BOOK ONE WELCOME TO SCORPIONVILLE

BY THE TIME SHE WAS thirteen years old, Lorena Saenz had learned how to make herself invisible. At school, she sat in back and kept her head down, even in second- period science, her favorite class. The teacher, Miss Catalis, was loud and eager and faintly absurd. She wore hippie dresses that bunched at the hips and told long, loopy stories about unsung female scientists.

“Did I ever tell you guys about Maria Mitchell?” she would say. “She was this totally brilliant schoolmarm who lived on Nantucket and loved stargazing. One night, she snuck onto the roof of the tallest building in town with her telescope. And guess what she spotted up there? A comet. A flipping comet! She went on to become the most famous female astronomer in America.”

The pleasure Miss Catalis took in such tales was excruciating. She strode up and down the rows, waving her arms, her bracelets clacking. Then she would freeze, dramatically, and demand to know what her students thought. “I’m looking for a deduction. What do you deduce?”

Eventually, someone would observe that Mitchell was kind of a rebel.

“What if she simply saw something nobody else could? Is that really rebellion? Sometimes you have to break the rules, if you want to prove the world wrong.” At this point, Miss Catalis would pause and let her eyes drift across the desks until they settled on Lorena, who would look down and squirm with a pleasure that confused her. It was an unnerving sensation: becoming visible.

A few months into the fall term, Miss Catalis announced partners for the annual science fair. Lorena would work with Jenny Stallworth. The pairing was so unexpected that a few students snorted. Jenny was blond and willowy and rich; braces lent her mouth a swollen insolence. Lorena was short and pudgy. She lived in a small apartment at the edge of the district with her mother, who was from Honduras. In the world of television, her complexion might have been described as a kind of fancy wood, walnut or mahogany, though in the world she occupied it was merely a shade darker than that of her Mexican friends.

Miss Catalis hoped that Jenny would be inspired by Lorena’s passion for science. But the class saw it differently. They were certain that Miss Catalis had seized upon the fair as a chance to unite two girls of vastly different backgrounds, temperaments, and social standing. It was the kind of thing certain eighth grade teachers did, part of their idiotic fairy-tale agenda. Lorena felt the eyes of her classmates upon her; the pity lit her cheeks.

Jenny greeted the union with a poise that would have pleased her mother. “This’ll be fun!” she assured Lorena. “We’ll come up with something cool.”

A week later, Jenny peeled away from the cluster of beauties with whom she commandeered the breezeway, and approached Lorena. “Wanna come over? Like, to my house. My mom thinks we should talk to my dad. About the science fair. He’s a research professor.”

“What does he study?” Lorena asked.

Jenny smiled without showing her braces. “Scorpions,” she murmured. “Totally gross, right?”

Lorena recognized the invitation as a compulsory kindness, yet it was also an opportunity to see Jenny’s house, and perhaps to better understand the ease with which she carried herself through the world.

It was the winter of 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been sworn in as president. On the outskirts of downtown Sacramento, where the girls lived, a portrait of the former governor still hung in the classrooms at Sutter Junior High. He gazed down upon them with his eternal smile, like an indulgent father, confident that no manner of evil would ever intrude upon the prosperous kingdom they shared.

THE STALLWORTH MANOR was a mint-green Victorian. It sat on a majestic lot in a tree-lined neighborhood known as the Fabulous Forties. Lorena had biked past the place on her way to school. Mrs. Stallworth met them at the door. She was even more elegant than Lo had imagined, her hair elaborately feathered, honeyed highlights, the sort of woman who might appear in a commercial for perfume. She inspected Lo with a frank and indulgent gaze. “How nice,” she said.

“You have a beautiful home,” Lorena replied softly, though she had seen only the foyer. Inside, light poured through a bay window, onto a pair of polished end tables. Fresh flowers had been arranged in a cut crystal vase.

Mrs. Stallworth’s name was Rosemary but everyone called her Ro, so the two of them were going to get along, Ro and Lo.

