say, though she had stolen a case of film from the store. The boys pretended to believe her. It was like that with lots of things.

I trailed after Suzanne, after all of them. Suzanne letting me draw suns and moons on her naked back with tanning oil while Russell played an idle riff on his guitar, a coy up-and-down fragment. Helen sighing like the lovesick kid she was, Roos joining us with a drifty smile, some teenage boy I didn’t know looking at us all with grateful awe, and no one even had to speak — the silence was knit with so much.

—

I prepared inwardly for Russell’s advances, but it only happened after a while. Russell giving me a cryptic nod so I knew to follow him.

I’d been washing windows with Suzanne in the main house — the floor littered with the crumple of newspaper and vinegar, the transistor radio going; even chores took on the delight of truancy. Suzanne singing along, talking to me with happy, fitful distraction. She looked different, those times we worked together, like she forgot herself and relaxed into the girl she was. It’s strange to remember she was just nineteen. When Russell nodded at me, I looked at her reflexively. For permission or forgiveness, either one. The ease in her face had drained into a brittle mask. Scrubbing the warped window with new concentration. She shrugged goodbye when I left, like she didn’t mind, though I could sense her watchful gaze on my back.

Every time Russell nodded at me like that, my heart contracted, despite the strangeness. I was eager for our encounters, eager to cement my place among them, as if doing what Suzanne did was a way of being with her. Russell never fucked me — it was always other stuff, his fingers moving in me with a technical remove I ascribed to his purity. His aims were elevated, I told myself, unsullied by primitive concerns.

“Look at yourself,” he said whenever he sensed shame or hesitance. Pointing me toward the fogged mirror in the trailer. “Look at your body. It’s not some stranger’s body,” he said evenly. When I shied away, goofing some excuse, he took me by the shoulders and pointed me back at the mirror. “It’s you,” he said. “It’s Evie. Nothing in you but beauty.”

The words worked on me, even if only temporarily. A trance overtaking me when I saw my reflection — the scooped breasts, even the soft stomach, the legs rough with mosquito bites. There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles — just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed.

Afterward he’d hand me a towel to clean myself, and this seemed like a great kindness.

When I returned to her purview, there was always a brief period when Suzanne was cool to me. Even her movements were stiff, as if braced, a lull behind her eyes, like someone asleep at the wheel. I learned quickly how to compliment her, how to ride by her side until she forgot to be aloof and deigned to pass her cigarette to me. It would occur to me later that Suzanne missed me when I left, her formality a clumsy disguise. Though it’s hard to tell — maybe that is only a wishful explanation.

—

The other parts of the ranch flash in and out. Guy’s black dog that they called by a rotating series of names. The wanderers who passed through the ranch that summer, crashing for a day or two before leaving. Denizens of the brainless dream, appearing at all hours of the day with woven backpacks and their parents’ cars. I didn’t see anything familiar in how quickly Russell talked them out of their possessions, put them on the spot so their generosity became a forced theater. They handed over pink slips to cars, bankbooks, once even a gold wedding ring, with the stunned and exhausted relief of a drowning person finally giving in to the tidal suck. I was distracted by their tales of sorrow, both harrowing and banal. Complaints of evil fathers and cruel mothers, a similarity to the stories that made us all feel like victims of the same conspiracy.

—

It was one of the few days it rained that summer, and most of us were indoors, the old parlor smelling damp and gray like the air outside. Blankets gridded the floor. I could hear a baseball game on the radio in the kitchen, rain dropping into the plastic bucket under a leak. Roos was giving Suzanne a hand massage, their fingers slick with lotion, while I read a years-old magazine. My horoscope from March 1967. An irritated sulk hung between us; we were not used to limitations, to being stuck anywhere.

The kids did better at being indoors. They passed only briefly through our watch, trundling by on their private missions. There was the bang of a fallen chair in the other room, but no one got up to investigate. Besides Nico, I didn’t know who most of the other kids belonged to — all of them were thin wristed, like they’d gone to seed, powdered milk glazed around their mouths. I’d watched Nico for Roos a few times, had held him in my arms and felt his sweaty, pleasing weight. I combed his hair with my fingers, untangled his shark-tooth necklace. All those self-consciously maternal tasks, tasks that pleased me more than him and allowed me to imagine I alone had the power to make him calm. Nico was uncooperative with these moments of softness, breaking the spell bluntly, like he’d sensed my good feelings and resented them. Tugging his little penis at me. Demanding juice in a shrieking falsetto. Once hitting me so hard that I bruised. I watched him squat and take a shit out on the concrete by the pool, shits we’d sometimes hose away and sometimes not.

Helen wandered downstairs in a Snoopy T-shirt and too-big socks, the red heels bunched around her ankles.

“Anyone wanna play Liar’s Dice?”

“Nah,” Suzanne announced. For all of us, it was assumed.

Helen slumped onto a balding armchair stripped of cushions. She glanced at the ceiling. “Still leaking,” she said. Everyone ignored her. “Can someone roll a joint?” she said. “Please?”

When no one answered, she joined Roos and Suzanne on the floor. “Please, please, please?” she said, nuzzling her head into Roos’s shoulder, draping herself in her lap like a dog.

“Oh, just do it,” Suzanne said. Helen jumped up to get the fake ivory box they kept the supplies in, while Suzanne rolled her eyes at me. I smiled back. It wasn’t so bad, I thought, being inside. All of us huddled in the same room like Red Cross survivors, water boiling on the stove for tea. Roos working by the window, where the light was alabaster through the scrappy lace curtain.

The calm was cut by Nico’s sudden whine, stampeding into the room as he chased a little girl with a bowl cut — she had Nico’s shark-tooth necklace, and a yelping scrabble broke out between them. Tears, clawing.

“Hey,” Suzanne said without looking up, and the kids got quiet, though they kept staring hotly at each other. Breathing hard, like drunks. Everything seemed fine, quickly handled, until Nico scratched the girl’s face, raking her with his overgrown nails, and the screaming doubled. The girl clapped both hands over her cheek, wailing so her baby teeth showed. Sustaining a high note of misery.

Roos got to her feet with effort.

“Baby,” she said, holding her arms out, “baby, you gotta be nice.” She took a few steps toward Nico, who started screaming, too, sitting down heavy on his diaper. “Get up,” Roos said, “come on, baby,” trying to hold on to his shoulders, but he’d gone limp and wouldn’t be moved. The other girl sobered in the face of Nico’s antics, how he wrenched away from his mother and started banging his head against the floor. “Baby,” Roos said, droning louder, “no, no, no,” but he kept going, his eyes getting dark and buttony with pleasure.

“God.” Helen laughed, a strange laugh that persisted. I didn’t know what to do. I remembered the helpless panic I’d sometimes felt when babysitting, a realization that this child did not belong to me and was beyond my reach; but even Roos seemed paralyzed with the same worry. Like she was waiting for Nico’s real mother to come home and fix everything. Nico was getting pink with effort, his skull knocking on the floor. Yelling until he heard the footsteps on the porch — it was Russell, and I saw everyone’s faces condense with new life.

“What’s this?” Russell said. He was wearing one of Mitch’s cast-off shirts, big bloody roses embroidered along the yoke. He was barefoot, wet all over from the rain.

“Ask Roos,” Helen chirped. “It’s her kid.”

Roos muttered something, her words going wild at the end, but Russell didn’t respond on her level. His voice was calm, seeming to draw a circle around the crying child, the flustered mother.

“Relax,” Russell intoned. He wouldn’t let anyone’s upset in, the jitter in the room deflected by his gaze. Even Nico looked wary in Russell’s presence, his tantrum taking on a hollow cast, like he was an understudy for himself.

“Little man,” Russell said, “come on up here and talk to me.”

Nico glared at his mother, but his eyes were drawn, helpless, to Russell. Nico pushed out his fat bottom lip, calculating.

Russell stayed standing in the doorway, not bending down eager and wet toothed like some grown-ups did with kids, and Nico was mostly quiet, settling into a whimper. Darting another look between his mother and Russell before finally scurrying over to Russell and letting himself be picked up.

“There’s the little man,” Russell said, Nico’s arms clinging tight around his neck, and I remember how strange it was to see Russell’s face change as he talked to the boy. His features mutable, turning antic and foolish, like a jester’s, though his voice stayed calm. He could do that. Change himself to fit the person, like water taking on the shape of whatever vessel it was poured into. He could be all these things at once: The man who crooked his fingers in me. The man who got everything free. The man who sometimes fucked Suzanne hard and sometimes fucked her gently. The man who whispered to the little boy, his voice grazing his ear.

I couldn’t hear what Russell said, but Nico swallowed his crying. His face was thrilled and wet: he seemed happy just to be in someone’s arms.

—

Helen’s eleven-year-old cousin Caroline ran away from home and stayed for a while. She’d been living in the Haight, but there had been a police crackdown: she’d hitched to the ranch with a cowhide wallet and a ratty fox fur coat she petted with skittish affection, like she didn’t want anyone to see how much she loved it.