Jenny snickered.

“Must everything embarrass you?” Mrs. Stallworth said.

Jenny’s room was huge. Rock stars glowered from the posters on her lavender walls. Stuffed animals had been ranked beneath the lace canopy of her bed. The girls thumbed through magazines and listened to Blondie, the band all the white girls listened to. Jenny asked Lo her birthdate, then nodded like it all made sense. “You’re a total Virgo. Earth sign. That means you’re grounded.”

Jenny was an Aries, a fire sign. Passionate and courageous, but maybe also a little impulsive. She was the baby of the family and could have exploited this, but she had been well-bred. She wasn’t cruel; she hadn’t any cause for cruelty.

Lo listened to Jenny and gazed at her astrology charts, dizzy with arrows and stars. She told Jenny that she had a grandma who was a curandera and could curse people with the evil eye. It involved killing a baby goat. Jenny lamented the notion of a murdered baby goat, then made a list of the people she might want to curse, which included her older brother and a boy who had teased her about her braces.

Jenny’s father was supposed to be home by four but he forgot. Jenny’s mother was mortified. That was the word she used. She called her husband and left a message with the department secretary and invited Lo to stay for dinner. They were having steak. Did she like steak?

Lo preferred not to impose but Mrs. Stallworth smiled and clapped her hands and instructed Lo to phone her mother. Lo’s mom wasn’t home, so she faked the conversation, and Mrs. Stallworth promised to drive Lo home; they could put her bike in the back of the station wagon. It was the least they could do.

Mrs. Stallworth had this way about her. She put people at ease by seizing control of situations. She had served as president of the PTA; there were plaques of appreciation discreetly placed amid photos of her children.

It was after five when Mr. Stallworth pulled into the driveway. He drove a Jeep, which didn’t strike Lorena as the sort of car a professor would drive. His manner of dress was likewise odd: shorts, hiking boots, a field hat that cast his face in shadow. He strode across the foyer, nodding sheepishly at his wife’s scolding, and uttered a distracted apology to the girls, who watched him from the top of the stairs. Then he took off his hat and Lorena sucked in her breath. He had a sturdy jaw, dark whiskers, pale brown eyes. Swarthy. Was that the word?

“My God, Marcus, go take a shower.” Mrs. Stallworth gestured at the stains under his armpits. “You smell like an animal.”

Lorena stared at his calves as he retreated.

Later, the girls were summoned to his basement office. He was wearing a polo shirt and thick black glasses. Jenny announced, rather defiantly, that they wanted to pursue a project on astrology.

“It’s smart to pursue a topic that interests you, but astrology isn’t exactly science.” Mr. Stallworth smiled shyly. He was turning a paperweight in his fingers; the tendons on the back of his hand made the muscles of his forearm dance. “You need a hypothesis. And you need proof. Evidence. What do you think? It’s Loretta, right?”

“Lorena,” Jenny said.

“We could have people fill out a survey to see if their personality traits fit with their sign,” Lo said. “If there’s a correlation.”

“A correlation. Good. But we’re not always the best judge of our own character, are we?”

“What if other people fill out the survey?” Lorena said quietly. “To correct for bias.”

Mr. Stallworth looked at her curiously.

Jenny released a sigh of theatrical impatience. “It’s the science fair, you guys, not the national academy of whatever.” She took up the idea of a survey at some length, while Mr. Stallworth closed his eyes and listened.

The walls of his office were covered with topographical maps, each of them riddled with colored pushpins. They looked like the connect-the-dot drawings Lorena had done as a kid as she waited for her mother to return from work.

“Why not aim for something a little more empirical?” Mr. Stallworth suggested finally.

He glanced at Lo, seeking an ally. She felt caught gazing at the cleft in his chin. Mr. Stallworth stood abruptly and announced that he needed to start the fire for the grill.

“I knew he was going say that,” Jenny said, after he’d left. “Empirical is like his pet word.”

Lo waited for Jenny to turn away, then picked up the paperweight. It was a coffin-shaped lump of amber with a tiny scorpion suspended inside. By some trick of light, the scorpion looked as if it were shrieking. She felt a sudden urge to slip the paperweight into her pocket and press it against her thigh.

JUST BEFORE DINNER, Jenny’s brother, Glen, arrived home. Muddy cleats hung from his shoulders. He was a senior in high school, impossibly glamorous. Mrs. Stallworth scolded him for tracking grime into the house. She wasn’t really mad. It was a fond performance, something moms did on TV, the kind who poured fresh-squeezed orange juice into tall glasses.

“Who are you?” Glen grunted at Lo.

“That’s Lo,” Jenny said. “Try not to be a dick.”

“Language!” Mrs. Stallworth called out from the kitchen.

Glen sauntered up to Lo and let his eyes roll down her body. “Do you think I’m a dick?” He was gone before she could answer.

The meal itself was elaborate: glazed carrots, fresh rolls with chilled tabs of butter, a salad that had nuts and crumbled cheese on it and steaks from the grill, one for each of them. The Stallworths sat around a huge oak table, with place settings for everyone. The children were expected to summarize their days in a crisp paragraph as the feast steamed. Jenny ate nothing. Glen annihilated his food.

“Jennifer has a special friend over tonight,” Mrs. Stallworth commented.

“Everyone can see her,” Jenny scoffed. “She’s not invisible.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Stallworth said pleasantly. “Tell us a little about yourself, Lorena.”

Lo felt her mouth go dry. Her shirt didn’t fit right. Mrs. Stallworth, all the Stallworths in fact, were looking at her. It was ridiculous, like an audience with royalty. “I’m in Jenny’s science class,” Lo said cautiously. “Obviously. I live with my mom. She works at Mercy. The hospital. On the labor and delivery ward.”

Mrs. Stallworth clapped. “Isn’t that lovely! She helps babies get born!”

Lo did not correct this impression.

“And your father?” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“He lives in Florida. He got remarried a while ago.”

Mrs. Stallworth smiled, as if Florida and remarriage were just splendid.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters, Lorena?”

“Quit grilling her,” Jenny said. “God.”

“Asking questions isn’t grilling,” Mrs. Stallworth said patiently. “It’s taking an interest in someone.”

“I have an older brother. He joined the navy. He’s training to work on a submarine.”

“It’s just you and your mom, then?” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“We get along pretty well. She works double shifts sometimes, so I make dinner for myself.”

“Who stays with you?” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“We have a neighbor I can call if something comes up.”

“You’re alone there at night?”

“No. No. My mom always gets home before bedtime. It’s not that big a deal.” She glanced at Jenny. “I’m a Virgo, so I’m pretty independent.”

Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

“What do you make for dinner?” Glen said suspiciously.

Lo meant to tell the truth. Toast pizzas. Beans and rice, doled from the pot that lived on their stove. “Spaghetti,” she said. “Hamburgers. Nothing like this. Thanks again for having me.”

Through all this chatter, Mr. Stallworth said nothing. He hacked at the meat on his plate and shoveled carrots into his mouth. There was something awkward in how he held his cutlery, as if, left to his own desires, he would have gone at the steak with his hands, then lapped at the red puddle beneath. Lo didn’t realize she was staring until she noticed Mrs. Stallworth staring at her. She held her blade aloft, almost like a baton. Lo cast her eyes down at her plate. She felt a shiver of fear, and this fear, for some unfathomable reason, pleased her.

“SHE’S SUCH A phony,” Jenny said, after dinner. They were back in her room.

“About what?” Lo said.

“Everything. It’s all just this big display. Lucia does all the real work.”

Lo wanted to ask who Lucia was, then she understood.

“My mom used to work,” Jenny added. “She sold real estate. But her family is loaded. That’s the secret formula around here.”

Lo nodded. “I lied about my brother,” she said suddenly. “It wasn’t a lie exactly. He is in the navy. But he signed up cuz he got kicked out of school.”