The ranch wasn’t that far from San Francisco, but we didn’t go there very often. I’d gone only once with Suzanne, to pick up a pound of grass from a house she called, jokingly, the Russian Embassy. Some friends of Guy’s, I think, the old Satanist hangout. The front door was painted a tarry black — she saw my hesitation and hooked her arm through mine.

“Doomy, huh?” she said. “I thought so too, at first.”

When she hitched me closer, I felt the knock of her hipbones. These moments of kindness were never anything but dazzling to me.

Afterward, she and I walked over to Hippie Hill. It was grayed-out, and drizzling, empty, except for the undead stumbling of junkies. I tried hard to squeeze out a vibe from the air, but there was nothing — I was relieved when Suzanne laughed, too, halting any labor for meaning. “Jesus,” she said, “this place is a dump.” We ended up back in the park, the fog dripping audibly from the eucalyptus leaves.

I spent almost every day at the ranch, except for brief stopovers at my house to change clothes or leave notes on the kitchen table for my mother. Notes that I’d sign, “Your Loving Daughter.” Indulging the overblown affection my absence made room for.

I knew I was starting to look different, the weeks at the ranch working me over with a grubby wash. My hair getting light from the sun and sharp at the edges, a tint of smoke lingering even after I shampooed. Much of my clothes had passed into the ranch possession, morphing into garments I often failed to recognize as my own: Helen clowning around in my once precious bib shirt, now torn and spotted with peach juice. I dressed like Suzanne, a raunchy patchwork culled from the communal piles, clothes whose scrappiness announced a hostility to the larger world. I had gone with Suzanne to the Home Market once, Suzanne wearing a bikini top and cutoffs, and we’d watched the other shoppers glare and grow hot with indignation, their sideways glances becoming outright stares. We’d laughed with insane, helpless snorts, like we’d had some wild secret, and we had. The woman who’d seemed about to cry with baffled disgust, clutching for her daughter’s arm: she hadn’t known her hatred only made us more powerful.

I prepared for possible sightings of my mother with pious ablutions: I showered, standing in the hot water until my skin splotched red, my hair slippery with conditioner. I put on a plain T-shirt and white cotton shorts, what I might have worn when I was younger, trying to appear scrubbed and sexless enough to comfort my mother. Though maybe I didn’t need to try so hard — she wasn’t looking closely enough to warrant the effort. The times we did have dinner together, a mostly silent affair, she would fuss at her food like a picky child. Inventing reasons to talk about Frank, inane weather reports from her own life. I could have been anyone. One night I didn’t bother to change, showing up at the table in a voile halter top that showed my stomach. She didn’t say anything, plowing her spoon through her rice with a distracted air until she seemed suddenly to remember my presence. Darting a slanted look at me. “You’re getting so skinny,” she announced, gripping my wrist and letting it drop in jealous measurement. I shrugged and she didn’t bring it up again.

—

When I finally met him in person, Mitch Lewis was fatter than I expected someone famous to be. Swollen, like there was butter under his skin. His face was furred with sideburns, his feathered golden hair. He brought a case of root beer for the girls and six netted bags of oranges. Stale brownies with German-chocolate frosting, in individual frilled cups like Pilgrims’ bonnets. Nougat candy in bright pink tins. The dregs of gift baskets, I assumed. A carton of cigarettes.

“He knows I like this kind,” Suzanne said, hugging the cigarettes to her chest. “He remembered.”

They all spoke of Mitch with that possessiveness, like he was an idea more than an actual person. They’d preened and prepared for Mitch’s visit with girlish eagerness.

“You can see the ocean from his hot tub,” Suzanne told me. “Mitch put lights up so the water is all glowy.”

“His dick is really big,” Donna added. “And like, purple.”

Donna was washing her armpits in the sink, and Suzanne rolled her eyes. “Whore’s bath,” she murmured, but she’d changed into a dress. Even Russell slicked back his hair with water, giving him a polished, urbane air.

Russell introduced me to Mitch, saying, “Our little actress,” his hand at my back.

Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgment.

“I’m Mitch,” he said. As if I hadn’t already known. His skin was fresh looking and poreless in the way of wealthy overeaters.

“Give Mitch a hug,” Russell said. Nudging me. “Mitch wants a hug, just like the rest of us. He could use a little love.”

Mitch looked expectant, opening a present he’d already shaken and identified. Usually, I would have been eaten by shyness. Conscious of my body, some error I could make. But already I felt different. I was one of them, and that meant I could smile back at Mitch, stepping forward to let him mash himself against me.

The long afternoon that followed: Mitch and Russell took turns playing guitar. Helen sitting on Mitch’s lap in a bikini top. She kept giggling and ducking her pigtailed head into his neck. Mitch was a much better musician than Russell, but I tried not to notice. I got stoned with a new and furious concentration, passing beyond the point of nervousness and into a blunted state. Smiling almost involuntarily, so my cheeks started to ache. Suzanne sat cross-legged in the dirt beside me, her fingers grazing mine. Our faces cupped and attentive as tulips.

—

It was one of those slurry days we offered up to the shared dream, a violence in our aversion to real life; though it was all about connecting, tuning in, we told ourselves. Mitch had dropped off some acid, sourced from a lab tech at Stanford. Donna mixed it with orange juice in paper cups and we drank it for breakfast, so the trees seemed to thrum with energy, the shadows purpling and wet. It was curious, later, to think of how easily I fell into things. If there were drugs around, I did them. You were in the moment — when everything back then happened. We could talk about the moment for hours. Turn it over in conversation: the way the light moved, why someone was silent, dismantling all the layers of what a look had really meant. It seemed like something important, our desire to describe the shape of each second as it passed, to bring out everything hidden and beat it to death.

Suzanne and I were working on the childish bracelets the girls had been trading among ourselves, collecting them up our arms like middle-schoolers. Practicing the V stitch. The candy stripe. I was making one for Suzanne, fat and wide, a poppy-red chevron on a field of peach thread. I liked the calm collection of the knots, how the colors vibrated happily under my fingers. I got up once to get Suzanne a glass of water, and there was a domestic gentleness in that act. I wanted to meet a need, put water in her mouth. Suzanne smiled up at me as she drank, gulping so fast I could see her throat ripple.

Helen’s cousin Caroline was hanging around that day. She seemed more knowing than I had ever been at eleven. Her bracelets shook with the kiss of cheap metal. Her terry-cloth shirt was the pale yellow of a lemon slushie and showed her small stomach, though her knees were scraped and ashy like a boy’s.

“Far-out,” she said when Guy tipped a paper cup of juice to her lips, and like a windup toy, she kept repeating this phrase when the acid began to hit. I’d started to detect the first signs in myself, too, my mouth filling with saliva. I thought of the flooded creeks I’d seen in childhood, the death cold of the rainwater as it came swift over the rocks.

I could hear Guy spinning nonsense on the porch. One of his meaningless stories, the drug making his bluster echo. His long hair pulled into a dark knot at the base of his skull.

“This fella was banging on the door,” he was saying, “shouting that he’d come to take what was his, and I was like aw, hell, big fuckin’ deal,” he droned, “I’m Elvis Presley,” and Roos was nodding along. Squinting up at the sun while Country Joe sounded from the house. Clouds drifting across the blue, outlined in neon.

“Check out Orphan Annie,” Suzanne said, rolling her eyes at Caroline.

Caroline was overdoing it at first, her stumbling, dopey affect, but soon the drug actually caught up to her and she got wild-eyed and a little scared. She was thin enough that I could see the glandular throb at her throat. Suzanne was watching her, too, and I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. Helen, Caroline’s supposed cousin, didn’t say anything, either. She was sunstruck, catatonic, stretched out on a piece of old carpet and listing a hand over her eyes. Giggling to no one. I went over to Caroline finally, touching her tiny shoulder.

“How’s it going?” I said.

She didn’t look up until I said her name. I asked her where she was from; she screwed her eyes tight. It was the wrong thing to say — of course it was, bringing up all that bad shit from the outside, whatever rotten memories were probably doubling right then. I didn’t know how to pull her back from the bog.

“You want this?” I said, holding up the bracelet. She peeked at it. “Just have to finish it,” I said, “but it’s for you.”

Caroline smiled.

“It’s gonna look real nice on you,” I went on. “It’ll go good with your shirt.”

The electricity in her eyes calmed. She held her own shirt away from her body to study it, softening.

“I made it,” she said, fingering the embroidered outline of a peace sign on the shirt, and I saw the hours she’d spent on it, maybe borrowing her mother’s sewing box. It seemed easy: to be kind to her, to put the finished bracelet around her wrist, burning the knot with a match so she’d have to cut it off. I didn’t notice Suzanne eyeing us, her own bracelet ignored in her lap.

“Beautiful,” I said, lifting Caroline’s wrist. “Nothing but beauty.”

As if I were an occupant of that world, someone who could show the way to others. Such grandiosity mixed up in my feelings of kindness; I was starting to fill in all the blank spaces in myself with the certainties of the ranch. The cool glut of Russell’s words — no more ego, turn off the mind. Pick up the cosmic wind instead. Our beliefs as mild and digestible as the sweet rolls and cakes we hustled from a bakery in Sausalito, stuffing our faces with the easy starch.