“Why was he kicked out?” Jenny whispered, with a gleeful solemnity.

“He kept cutting classes. Then he kind of joined a gang.”

“For real?” Jenny put her hand over her mouth.

Lorena knew it was wrong to talk about her brother’s troubles. But it was a kind of preemptive offering, one that allowed her to protect the most important secret of all: that Tony and her mother were undocumented, that he’d enlisted in the hopes of earning a path to citizenship.

“Don’t tell anyone, okay? Promise?”

Jenny promised.

MR. STALLWORTH DROVE Lo home in his Jeep, turning south onto Alhambra. She watched the trees of East Sacramento give way to the shrubs of Oak Park, then farther south into Fruitridge Pocket, with its Eichlers and pavement. Lorena had never been in a Jeep before. The wind tore at her hair. Potholes rattled her bum. Mr. Stallworth stared at the road ahead, his hands clamped to the steering wheel.

They pulled up to her apartment building. A Styrofoam takeout box, whipped up from the gutter, hugged the chain- link fence.

“How do you know about bias?” Mr. Stallworth said suddenly.

“Our science teacher. Miss Catalis. She has these sayings. The enemy of truth isn’t falsehood. It’s bias. That’s one of them.”

Mr. Stallworth was smiling. “Listen, Lorena. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: astrology is nonsense. You know that already, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t have to play dumb,” he said gently, almost reluctantly. “It’s okay to be smart.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Lo thanked Mr. Stallworth for the ride.

“Of course. Do you need help with your bike?”

“Not really.”

“Of course you do.”

Mr. Stallworth reached across Lo and jerked at the door handle. “It gets stuck,” he murmured, nudging the door open with his knuckles. Lo’s seat belt had tugged at her shirt, exposing a band of belly skin, against which the hairs of his forearm brushed, ever so lightly. A dark possibility rose between them like a coil of smoke then dissolved. It was that quick; Mr. Stallworth withdrew his arm. “In any case,” he said formally. “It’s nice to see Jenny spending a little time with a serious young lady.”

“MY MOM LIKES you,” Jenny said, in her mocking tone. They were in a corner of the library, supposedly researching. “My brother says you’re getting tits.”

This was true. They were tender all the time; they bumped into things.

“What a pig.” Jenny picked at her braces and oinked. “Boys are all pigs. Let’s go to the bathroom.”

“Why?”

“I want to see them. I could see them in gym if we had the same period. I’ll show you mine. They’re so lame.”

Lo thought of the Jenny Stallworth who lived in her mind, the tall, stylish girl who glided through the cafeteria in Esprit jeans, a different color for each day of the week, who enthroned herself upon the bench that overlooked their little junior high quad and nibbled at a Twix bar and stared with glamorous apathy past the rich jocks wrestling each other for her attention. Jenny with the magazine home, the gracious mother, the dark handsome father. That was Jenny from the outside. But inside were all the secret boxes that made up a human being, boxes made of envy and curiosity and shame.

In the bathroom, they crowded into a stall and Lo lifted her shirt and unhooked her bra. Her heart was thumping.

Jenny regarded them with undisguised awe, then her slender hand reached out and took hold of the left one, testing its heft for a second. “Otsa lotsa mozzarella,” she sang out, the tagline from a TV ad.

Lorena wondered if this was what it meant to be rich, that you were allowed to take possession first and ask permission later. It was like the scientific method in reverse, the conclusion before the hypothesis.

“Your nips are kind of big,” Jenny went on. “Has anyone felt them? Like, a boy? Who?”

“A friend of my cousin,” Lo said softly. “He lives in San Jose.”

Lo made it sound like a date, though it had been a game in her cousin’s basement. She didn’t know the boy. His tongue tasted of pizza and Binaca. His fingers were bony and fumbling.