—

In the days after, Caroline followed me like a stray dog. Hovering, in the doorway of Suzanne’s room, asking if I wanted one of the cigarettes she’d cadged from the bikers. Suzanne stood up and clasped her elbows behind her back, stretching.

“They just gave you them?” Suzanne said archly. “For free?”

Caroline glanced at me. “The cigarettes?”

Suzanne laughed without saying anything else. I was confused, in these moments, but translated them into further proof: Suzanne was prickly with other people because they didn’t understand her like I did.

I didn’t say it out loud to myself or even think about it too much. Where things were heading with Suzanne. The dredge of discomfort I got when she disappeared with Russell. How I didn’t know what to do without her, seeking out Donna or Roos like a lost kid. The time she came back smelling of dried sweat and roughly wiped herself between the legs with a washcloth, like she didn’t care I was watching.

I got up when I saw how nervously Caroline fingered the bracelet I’d given her.

“I’ll take a cigarette,” I said, smiling at Caroline.

Suzanne hooked her arm in mine.

“But we’re gonna feed the llamas,” Suzanne said. “Don’t want them to starve, do you? Waste away?”

I hesitated, and Suzanne reached out to play with a part of my hair. She was always doing that: picking burrs off my shirt, once wedging a fingernail between my front teeth to dislodge a bit of food. Breaching the boundaries to let me know they didn’t exist.

Caroline’s desire to be invited was so blatant that I felt almost ashamed. But it didn’t stop me from following Suzanne outside, shrugging an apology at Caroline. I could feel her watching us go. The hooded attentions of a child, that wordless understanding. I saw that disappointment was already something familiar to Caroline.

—

I was scanning the contents of my mother’s refrigerator, the glass jars mortared with dried spills. The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing to eat, as usual. Little things like this reminded me why I’d rather be somewhere else. When I heard my mother shuffling in the front door, the razzle of her heavy jewelry, I tried to slink off without crossing paths.

“Evie,” she called, coming into the kitchen. “Wait up a minute.”

I was out of breath from the bike ride from the ranch and at the tail end of being stoned. I tried to blink an ordinary number of times, to present a blank face that would give her nothing.

“You’re getting so tan,” she said, lifting my arm, and I shrugged. She idly brushed the hair on my arm back and forth, then paused. There was an uncomfortable moment between us. It occurred to me: she’d finally caught on to the trickle of money that had been disappearing. The thought of her anger didn’t scare me. The act had been so preposterous that it took on the safety of the unreal. I’d almost started to believe that I had never really lived here, so strong was the feeling of disassociation as I crept through the house on my errands for Suzanne. My excavation of my mother’s underwear drawer, sifting through the tea-colored silks and pilly lace until I closed in on a roll of bills banded with a hair tie.

My mother furrowed her brows. “Listen,” she said. “Sal saw you out on Adobe Road this morning. Alone.”

I tried to keep my face blank, but I was relieved — it was just one of Sal’s bovine observations. I’d been telling my mother I’d been at Connie’s house. And I was still home some nights, trying to keep the balance in check.

“Sal said there’s some very strange people out there,” my mother said. “Some kind of mystic or something, but he sounds”—her face screwed up.

Of course — she would love Russell if he lived in a mansion in Marin, had gardenias floating in his pool, and charged rich women fifty dollars for an astrology reading. How transparent she seemed to me then, always on constant guard against anything lesser than, even as she opened the house up to anyone who smiled at her. To Frank and his shiny-buttoned shirts.

“I’ve never met him,” I said, my voice impassive. So my mother would know I was lying. The fact of the lie hovered there, and I watched her till for a response.

“I just wanted to warn you,” she said. “So you know that this guy is out there. I expect you and Connie to take care of each other, understand?”

I could see how badly she wanted to avoid a fight, how she strained for this middle ground. She’d warned me, so she had done what she was supposed to do. It meant she was still my mother. Let her feel this was true — I nodded and she relaxed. My mother’s hair was growing out. She was wearing a new tank top with knit straps, and the skin of her shoulders was loose, showing a tan line from a swimsuit — I had no idea when or where my mother had been swimming. How quickly we’d become strangers to each other, like nervous roommates encountering each other in the halls.

“Well,” she said.

I saw, for a moment, my old mother, the cast of weary love in her face, but it disappeared when her bracelets made a tinny sound, falling down her arms.

“There’s rice and miso in the fridge,” she said, and I made a noise in my throat like I might eat it, but we both knew I wouldn’t.

8

The police photos of Mitch’s house make it look cramped and spooky, as if destined for its fate. The fat splintered beams along the ceiling, the stone fireplace, its many levels and hallways, like something in the Escher lithographs Mitch collected from a gallery in Sausalito. The first time I encountered the house, I remember thinking it was as spare and empty as a coastal church. There was very little furniture, the big windows in the shape of chevrons. Herringbone floors, wide and shallow steps. From the front door, you could already see the black plane of bay spreading past the house, the dark, rocky bank. The houseboats knocking peaceably against each other, like cubes of ice.

Mitch poured us drinks while Suzanne opened his refrigerator. Humming a little song as she peered at the shelves. Making noises of approval or disapproval, lifting tinfoil off a bowl to sniff at something. I was in awe of her at moments like that. How boldly she acted in the world, in someone else’s house, and I watched our reflections wavering in the black windows, our hair loose on our shoulders. Here I was, in this famous man’s kitchen. The man whose music I’d heard on the radio. The bay out the door, shining like patent leather. And how glad I was to be there with Suzanne, who seemed to call these things into being.

—

Mitch had a meeting with Russell earlier that afternoon — I remember noticing it was strange that Mitch had been late for it. Two o’clock had passed, and we were still waiting for Mitch. I was silent, like they all were, the quiet between us expanding. A horsefly bit at my ankle. I didn’t want to shoo it away, conscious of Russell a few feet away, perched on his chair with his eyes closed. I could hear him humming under his breath. Russell had decided it would be best for Mitch to come upon him sitting there, his girls surrounding him, Guy at his side, the troubadour with his audience. He was ready to perform, guitar laid across his knees. His bare foot jiggling.

There was something in the way Russell was fingering the guitar, pressing silently on the strings — he was nervous in a way I didn’t know how to decipher yet. Russell didn’t look up when Helen started whispering to Donna, just a low whisper. Something about Mitch, probably, or some stupid thing Guy had said, but when Helen kept talking, Russell got to his feet. He took a moment to lay the guitar against his chair, pausing to make certain it was stable, then walked over swiftly and slapped Helen in the face.

She gave an involuntary yip, a strange burble of sound. Her wide-eyed hurt draining quickly into apology, blinking fast so the tears wouldn’t fall.

It was the first time I had ever seen Russell react that way, the cut of anger aimed at one of us. He couldn’t have hit her — the stupid blare of sun made that impossible, the hour of afternoon. The idea was too ludicrous. I looked around for confirmation of the frightening breach, but everyone was staring pointedly away or had arranged their faces into disapproving masks, like Helen had brought this on herself. Guy scratched behind an ear, sighing. Even Suzanne seemed bored by what had happened, like it was no different from a handshake. The vinegar in my throat, my sudden, despairing shock, seemed like a failing.

And soon enough, Russell was petting Helen’s hair, tightening her lopsided pigtails. Whispering something in her ear that made her smile and nod, like a goopy-eyed baby doll.

—

When Mitch finally showed up at the ranch, an hour late, he was bearing much-needed supplies: a cardboard flat of canned beans, some dried figs, and chocolate spread. Rock-hard Packham pears, individually wrapped in pink tissue paper. He let the kids clamber up his legs, though normally he shook them off.

“Hi, Russell,” Mitch said. A lace of sweat on his face.

“Long time no see, brother,” Russell said. He kept his grin steady, though he didn’t get up from his chair. “How goes the Great American Dream?”

“Things are good, man,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Haven’t heard from you in a while,” Russell said. “Breaking my heart, Mitch.”

“Been busy,” Mitch said. “A lot going on.”

“There’s always a lot going on,” Russell said. Looking around at us, making long eye contact with Guy. “Don’t you think? Seems like there’s a lot going on and that’s what life is. Think it only stops when you die.”

Mitch laughed, like everything was fine. Passing out the cigarettes he’d brought, the food, like a sweating Santa. The books would identify this as the day things turned between Russell and Mitch, though I didn’t know any of this at the time. Didn’t pick up on any meaning in the tension between them, Russell’s fury muffled by a calm, indulgent exterior. Mitch had come to give Russell the bad news that there would be no record deal for Russell, after all: the cigarettes, the food, all of it meant as a consolation. Russell had been hounding Mitch for weeks about the supposed record deal. Pushing and pushing, wearing Mitch down. Sending Guy to deliver cryptic messages to Mitch that could oscillate between threatening and benign. Russell was trying to get what he believed he deserved.

We smoked some grass. Donna made peanut-butter sandwiches. I sat in the circle of shade cast by an oak. Nico was running around with one of the other kids, chins crusted with remnants of breakfast. He snapped a stick at a bag of trash, the garbage spilling everywhere — nobody noticed but me. Guy’s dog was out in the meadow, the llamas high-stepping in agitation. I was stealing looks at Helen, who seemed, if anything, insistently happy, like the exchange with Russell fulfilled a comforting pattern.

The slap should have been more alarming. I wanted Russell to be kind, so he was. I wanted to be near Suzanne, so I believed the things that allowed me to stay there. I told myself there were things I didn’t understand. I recycled the words I’d heard Russell speak before, fashioned them into an explanation. Sometimes he had to punish us in order to show his love. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he had to keep us moving forward, for the good of the group. It had hurt him, too.

Nico and the other kid had abandoned the trash pile, squatting in the grass with their heavy diapers sagging. They spoke rapidly to each other in serious Asiatic voices, with sober, rational inflection, like the conversation of two little sages. Breaking into sudden hysterical laughter.

—

It was late in the day. We drank the dirty wine they sold by the gallon in town, sediment staining our tongues, a nauseous heat. Mitch had gotten to his feet, ready to head home.

“Why don’t you go with Mitch?” Russell suggested. Squeezing my hand in submerged code.

Had a look passed between him and Mitch? Or maybe I am imagining that I witnessed that exchange. The logistics of the day were shrouded in confusion, so that somehow it was dusk and Suzanne and I were driving Mitch back to his house, hurtling along the back roads of Marin in his car.

Mitch was sitting in the backseat, Suzanne driving. I was up front. I kept catching sight of Mitch in the mirror, lost in an aimless fog. Then he’d jolt back into himself, staring at us with wonderment. I didn’t fully understand why we’d been chosen to take Mitch home. Information passed through selectively, so all I knew was that I got to be with Suzanne. All the windows open to the smell of summer earth and the secret flash of other driveways, other lives, along that narrow road in the shadow of Mount Tam. The loops of garden hoses, the pretty magnolia. Suzanne drove in the wrong lane sometimes, and we shrieked with happy and confused terror, though there was a flatness to my yelling: I did not believe anything bad could ever happen, not really.

—

Mitch changed into a white pajama-like suit, a souvenir from a three-week sojourn in Varanasi. He handed us each a glass — I caught the medical whiff of gin and something else, too, a tinge of bitterness. I drank it easily. I was almost pathologically stoned, and I kept swallowing, my nose getting stuffy. I laughed a little to myself. It seemed so odd to be in Mitch Lewis’s house. Among his cluttered shrines and new-looking furniture.

“The Airplane lived here for a few months,” he said. He blinked heavily. “With one of those dogs,” he continued, staring around at his house. “The big white ones. What are they called? Newfoundlands? It tore up the lawn.”

He didn’t seem to care that we were ignoring him. He was out of it, glazing over with silence. Abruptly he got to his feet, putting a record on. Turning the volume up so loud I startled, but Suzanne laughed, urging him to make it louder. It was his own music, which embarrassed me. His heavy belly pressed against his long shirt, as flowing as a dress.

“You’re fun girls,” he said dimly. Watching Suzanne start to dance. Her dirty feet on the white carpet. She’d found chicken in the refrigerator and had torn off a piece with her fingers, chewing while she moved her hips.

“Kona chicken,” Mitch remarked. “From Trader Vic’s.” The banality of this remark — Suzanne and I caught each other’s eyes.

“What?” Mitch said. When we kept laughing, he did, too. “This is fun,” he repeated over the music. He kept saying how much some actor he knew liked the song. “He really got it,” he said. “Wouldn’t stop playing it. Tuned-in guy.”

It was new to me, that you could treat someone famous like they weren’t that special, that you could see all the ways they were disappointing and regular or notice the way his kitchen smelled of trash that hadn’t been taken out. The phantom squares on the wall where photographs had once hung, the gold records leaned against the baseboard, still wrapped in plastic. Suzanne acted like it was really only she and I that mattered, and this was all a little game we were playing with Mitch. He was the background to the larger story, which was our story, and we pitied him and felt grateful to him, at the same time, for how he sacrificed himself for our enjoyment.

Mitch had a little coke, and it was almost painful to watch him shake it out carefully onto a book about TM, staring at his own hands with a queer distance, like they didn’t belong to him. He cut three lines, then peered at them. He fussed around until one was markedly bigger and snorted it quickly, breathing hard.

“Ahh,” he said, leaning back, his throat raw and pricked with golden stubble. He held out the book to Suzanne, who danced over, sniffing up a line, and I did the last one.

The coke made me want to dance, so I did. Suzanne grabbing my hands, smiling at me. It was a strange moment: we were dancing for Mitch, but I was eaten up by her eyes, how she urged me on. She watched me move with pleasure.

Mitch was trying to talk, telling us some story about his girlfriend. How lonesome he’d been since she’d left for Marrakesh, on some tear about needing more space.

“Baloney,” he kept saying. “Ah, baloney.”

We were indulging him: I took my lead from Suzanne, who nodded when he spoke but rolled her eyes at me or loudly urged him to tell us more. He was talking about Linda that night, though her name meant nothing to me. I was barely listening: I’d picked up a small wooden box rattling with tiny silver balls and tipped it, trying to get the balls to drop into holes painted to look like the mouths of dragons.

Linda would be his ex-girlfriend by the time of the murders, only twenty-six, though that age seemed vague to me then, like a knock on a faraway door. Her son, Christopher, was five years old but had already been to ten countries, bundled along on his mother’s travels like the pouch of her scarab jewelry. The ostrich-skin cowboy boots she stuffed with rolled-up magazines so they’d keep their shape. Linda was beautiful, though I’m sure her face would’ve grown bawdy or cheap. She slept in bed with her golden-haired little boy, like a teddy bear.

—

I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me, that Mitch was just the comic fill — I didn’t even consider other possibilities. I’d gone to the bathroom, used Mitch’s strange black soap and peeked in his cabinet, loaded with bottles of Dilaudid. The enamel shine of the bathtub, the cut of bleach in the air so I could tell he had a cleaning lady.

I had just finished peeing when someone opened the bathroom door without knocking. I was startled, reflexively trying to cover myself. I saw the man sliver a glance toward my exposed legs before he ducked back into the hallway.

“Apologies,” I heard him say from the other side of the door. A chain of stuffed marigold birds swung gently from where they hung by the sink.

“My deepest apologies,” the man said. “I was looking for Mitch. Sorry to bother you.”

I sensed him hesitate on the other side of the door, then tap the wood lightly before he walked away. I pulled up my shorts. The adrenaline that spread through me lessened but didn’t disappear. It was probably just a friend of Mitch’s. I was jumpy from the coke, but I wasn’t frightened. Which made sense: nobody thought until later that strangers might be anything but friends. Our love for one another boundless, the whole universe an extended crash pad.

—

I’d realize a few months after that this must have been Scotty Weschler. The caretaker who lived in the back house, a tiny white-paneled cabin with a hot plate and a space heater. The man who cleaned the hot tub filters and watered the lawn and checked that Mitch hadn’t overdosed in the night. Prematurely balding, with wire glasses: Scotty had been a cadet at a military academy in Pennsylvania before dropping out, moving west. He never shook his cadet idealism: he wrote letters to his mother about the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, using words like “majestic” and “grandeur.”

He’d be the first. The one who tried to fight back, to run.

I wish I could squeeze more out of our brief encounter. To believe, when he opened the door, that I had felt a shiver of what was coming. But I’d made out nothing but the flash of a stranger, and I thought of it very little. I didn’t even ask Suzanne who the man was.

—

The living room was empty when I came back. The music blaring, a cigarette leaching smoke in the ashtray. The glass door that led out to the bay was open. I was surprised by the suddenness of the water when I went out on the porch, the wall of woolly lights: San Francisco in the fog.

No one was out on the bank. Then I heard, over the water, a distorted echo. And there they were, both of them, splashing in the waves, the water foaming around their legs. Mitch flapping around in his white outfit, now like soggy bedsheets, Suzanne in the dress she called her Br’er Rabbit dress. My heart lurched — I wanted to join them. But something held me in place. I kept standing on the stairs that led to the sand, smelling the sea-softened wood. Did I know what was coming? I watched Suzanne shed her dress, shrugging it off with drunken difficulty, and then he was on her. His head lowering to lick at her bare breast. Both of them unsteady in the water. I watched for longer than seemed right. I was buzzy and adrift by the time I turned my back and wandered into the house.

—

I turned the music down. Shut the refrigerator door, which Suzanne had left open. The picked-over carcass of the chicken. Kona chicken, as Mitch had insisted: the sight made me a little nauseous. The too-pink flesh emanating a chill. I would always be like this, I thought, the person who closed the refrigerator. The person who watched from the steps like a spook while Suzanne let Mitch do whatever he wanted. Jealousy started to oscillate in my gut. The strange gnaw when I imagined his fingers inside her, how she’d taste of salt water. Confusion, too — how quickly things had changed and I was the one on the outside again.