Jenny was still squinting. “Does your mom have big ones? That’s how you know what yours are going to look like. My mom’s a fucking A-cup. She said you don’t want them too big or they get all saggy.” Jenny began to tug nervously at her shirt.

“You don’t have to show me,” Lo said.

“Whatever.” Jenny lifted her shirt and peeled back the padded cup of her bra and out plopped one of them. It looked small and terrified, like a baby mouse with one pink eye. “Peter Stinson wanted to touch them. He thinks he’s such hot shit because his dad is a surgeon. Big deal. He’s gay.” Jenny carried on like this until they heard the bathroom door swing open. They listened to another girl enter the stall next to them and pee and let out a small glissando of farts, which sent them into convulsions.

“That should be our project,” Jenny said, on the way back to the library. “A study of why farts come out in those little blips. How sick would that be?”

“Maybe we should do something on scorpions,” Lo said carefully.

“Have you ever seen a scorpion? Like, in real life?”

Lo had not. Her mother had talked about them. In the village where she grew up, you had to check your shoes for them. They were supposed to have mystical powers.

“I like the fart idea.” Jenny sniggered. “My mom says you should come over for dinner again. She’s got a whole idea in her head.”

Lo wanted to ask what that meant, but she didn’t.

MISS CATALIS DID a weekly check-in on Friday. The science fair was her big crusade, students discovering things, claiming the universe. “Believe me, girls, I’m a huge fan of the horoscope,” she said. “But astrology is a belief system. Something more like religion. We choose to believe rather than being compelled by facts. You understand the difference?”

Jenny nodded sullenly.

“Any other ideas?”

The girls exchanged an embarrassed look.

“We were thinking something about gas,” Lorena said. “Like, human gas.”

Jenny looked down, to keep herself from cracking up.

“To figure out why the byproduct of digestion would be flatulence,” Lo continued. “We could examine the specific food groups that lead to a gaseous outcome.”

A shadow passed over Miss Catalis’s face. “I was hoping for something a bit more ambitious from you two.”

Jenny made one of her little smirks, the ones pretty girls mistook for indiscernible. Lo could see how stunning she would be when her braces came off. She thought about the scorpion in Mr. Stallworth’s paperweight, its tiny trapped shriek.

“C’mon guys. This is your chance to push into the unknown.”

JENNY WAS STARING at her tender, unhappy face in the mirror when she mentioned, in the blithe way she had, that her family was going on a camping trip the next weekend and that Lo was invited. “It’s, like, Death Valley or whatever. Not the actual place but around there.”

This was in the minutes after Science, the brief portion of the day during which Jenny and Lo consorted. They were in the bathroom behind the portable classrooms, where they wouldn’t be seen together. Eighth grade was what it was: a tender, blemished version of the world to come.

Lo smoothed a clump of hair.

“You checked with your mom?”

“Duh. It was her idea. Have your mom call if she’s got questions.”

But her mom wouldn’t have questions. Graciela Saenz lived by rituals of caution, avoiding those outside a small circle of neighbors, parishioners, and co-workers. It was enough to know that Lorena was spending time with a good family. The one she worried about was Tony, who had inherited his father’s reckless temper.

Lorena had slept outside plenty of times, setting a thin blanket on the porch, or a patch of lawn, when summer rendered their apartment broiling. But she had never camped in the desert. Jenny said she didn’t need anything besides tennis shoes and a change of clothes. Her dad had all the equipment.

On the appointed morning, Lo arrived at the Stallworth home bearing corn dumplings in honey. She claimed her mother had made them, though she’d bought them from a bodega. Mrs. Stallworth made a big production.

Mr. Stallworth had left to pick up Glen from a soccer tournament, so Rosemary drove the girls in her Cadillac. They sat in the back seat, as if they were being chauffeured, and zoomed south into the hot belly of the state, the highways that stunk of cow shit and garlic, the wide green fields where Lorena’s father had picked crops when he first arrived. Mrs. Stallworth listened to KFRC, the Top 40 station. She sang along to “Bette Davis Eyes” and “Queen of Hearts” and the other hits Jenny pretended to hate.