The chemical pleasure in my head had already faded, so all I recognized anymore was the lack of it. I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t want to sit on the couch, waiting for them to come inside. I found an unlocked bedroom that looked like a guest room: no clothes in the closet, a bed with slightly mussed sheets. They smelled like someone else, and there was a single gold earring on the nightstand. I thought of my own home, the weight and feel of my own blankets — then a sudden desire to sleep at Connie’s house. Curled up against her back in our familiar, ritual arrangement, her sheets printed with chubby cartoon rainbows.

I lay in the bed, listening for the sound of Suzanne and Mitch in the other room. Like I was Suzanne’s thick-necked boyfriend, the same ratchet of righteous anger. It wasn’t aimed at her, not exactly — I hated Mitch with a fierceness that kept me wide-awake. I wanted him to know how she’d been laughing at him earlier, to know the exact degree of pity I had for him. How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling.

—

I was almost certain, later, that this was the same bedroom that Linda and her little boy were sleeping in. Though I know there were other bedrooms, other possibilities. Linda and Mitch were broken up by the night of the murder, but they were still friends, Mitch delivering an oversize stuffed giraffe on Christopher’s birthday the week before. Linda was only staying at Mitch’s because her apartment in the Sunset was crawling with mold — she’d planned on being at his house for two nights. Then she and Christopher would stay in Woodside with her boyfriend, a man who owned a series of seafood restaurants.

After the murders, I had seen the man on a talk show: face red, pressing a handkerchief to his eyes. I wondered if his fingernails were manicured. He told the host he’d been planning to propose to Linda. Though who knows if that was true.

—

Around three in the morning, there was a knock on my door. It was Suzanne, stumbling inside without waiting for an answer. She was naked, bringing a gusty smell of brine and cigarette smoke.

“Hi,” she said, pulling at my blankets.

I’d been half-asleep, lulled by the sameness of the dark ceiling, and she was like a creature from a dream, storming into the room, smelling as she did. The sheets getting damp when she crawled in beside me. I believed she had come for me. To be with me, a gesture of apology. But how quickly that thought disappeared when I took in her urgency, her stoned, glassy focus — I knew this was for him.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, and laughed. Her face new in the strange blue light. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “you’ll see. He’s gentle.”

Like that was the most you could hope for. I sat back, grabbing the covers.

“Mitch is a creep,” I said. It was clear to me that we were in a stranger’s house. The oversize, empty guest room, with its unsavory off-gassing of other bodies.

“Evie,” she said. “Don’t be like that.”

Her nearness, the dart of her eyes in the dark. How easily she pressed her mouth to mine, then, edging her tongue past my lips. Running the tip along the ridges of my teeth, smiling into my mouth, and saying something I couldn’t hear.

I could taste the cocaine drip in her mouth, the brackish sea. I went to kiss her again, but she had already drifted away, smiling like this was a game, like we’d done something funny and unreal. Playing lightly with my hair.

I was happy to twist the meanings, willfully misread the symbols. Doing what Suzanne asked seemed like the best gift I could give her, a way to unlock her own reciprocal feelings. And she was trapped, in her way, just like I was, but I never saw that, shifting easily in the directions she prompted for me. Like the wooden toy, clattering with the silver ball I’d tilted and urged into the painted holes, trying for the winning drop.

—

Mitch’s room was big, and the tile floor was cold. The bed was on a raised platform, carved with Balinese figures. He grinned when he saw me behind Suzanne, showing a quick flash of teeth, and opened his arms to us, his bare chest foaming with hair. Suzanne went right to him, but I sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded in my lap. Mitch raised up on his elbows.

“No,” he said, patting the mattress. “Here. Come here.”

I scooted over to lie beside him. I could feel Suzanne’s impatience, how she sidled to him like a dog.

“I don’t want you yet,” Mitch said to her. I couldn’t see Suzanne’s face, but I could imagine the swift hurt.

“Can you take these off?” Mitch tapped at my underwear with his hand.

I was ashamed: they were full-seated and childish, the elastic limp. I lowered them down my hips until they were around my knees.

“Oh God,” Mitch said, sitting up. “Can you open your legs a little?”

I did. He crouched over me. I could feel his face close to my childish mound. His snout had the wet heat of an animal.

“I’m not going to touch you,” Mitch said, and I knew he was lying. “Jesus,” he breathed. He gestured Suzanne over. Murmuring low, placing us like dolls. Announcing fussy asides to no one in particular. Suzanne looked to me like a stranger in that strange room, like the part of her I recognized had retreated.

He sucked my tongue into his mouth. I could stay still, mostly, while Mitch kissed me, and accept his probing tongue with a hollow distance, even his fingers inside me like something curious and without meaning. Mitch lifted himself and pushed inside me, groaning a little when it was difficult. He spit on his hand and rubbed me, then tried again, and how sudden it was, his jacking between my legs, and how I kept thinking to myself with some surprise and disbelief that it was actually happening, and then I felt Suzanne’s hand snake over and grab mine.

Maybe Mitch nudged Suzanne in my direction, but I didn’t see. When Suzanne kissed me again, I was lulled into thinking she was doing it for me, that this was our way to be together. That Mitch was just the background noise, the necessary excuse that allowed for her eager mouth, the curl of her fingers. I could smell myself and smell her, too. A sound deep in her throat that I believed was meant for me, as if her pleasure were at some pitch Mitch couldn’t hear. She moved my hand to her breast, shivering when I touched the nipple. Closing her eyes like I had done something good.

Mitch rolled off me in order to watch. Kneading the wet head of his dick, the mattress slanting toward his weight.

I kept kissing Suzanne, so different from kissing a man. Their forceful mash getting across the idea of a kiss, but not this articulation. I pretended Mitch wasn’t there, though I could feel his gaze, his mouth as slack as the open trunk of a car. I was skittish when Suzanne tried to push apart my legs, but she smiled up at me, so I let her. Her tongue was tentative, first, then she used her fingers, too, and I was embarrassed at how wet I was, the noises I made. My mind fritzing from a pleasure so foreign I didn’t know how to name it.

Mitch fucked us both after that, like he could correct our obvious preference for each other. Sweating hard, his eyes crimping with effort. The bed moving away from the wall.

When I woke up in the morning and saw the soiled twist of my underwear on Mitch’s tile floor, such helpless embarrassment bubbled up in me that I almost cried.

—

Mitch drove us back to the ranch. I was silent, looking out the windows. The passing houses seemed long dormant, the fancy cars shrouded in their putty-colored covers. Suzanne was sitting in the front. She turned around to smile at me from time to time. An apology, I could tell, but I was stone-faced, my heart a tight fist. A grief that I didn’t fully indulge.

I was shoring up the bad feelings, I suppose, like I could preempt sorrow with my bravado, with the careless way I thought about Suzanne to myself. And I’d had sex: so what? It was no big deal, another working of the human body. Like eating, something rote and accessible to everyone. All the pious and pastel urgings to wait, to make yourself into a present for your future husband: there was relief in the plainness of the actual act. I watched Suzanne from the backseat, watched her laugh at something Mitch said and roll down the window. Her hair lifting in the rush.

—

Mitch pulled up at the ranch.

“Later, girls,” he said, raising a pink palm. Like he’d taken us for ice cream, some innocent outing, and was returning us to the cradle of our parents’ house.

Suzanne had gone immediately in search of Russell, cleaving from me without a word. I realized later that she must have been giving Russell a report. Letting him know how Mitch had seemed, whether we’d made him happy enough to change his mind. At the time, I only noticed the abandonment.

I tried to busy myself, peeling garlic in the kitchen with Donna. Smashing cloves between the flat blade of a knife and the counter like she showed me. Donna slid the radio knob from one end of the dial to the other and back, getting varying degrees of static and alarming strains of Herb Alpert. She gave up finally and returned to jabbing at a mess of black dough.

“Roos put Vaseline in my hair,” Donna said. She gave a shake and her hair barely moved. “It’s gonna be real soft when I wash it.”

I didn’t answer. Donna could tell I was distracted and catted her eyes over at me.

“Did he show you the fountain in the backyard?” she said. “He got it from Rome. Mitch’s place has high vibes,” she went on, “all the ions, ’cause of the ocean.”

I reddened, trying to concentrate on separating the garlic from its woody husks. The buzz of the radio suddenly seemed nasty, polluting, the announcer talking too fast. They’d all been there, I understood, to Mitch’s strange house by the sea. I’d enacted some pattern, been defined, neatly, as a girl, providing a known value. There was something almost comforting about it, the clarity of purpose, even as it shamed me. I didn’t understand that you could hope for more.

I hadn’t seen the fountain. I did not say so.

Donna’s eyes were bright.

“You know,” she said, “Suzanne’s parents are actually real rich. Propane or something. She never was homeless or anything, either.” She was working the dough on the counter as she spoke. “Didn’t end up in any hospital. Any of that shit she says. Just scratched herself up with a paper clip, on some freaky jag.”

I was queasy from the stench of food scraps softening in the sink. I shrugged like I didn’t much care either way.

Donna went on. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “But it’s true. We were up in Mendocino. Crashing with an apple farmer. She’d done too much acid, just started working away at herself with that clip until we made her quit. She didn’t even bleed, though.”

When I didn’t respond, Donna slammed the dough into a bowl. Punching it down. “Think whatever you want,” she said.