“You don’t even know who Bette Davis is, do you girls?” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“Here we go,” Jenny murmured.

Mrs. Stallworth kept right on talking about Bette Davis and her horrible smoking and what it had done to the skin around her eyes. She had that talent of certain mothers, to ignore the static of her children, to pretend everyone was a bit happier than they were. It was more than that, though. Mrs. Stallworth wanted to talk about herself, those years when pop songs and movie stars still defined her. Jenny experienced her mother’s nostalgia as an affront, a galling reminder that her own youth would someday dissolve into such tiresome monologues.

But Lo was happy to hear her stories. She asked questions while Jenny stared out the window. Mrs. Stallworth had grown up with money, back East, on something called the Main Line. She had studied ballet and been a fashion model. An Italian designer spotted her at a club and led her onto the dance floor and by the end of the night he had asked her to come to Europe.

“He wanted to get into your pants,” Jenny said.

“Of course he did,” Rosemary replied. “What do I always tell you, Jennifer? Women don’t enjoy the privilege of stupidity.”

“What happened?” Lo said.

“He wanted to design some clothing. He needed a model. He selected me because of my height. And my shoulder blades.”

“Don’t tell me you stripped naked for this greaseball.”

“Alright. I won’t tell you.”

Holy shit, Jenny mouthed.

“Did you go to Europe?” Lo asked.

“Of course not.” Mrs. Stallworth glanced into the rearview mirror, as if Lo had misunderstood the point of the story. “I got married.”

After a time, Jenny began whispering about Peter Stinson, whom she liked, or thought she maybe liked, though she sort of hated him, too, while Lo studied Mrs. Stallworth’s mauve sweater and tried to figure out what might distinguish her shoulder blades to an older man.

“Your father has a surprise for you two,” Mrs. Stallworth said.

Lo pondered where everyone would sleep that night. She was struck by an absurd question: Was she now a member of the Stallworth family?

IN THE PARKING lot of the trailhead, Glen and Mr. Stallworth heaved equipment from the back of the Jeep. Lorena stared past the tiny kiosk with its faded map, into a pale expanse rippling with heat; her gaze fixed on the distant spot where the sky met the white of the trail, the vanishing point. Mrs. Stallworth, Rosemary, hugged Jenny, then got back in her car.

“Isn’t your mom coming?” Lo whispered.

Jenny laughed. “Hey, Mom! Lo wants to know whether you’re coming with us.”

Rosemary smoothed her face into a smile. “I’m afraid the out-of-doors isn’t my milieu, dear.”

“Her milieu is, like, the nearest Hilton,” Glen muttered.

They walked for a long time through desert the color of bone. Everything—the plants and rocks, even the sand—had been bleached by the sun. Glen stripped off his shirt and tied it around his head. He wanted the world to see his muscles glisten. He was that sort of animal.

Mr. Stallworth trudged beneath a massive pack. His thick, hairy legs pumped away. The girls staggered behind. Lo expected Jenny to complain. But a different set of rules applied to her father. Suffering was the price of his company. Late in the afternoon, they turned off the main trail. She could feel the earth’s heat through the rubber soles of her tennis shoes.

At dusk, they struck camp and made freeze-dried stew and rice, which they consumed with a keen hunger, along with the corn dumplings. After dinner, the girls crawled into their tent to put on sweaters.

The darkness brought a bite to the air. Mr. Stallworth stood by the fire. “Come on over here, you two.” He reached into his giant pack and drew out what appeared to be long plastic shin guards. Then he bent down and began strapping them onto his daughter’s legs, like armor.

“What are these things?”

“Snake chaps!” Glen hooted. “Rattlers hunt at night.”

Jenny turned to her father.

“It’s a precaution,” Mr. Stallworth said calmly. “You’re perfectly safe.” He turned to Glen. “Don’t test me, young man. I’m not your mother.”