—

Suzanne came into her bedroom later, while I was changing. I hunched myself protectively over my naked chest: Suzanne noticed and seemed ready to mock me but stopped herself. I saw the scars on her wrist but didn’t indulge the uneasy questions — Donna was just jealous. Never mind Donna and her stiff Vaseline hair, shanky and foul as a muskrat’s.

“Last night was a trip,” Suzanne said.

I pulled away when she tried to sling her arm around me.

“Oh, come on, you were into it,” she said. “I saw.”

I made a sick face — she laughed. I occupied myself with tidying the sheets, as if the bed could ever be anything but a dank nest.

“Aw, it’s fine,” Suzanne said. “I got something to cheer you up.”

I thought she was going to apologize. But then it occurred to me — she was going to kiss me again. The dim room got airless. I almost felt it happen, an imperceptible lean — but Suzanne just hefted her bag onto the bed, the fringe pooling on the mattress. The bag was full of a strange weight. She gave me a triumphant look.

“Go on,” she said. “Look inside.”

Suzanne huffed at my stubbornness and opened it herself. I didn’t understand what was inside, the odd metallic flash. The sharp corners.

“Take it out,” Suzanne said, impatient.

It was a gold record framed in glass, much heavier than expected.

She nudged me. “We got him, huh?”

Her expectant look — was this meant to explain something? I stared at the name, engraved on a small plaque: Mitch Lewis. The Sun King album.

Suzanne started laughing.

“Man, you should see your face right now,” she said. “Don’t you know I’m on your side?”

The record glinted dully in the dark room, but even its pretty Egyptian gleam failed to stir me — it was just an artifact of that strange house, nothing so valuable. Already the weight was making my arms tired.

9

The clatter on the porch startled me, followed by the sound of my mother’s dissolving laughter, Frank’s heavy steps. I was in the living room, stretched out in my grandfather’s chair and reading one of my mother’s McCall’s. Its pictures of genitally slick hams, wreathed with pineapple. Lauren Hutton lounging on a rocky cliff in her Bali brassieres. My mother and Frank were loud, coming into the living room, but stopped talking when they caught sight of me. Frank in his cowboy boots, my mother swallowing whatever she’d been saying.

“Sweetheart.” Her eyes were filmy, her body swaying just enough so I knew she was drunk and trying to hide it, though her pink neck — exposed in a chiffon shirt — would have given it away.

“Hi,” I said.

“Whatcha doing home, sweetheart?” My mother came over to wrap her arms around me, and I let her, despite the metallic smell of alcohol on her, the wilt of her perfume. “Is Connie sick?”

“Nah.” I shrugged. Turning back to my magazine. The next page: a girl in a butter-yellow tunic, kneeling on a white box. An advertisement for Moon Drops.

“You’re usually in and out so quick,” she said.

“I just felt like being home,” I said. “Isn’t it my house, too?”

My mother smiled, smoothing my hair. “Such a pretty girl, aren’t you? Of course it’s your house. Isn’t she a pretty girl?” she said, turning to Frank. “Such a pretty girl,” she repeated to no one.

Frank smiled back but seemed restless. I hated that unwilling knowledge, how I’d started to notice each tiny shift of power and control, the feints and jabs. Why couldn’t relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate? I snapped the magazine shut.

“Good night,” I said. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen later, Frank’s hands in the chiffon. My mother aware enough to turn out the lights, eager for the forgiving dark.

—

These were the fantasies I goaded: that by leaving the ranch for a while, I could provoke Suzanne’s sudden appearance, her demand that I return to her. The loneliness I could gorge myself on, like the saltines I ate by the sleeve, relishing the cut of sodium in my mouth. When I watched Bewitched, I had new irritation for Samantha. Her priggish nose, how she made a fool of her husband. The desperation of his doltish love turning him into the punch line. I paused one night to study the studio photo of my grandmother that hung in the hall, her shellacked cap of curls. She was pretty, awash in health. Only her eyes were sleepy, as if just woken from flowery dreams. The realization was bracing — we looked nothing alike.

I smoked a little bit of grass out the window, then fingered myself to tiredness, reading a comic book or a magazine, it didn’t matter which. It was just the form of bodies, my brain let loose on them. I could look at an advertisement for a Dodge Charger, a smiling girl in a snow-white cowboy hat, and furiously project her into obscene positions. Her face slack and swollen, sucking and licking, her chin wet with saliva. I was supposed to understand the night with Mitch, be easy with things, but I had only my stiff and formal anger. That stupid gold record. I tried hard to mash up new meaning, like I’d missed some important sign, a weighted look Suzanne had given me behind Mitch’s back. His goatish face, dripping sweat onto me so I had to turn my head.

—

The next morning I’d been pleased to find the kitchen empty, my mother taking a shower. I tipped sugar in my coffee, then settled at the table with a sleeve of saltines. I liked to crumble a saltine in my mouth, then flood the starchy mess with coffee. I was so absorbed in this ritual that Frank’s sudden presence startled me. He scraped out the other chair, hitching it close as he sat down. I saw him take in the debris of saltines, inciting my vague shame. I was about to slither away, but he spoke before I could.

“Big plans for today?” he asked me.

Trying to pal around. I twisted the sleeve of crackers closed and wiped my hands of crumbs, suddenly fastidious. “Dunno,” I said.

How quickly the veneer of patience drained away. “You just going to mope around the house?” he asked.

I shrugged; that’s exactly what I’d do.

A muscle in his cheek jumped. “At least go outside,” he said. “You stay in that room like you’re locked in there.”

Frank wasn’t wearing his boots, just his blaring white socks. I swallowed a helpless snort; it was ridiculous to see a grown man’s socked feet. He noticed my mouth twitch and got flustered.

“Everything’s funny to you, huh?” he said. “Doing whatever you want. You think your mom doesn’t notice what’s going on?”

I stiffened but didn’t look up. There were so many things he could be talking about: the ranch, what I’d done with Russell. Mitch. The ways I thought about Suzanne.

“She got real confused the other day,” Frank went on. “She’s missing some money. Gone right from her purse.”

I knew my cheeks had flushed, but I stayed quiet. Narrowing my eyes at the table.

“Give her a break,” Frank said. “Hm? She’s a nice lady.”

“I’m not stealing.” My voice was high and false.

“Borrowing, let’s say. I’m not gonna tell. I get it. But you should stop. She loves you a lot, you know?”

No more noise from the shower, which meant my mother would appear soon. I tried to gauge whether Frank really wouldn’t say anything — he was trying to be nice, I understood, not getting me in trouble. But I didn’t want to be grateful. Imagine him trying to be fatherly with me.

“The town party is still happening,” Frank said. “Today and tomorrow, too. Maybe you could go on down there, have some fun. I’m sure that would make your mother happy. You staying busy.”

When my mother entered, toweling the ends of her hair, I immediately brightened, arranging my face like I was listening to Frank.

“Don’t you think so, Jeanie?” Frank said, gazing at my mother.

“Think what?” she said.

“Shouldn’t Evie go check out that carnival?” Frank said. “That centennial thing? Keep busy?”

My mother took up this pet notion like it was a flash of brilliance. “I don’t know if it’s the centennial, exactly—” she said.

“Well, town party,” Frank broke in, “centennial, whatever it is.”

“But it’s a good idea,” she said. “You’ll have a great time.”

I could feel Frank watching me.

“Yeah,” I said, “sure.”

“Nice to see you two having a good talk,” my mother added shyly.

I made a face, collecting my mug and crackers, but my mother didn’t notice: she had already bent to kiss Frank. Her robe falling open so I saw a triangle of shadowy, sun-spotted chest and had to look away.

—

The town was celebrating 110 years, after all, not 100, the awkward number setting the tone for the meager affair. To even call it a carnival seemed overly generous, though most of the town was there. There had been a box social in the park and a play about the town’s founding in the high school amphitheater, the student council members sweating in theater department costumes. They’d closed the road to street traffic, so I found myself in a bobbing press of people, pushing and grabbing at the promise of leisure and fun. Husbands whose faces were tight with aggrieved duty, flanked by kids and wives who needed stuffed animals. Who needed pale, sour lemonade and hot dogs and grilled corn. All the proof of a good time. The river was already clotted with litter, the slow drift of popcorn bags and beer cans and paper fans.

My mother had been impressed by Frank’s miraculous ability to get me to leave the house. Just as Frank wanted her to be. So she could imagine the neat way he’d slot into a father shape. I was having exactly as much fun as I’d expected to have. I ate a snow cone, the paper cup weakening until the syrup leaked out over my hands. I threw the rest away, but my hands scudded with the residue, even after I wiped them on my shorts.

I moved among the crowd, in and out of shade. I saw kids I knew, but they were the background fill from school, no one I had ever spent concentrated time with. Still, I incanted their first and last names helplessly in my head. Norm Morovich. Jim Schumacher. Farm kids, mostly, whose boots smelled of rot. Their soft-spoken answers in class, speaking only when specifically called upon, the humble ring of dirt I saw in the upturned cowboy hats on their desks. They were polite and virtuous, the trace of milk cows and clover fields and little sisters on them. Nothing at all like the ranch population, who would pity boys who still respected their father’s authority or wiped their boots before entering their mother’s kitchen. I wondered what Suzanne was doing — swimming in the creek, maybe, or lying around with Donna or Helen or maybe even Mitch, a thought that made me bite my lip, working a ruff of dry skin with my teeth.