Jenny tore off the snake chaps. “No way no way no way.” She retreated into the tent and Mr. Stallworth followed. They could hear him speaking to her in soft exasperation.

“What about you? You afraid of snakes, Lo?” Glen flicked his tongue.

She let her eyes linger on his face. He was like her own brother in some ways, engorged with an arrogance that was central to whatever secret he was keeping from the world.

Mr. Stallworth emerged from the tent.

“I should stay with her,” Lo said.

“Nonsense.” Mr. Stallworth dropped to his knees before her and suddenly his hands were on her calves. He yanked at the straps. She felt roughly handled in a way she knew she shouldn’t like.

“Just go,” Jenny moaned through the flap. “Leave me the hell alone.”

MR. STALLWORTH LED them into the darkness. He lugged an oversized lantern, which he set down on a small rise. “Close your eyes and keep them shut until I say.”

“Do it,” Glen murmured.

“Okay. Open.”

An iridescent purple light gleamed out in all directions. Lo’s eyes scrolled an ocean of sand, upon which now lay scattered scores of tiny glow-in-the-dark toys, the sort kids on TV pulled from cereal boxes. Then the toys began to move. These were living creatures, many-legged and scrabbling, like tiny lobsters.

“Welcome to Scorpionville,” Glen said.

Lo glanced at the sand around her feet. A scorpion the length of a hairpin labored under the weight of its stinger, which hung like a fanged jewel over the armored segments of its body.

“Don’t be frightened.” Mr. Stallworth said. He was suddenly right beside her.

“I’m not,” Lo replied.

“What do you think?”

“They’re—” She cast about for the right word, stunned to find the truth in such a simple one: “Beautiful.”

She could feel Mr. Stallworth inspecting her face, trying to figure out if she really meant it. He took off his glasses and began furiously polishing the lenses with the hem of his shirt. For a queer moment, Lo imagined grabbing his glasses and tossing them away.

“We gonna take any home?” Glen asked.

Mr. Stallworth pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and swept the purple beam across the sand. “We might as well see who’s hunting tonight.” To Lo’s astonishment, he knelt down and guided a scorpion onto his palm. The animal was the size of a matchbox. Its pincers pawed the air.

“Shouldn’t you have gloves?” Lo said.

“You just come at them from behind,” Glen said. “They can’t sting backwards.”

“They’re not aggressive animals,” Mr. Stallworth explained. “They just want to be left alone.”

“Tell her about the dance,” Glen said.

Mr. Stallworth let the scorpion scuttle from one hand to the next. “Yes. You might like this. During courtship, the scorpions grasp each other’s pedipalps—their pincers. They perform a kind of dance. It’s called the promenade à deux. It looks like they’re fighting. But it’s just the opposite. It’s how they select a mate.”

“Fuck or fight,” Glen whispered in Lo’s direction.

His father glared at him. “What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” Glen said.

Mr. Stallworth aimed the purple light into his son’s eyes. “There’s a young woman here, Glen. This isn’t some locker room.”

“It was a joke—”

“It was demeaning. Apologize to Lorena. Now.”

Glen blinked like a scolded dog. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

Mr. Stallworth returned his focus to the animal. “You see these little hairs along their legs?” he said. “This is how they hunt. By touch. By vibration. They can register the movement of a single grain of sand from ten yards away.”

“Why do they shine?” Lo said.

“Nobody knows. Fluorescence must convey some kind of evolutionary advantage, but it’s still their little secret.”

Glen asked his father to find a scorpion he could pick up. Mr. Stallworth scanned the ground with his magic light. “These are your best bet,” he said. “Paruroctonus utahensis. Sand scorpions.”

“Aren’t they poisonous?” Lo said.

“This species isn’t too bad. Unless you’re an insect.”

She watched Mr. Stallworth gently prod the scorpion onto Glen’s hand. The creature scampered along his knuckles. It looked glum, menacing, painfully shy.