—

I’d have to stay at the carnival only a little while longer and then I could go back home, Frank and my mother satisfied with my healthy dose of sociable activity. I tried to make my way toward the park, but it was packed — the parade had started, the pickup beds heavy with crepe-paper models of town hall. Bank employees and girls in Indian costumes waving from floats, the noise of the marching band violent and oppressive. I weaved out of the crowd, scuttling along the periphery. Sticking to the quieter side streets. The sound of the marching band grew louder, the parade winding down East Washington. The laughter I heard, pointed and performative, cut through my focus: I knew, before I looked up, that it was aimed at me.

It was Connie, Connie and May, a netted bag stretching from Connie’s wrist. I could make out a can of orange soda and other groceries straining inside, the line of a swimsuit under Connie’s shirt. Encoded within was their whole simple day — the boredom of the heat, the orange soda going flat. The bathing suits drying on the porch.

My first feeling was relief, like the familiarity of turning into my own driveway. Then came an uneasiness, the clicking together of the facts. Connie was mad at me. We were not friends anymore. I watched Connie move past her initial surprise. May’s bloodhound eyes squinted, eager for drama. Her braces thickening her mouth. Connie and May exchanged a few whispered words, then Connie edged forward.

“Hey,” she said cautiously. “What’s going on?”

I had expected anger, derision, but Connie was acting normal, even a little glad to see me. We hadn’t spoken in almost a month. I looked at May’s face for a clue, but it was insistently blank.

“Nothing much,” I said. I should have been fortified by the last few weeks, the existence of the ranch lessening the stakes of our familiar dramas, and yet how quickly the old loyalties return, the pack animal push. I wanted them to like me.

“Us either,” Connie said.

My sudden gratitude for Frank — it was good that I had come, good to be around people like Connie who were not complicated or confusing like Suzanne, but just a friend, someone I’d known beyond daily changes. How she and I had watched television until we got blinky headaches and popped pimples on each other’s backs in the harsh light of the bathroom.

“Lame, huh?” I said, gesturing in the direction of the parade. “A hundred and ten years.”

“There’s a bunch of freaky people around.” May sniffed, and I wondered if she was somehow implicating me. “By the river. They stunk.”

“Yeah,” Connie said, kinder. “The play was really stupid, too. Susan Thayer’s dress was pretty much see-through. Everyone saw her underwear.”

They shot each other a look. I was jealous of their shared memory, how they must have sat together in the audience, bored and restless in the sun.

“We might go swimming,” Connie said. This statement seemed vaguely hilarious to both of them, and I joined in, tentative. Like I understood the joke.

“Um.” Connie seemed to silently confirm something with May. “Do you want to come with us?”

I should have known that it wouldn’t end well. That it was happening too easily, that my defection wouldn’t be tolerated. “To swim?”

May stepped up, nodding. “Yeah, at the Meadow Club. My mom can drive us. You wanna come?”

The thought that I might go with them was such a ludicrous anachronism, as if an alternate universe were unfolding where Connie and I were still friends and May Lopes was inviting us to the Meadow Club to swim. You could get milkshakes there and grilled cheese sandwiches with lacy frills of burnt cheese. Simple tastes, food for children, everything paid for by signing your parent’s name. I allowed myself to feel flattered, remembering an easy familiarity with Connie. Her house so known to me that I didn’t even think about where each bowl went in the cabinet, each plastic cup, their rims eaten by the dishwasher. How nice that seemed, how uncomplicated, the cogent march of our friendship.

That was the moment May stepped toward me, pitching the can of orange soda forward: the soda inside hit my face at an angle, so it didn’t douse me so much as dribble. Oh, I thought, my stomach dropping. Oh, of course. The parking lot tilted. The soda was tepid and I could smell the chemicals, the unsavory drip on the asphalt. May dropped the mostly empty can. It rolled a ways and then stopped. Her face was as shiny as a quarter, and she looked spooked by her own audacity. Connie was more uncertain, her face a flickering bulb, coming to full-watt attention when May rattled her bag like a warning bell.

The liquid had barely grazed me. It could have been worse, a real soaking instead of this meager attempt, but somehow I longed for the soaking. I wanted the event to be as big and ruthless as the way my humiliation felt.

“Have a fun summer,” May trilled, linking arms with Connie.

And then they were walking away, their bags jostling and their sandals loud on the sidewalk. Connie turned to glance back at me, but I saw May tug her, hard. The bleed of surf music carried across the road from an open car window — I thought I saw Peter’s friend Henry at the wheel, but maybe that was my imagination. Projecting a larger net of conspiracy onto my childish humiliation, as if that were an improvement.

—

I kept a lunatic calm on my face, afraid someone might be watching me, alert for signs of weakness. Though I’m sure it was obvious — a tightness in my features, a wounded insistence that I was fine, everything was fine, that it was just a misunderstanding, girlish high jinks between friends. Ha ha ha, like the laugh track on Bewitched that drained the look of horror on Darrin’s marzipan face of any meaning.

It had only been two days without Suzanne, but already I had slipped back so easily into the dull stream of adolescent life — Connie and May’s idiot dramas. My mother’s cold hands, sudden on my neck, like she was trying to startle me into loving her. This awful carnival and my awful town. My anger at Suzanne was hard to access, an old sweater packed away and barely remembered. I could think of Russell slapping Helen and it surfaced as a little glitch at the back of certain thoughts, a memory of wariness. But there were always ways I made sense of things.

I was back at the ranch the next day.

—

I found Suzanne on her mattress, bent intently over a book. She never read, and it was odd to see her stilled in concentration. The cover was half-torn and had a futuristic pentagram on it, some blocky white type.

“What’s that about?” I asked from the doorway.

Suzanne looked up, startled.

“Time,” she said. “Space.”

The sight of her brought flashes of the night with Mitch, but they were unfocused, like a secondhand reflection. Suzanne didn’t say anything about my absence. About Mitch. All she did was sigh and toss the book down. She lay back on the bed, studying her nails. Pinching the skin of her upper arm.

“Flabby,” she declared, waiting for me to protest. As she knew I would.

—

I had a hard time sleeping that night, shifting on the mattress. I was returned to her. So alert to every cue in her face that I made myself sick, watching her, but happy, too.

“I’m glad I’m back,” I whispered, the darkness allowing me to say the words.

Suzanne laughed a little, half-asleep. “But you can always go home.”

“Maybe I never will.”

“Free Evie.”

“I’m serious. I don’t ever want to leave.”

“That’s what all the kids say when summer camp is over.”

I could see the whites of her eyes. Before I could say anything, she let out a sudden heavy breath.

“I’m too hot,” she announced. Kicking off the sheet and turning from me.

10

The clock was loud in the Dutton house. The apples in the netted basket looked waxy and old. I could see photos on the mantel: the familiar faces of Teddy and his parents. His sister who’d married an IBM salesman. I kept waiting for the front door to open, for someone to identify our intrusion. The sun lit a folded paper star in the window so it went bright. Mrs. Dutton must have taken the time to tape that up, make her home nice.

Donna disappeared into another room, then reappeared. I heard the shudder of drawers, of things being moved.

I saw the Dutton house that day as if for the first time. Noticing that the living room was carpeted. That the rocking chair had a cross-stitched pillow on the seat that looked handmade. The wonky antennae of the television, a smell like stale potpourri in the air. Everything was waterlogged by the knowledge of the family’s absence: the arrangement of papers on the low table, an uncapped aspirin bottle in the kitchen. None of it made any sense without the animation of the Duttons’ presence, like the blurry glyphs of 3-D pictures before the glasses knocked them into clarity.

Donna kept reaching to bump something out of its place: little things. A blue glass of flowers moved four inches to the left. A penny loafer kicked away from its mate. Suzanne didn’t touch anything, not at first. She was picking things up with her eyes, ingesting it all — the framed photos, the ceramic cowboy. The cowboy made Donna and Suzanne weaken into giggles, me smiling, too, but I did not get the joke; only a queer feeling in my stomach, the starkness of the hollow sunlight.

—

The three of us had gone on a garbage run earlier that afternoon, in a borrowed car, a Trans Am, possibly Mitch’s. Suzanne turned up the radio, KFRC, K. O. Bayley on the big 610. Both Suzanne and Donna seemed energized, and so was I. Happy to be back among them. Suzanne pulled into a glass-fronted Safeway that was familiar to me, the cant of its green roof. Where my mother shopped occasionally.

“Grubby grub time,” Donna announced, making herself laugh.

Donna hoisted herself over the lip of the dumpster, avid as an animal, knotting her skirt around her hips so she could dig deep. She got off on it, happy to muck around in the trash, the wet squelch.

On the way back to the ranch, Suzanne made an announcement.

“Time for a little trip,” she said, loudly recruiting Donna into the plan.

I liked knowing she was thinking of me, trying to placate me. I noticed a new desperation around her after Mitch. I was more conscious of her attentions, of how to keep her eyes on me.

“Where?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Suzanne said, catching Donna’s gaze. “It’s like our medicine, like a little cure for what ails you.”

“Ooh,” Donna said, leaning forward. She seemed to have understood immediately what Suzanne was talking about. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“We need a house,” Suzanne said. “That’s the first thing. An empty house.” She flashed a look at me. “Your mom’s gone, right?”

I didn’t know what they were going to do. But I recognized a tinge of alarm, even then, and had the sense to spare my own home. I shifted in the seat. “She’s there all day.”

Suzanne made a disappointed hum. But I was already thinking of another house that might be empty. And I offered it up to them, easily.

I gave Suzanne directions, watching the roads grow more and more familiar. When Suzanne stopped the car and Donna got out and smeared mud on the first two numbers of the license plate, I only worried a little. I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought — that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.

Suzanne was driving erratically, rolling through a stop sign and gazing away from the road for long stretches of time, caught in a private daydream. She turned onto my own road. The gates like a familiar string of beads, one following the other.

“There,” I said, and Suzanne slowed the car.

The windows of the Dutton house were plain with curtains, the flagstone path cutting a line to the front door. No car in the carport, just a glisten of oil on the asphalt. Teddy’s bike wasn’t in the yard — he was gone, too. The house looked empty.

—

Suzanne parked the car down the road a little bit, mostly out of sight, while Donna went briskly to the side yard. I trailed Suzanne, but I was hanging back slightly, shuffling my sandals through the dirt.

Suzanne turned to me. “Are you coming or what?”

I laughed, but I’m sure she saw the effort it took. “I just don’t understand what we’re doing.”

She cocked her head and smiled. “Do you really care?”

I was scared and couldn’t say why. I mocked myself for letting my mind range furiously to the very worst thing. Whatever they were going to do — steal, probably. I didn’t know.

“Hurry up,” Suzanne said. She was getting annoyed, I could tell, though she was still smiling. “We can’t just stand here.”

Afternoon shadows were starting to slant through the trees. Donna reemerged from the wooden side gate. “The back door’s open,” she said. My stomach sank — there was no way to stop whatever was about to happen. And then there was Tiki, scrambling in our direction, barking in wretched alarm. Yips shook his whole body, his skinny shoulders twitching.

“Fuck,” Suzanne muttered. Donna backed off, too.

The dog could have been enough of an excuse, I suppose, and we could’ve piled back into the car and gone back to the ranch. A part of me wanted that. But another part wanted to fulfill the sick momentum in my chest. The Dutton family seemed like perpetrators, too, just like Connie and May and my parents. All quarantined by their selfishness, their stupidity.

“Wait,” I said. “He knows me.”

I squatted, holding out my hand. Keeping my eyes on the dog. Tiki approached, sniffing my palm.

“Good Tiki,” I said, petting him, scratching under his jaw, and then the barking stopped and we went inside.

—

I couldn’t believe nothing happened. That no cop cars were whining after us. Even after shifting so easily into the Dutton domain, crossing the invisible boundaries. And why had we done that? Jarred the inviolate grid of a home for no reason? Just to prove we could? The calm mask of Suzanne’s face as she touched the Duttons’ things confused me, her odd remove, even as I fluoresced with a strange, unreadable thrill. Donna was looking over some treasure from the house, a bauble of milky ceramic. I peered closer and saw it was a little figure of a Dutch girl. How bizarre, the detritus of people’s lives removed from their context. It made even things that were precious seem like junk.

The lurch in me made me think of an afternoon when I was younger, my father and I hunched over the shoreline at Clear Lake. My father squinting in the harshness of midday, the fish white of his thighs in his swimming shorts. How he pointed out a leech in the water, quivering and tight with blood. He was pleased, poking at the leech with a stick to make it move, but I was frightened. The inky leech caused some drag on my insides that I sensed again, there, in the Dutton house, Suzanne’s eyes meeting mine across the living room.

“You like?” Suzanne said. Smiling a little. “Wild, right?”

Donna came out into the entryway. Her forearms shone with sticky juice, and she held a triangle of watermelon in her hand, the spongy pink of an organ.

“Greetings and salutations,” she said, chewing wetly. There was an almost feral percolation emanating from Donna like a bad smell, her dress whose hem was ratty from being stepped on: how out of place she looked next to the polished coffee table, the tidy curtains. Drops of watermelon juice fell on the floor.

“There’s more in the sink,” she said. “It’s real good.”

Donna picked a black seed from her mouth with a delicate little pinch, then flicked it off into the corner of the room.

—

We were there only a half hour or so, though it seemed much longer. Snapping the TV on and off. Paging through the mail on the side table. I followed Suzanne up the stairs, wondering where Teddy was now, where his parents were. Was Teddy still waiting for me to bring him his drugs? Tiki banged around in the hallway. I realized with a start that I’d known the Dutton family my whole life. Under the hanging photographs, I could make out the line of wallpaper, just starting to peel, the tiny pink flowers. The smear of fingerprints.

I would often think of the house. How innocent I told myself it was: harmless fun. I was reckless, wanting to win back Suzanne’s attention, to feel like we were arranged again against the world. We were ripping a tiny seam in the life of the Dutton family, just so they’d see themselves differently, even if for a moment. So they’d notice a slight disturbance, try to remember when they’d moved their shoes or put their clock in the drawer. That could only be good, I told myself, the forced perspective. We were doing them a favor.

—

Donna was in the parents’ bedroom, a long silk slip pulled over her dress.

“I’ll need the Rolls at seven,” she said, swishing the watery fabric, the color of champagne.

Suzanne snorted. I could see a cut-glass bottle of perfume tipped on the nightstand and the golden tubes of lipstick like shell casings in the carpet. Suzanne was already sifting through the bureau, stuffing her hand inside the flesh-tone nylons, creating obscene bulges. The brassieres were heavy and medical looking, stiff with wire. I lifted one of the lipsticks and uncapped it, smelling the talcum scent of the orangy red.

“Oh, yeah,” Donna said, seeing me. She grabbed a lipstick, too, and made a cartoonish pucker, pretending to apply it. “We should leave a little message,” she said. Looking around.

“On the walls,” Suzanne said. The idea excited her, I could tell.

I wanted to protest: leaving a mark seemed almost violent. Mrs. Dutton would have to scrub the wall clean, though it would probably always have a phantom nap, the receipt of all the scrubbing. But I stayed quiet.

“A picture?” Donna said.

“Do the heart,” Suzanne added, coming over. “I’ll do it.”

I had a startling vision of Suzanne then. The desperation that showed through, the sudden sense of a dark space yawning in her. I didn’t think of what that dark space might be capable of, only a doubling of my desire to be near it.

Suzanne took the lipstick from Donna but hadn’t yet pressed the tip to the ivory wall when we heard a noise in the driveway.

“Shit,” Suzanne said.

Donna’s eyebrows were raised in mild curiosity: What would happen next?

The front door opened. I tasted my own stale mouth, the rancid announcement of fear. Suzanne seemed scared, too, but her fear was distant and amused, like this was a game of sardines and we were just hiding until the others found us. I knew it was Mrs. Dutton when I heard high heels.

“Teddy?” she called. “You home?”

They’d parked the ranch car down the road, but still: I’m sure Mrs. Dutton took note of the unfamiliar car. Maybe she thought it was a friend of Teddy’s, some older neighborhood pal. Donna was giggling, her hand pressed over her mouth. Eyes bulged in mirth. Suzanne made an exaggerated shushing face. My pulse was loud in my ears. Tiki clattered through the rooms downstairs and I heard Mrs. Dutton cooing to him, the heaving sighs he made in response.

“Hello?” she called.

The wake of silence that followed seemed obviously uneasy. She’d come upstairs soon enough, and then what?

“Come on,” Suzanne whispered. “Let’s sneak out the back.”

Donna was laughing silently. “Shit,” she said, “shit.”

Suzanne dropped the lipstick on the bureau, but Donna kept the slip on, hitching the straps.

“You go first,” she said to Suzanne.

—

There was no way out but to pass Mrs. Dutton in the kitchen.

She was probably wondering at the pink mess of watermelon in the sink, the sticky patches on the floor. Maybe just starting to pick up the disturbance in the air, the itch of strangers in the house. A nervous hand fluttering at her throat, a sudden wish for her husband at her side.

Suzanne took off down the stairs, Donna and I hustling behind. The racket of our footsteps as we plowed past Mrs. Dutton, barreling at full speed through the kitchen. Donna and Suzanne were laughing their heads off, Mrs. Dutton shrieking in fright. Tiki came barking after us, quick and hectic, his nails skittering on the floor. Mrs. Dutton backed up, nakedly afraid.

“Hey,” she said, “stop,” but her voice wavered.

She bumped against a stool and lost her balance, sitting down hard on the tile. I looked back as we banged past — there was Mrs. Dutton splayed on the floor. Recognition tightened her face.

“I see you,” she called from the floor, struggling to right herself, her breath going wild. “I see you, Evie Boyd.”