“Are you gonna pick one up?” Glen asked Lo. “How about that little guy?” He pointed to a scorpion barely larger than a beetle.

Mr. Stallworth crouched for a closer look. His arm shot out and swept Glen backwards.

“What the hell?”

Mr. Stallworth drew a pair of long tweezers out of his fanny pack and plucked up the animal, which twisted fiercely. “Hadrurus hirsutus. The desert hairy scorpion. Highly toxic.” Mr. Stallworth dropped the specimen inside a clear plastic film canister, then strode to the giant lantern and shut it off. The sand went dark around them and in this darkness Lorena heard the crisp thrashing of Hadrurus hirsutus.

“What about Lo?” Glen said.

“I’m sure she’s had enough excitement for one night.”

“I’m not scared,” Lo said. The words came out louder than she intended. More softly, she added, “I’d like to hold one.”

Mr. Stallworth switched on the lantern. He stared at her face again, half in wonder, and picked up another one, bluish under the light, a gentle species, he said, its sting no worse than a wasp. She reached out and Mr. Stallworth uncurled her fingers. The earth was trembling beneath her. Then she realized that it was her, and not the earth.

“You don’t have to do this,” Mr. Stallworth said.

“I know.”

“Do you trust me?”

She met his gaze and nodded and Mr. Stallworth lowered the animal onto her.

“No way,” Glen said.

The creature clung to the knob of her wrist, like a charm. Slowly, tentatively, it began to move toward her hand, the legs rising and falling like tiny jointed oars. Lorena’s pulse lurched. She closed her eyes to keep from flinching. Tiny feet tickled her palm. She felt a dampness beneath her clothes, the dizziness of what was going to happen next. When she could stand it no longer she opened her eyes. The scorpion was perched on her thumb, perfectly still, its stinger hoisted like a tiny scythe.

“He appears to like you,” Mr. Stallworth said.

JENNY REFUSED TO join them around the fire; Lorena brought her a toasted marshmallow. She described what had happened, careful to express the proper disgust. “I shouldn’t have gone. Are you mad at me?”

Jenny shook her head. “I get it. All my friends cream their jeans over Glen. This was my mom’s idea, anyway.” She ripped the browned skin off her marshmallow and sucked it into her mouth. “The whole thing is so Holly Hobbie.”

“What thing?”

“She wants us to do our project on scorpions, so me and him can bond. Duh.”

Lorena felt a sudden ache in her throat. To be the object of such a plan, to live within the orbit of such concern. “It would be a cool way to freak people out,” she said.

“What would?”

“We could have them, like, stick their hands into an aquarium filled with sand, then we turn on the UV light. The boys would shit themselves.”

Jenny laughed tentatively. “That’s like a haunted house thing.”

“The science could be about why they glow. Your dad says nobody knows. It’s like this big mystery.” She wanted to say: Just think about it. She wanted to say: We could win with your dad’s help.

Jenny thrashed at her sleeping bag. “Don’t you get it? Those things freak me out, okay? They give me nightmares. Whose fucking side are you on, anyway?”

LORENA COULDN’T SLEEP; her blood was still roaring. She lay in the tent listening to Glen cast words into the fire, about soccer, the refs, some jerk whose ass he might kick. His tone reminded her of the way Tony spoke around his older friends, as if he wanted something from them, praise, permission, a kind of regard that his neediness pushed away. From time to time, Mr. Stallworth replied with a stern murmur. At last, Glen retreated to the other tent. Lorena counted to two hundred. Outside, Mr. Stallworth stood staring at the flames. He had gathered stones—from where, Lo couldn’t imagine—and arranged them around the fire in a perfect circle.

He glanced up at Lorena. “Trouble sleeping?”

She nodded.

“They’re remarkable, aren’t they? Not everyone can see it.” He dumped the dregs of his coffee onto the fire and they listened to it hiss. The fire cast the line of his jaw in bronze. Mr. Stallworth seemed to be trying to decide something.

“If you really can’t sleep,” he said at last, “I’d like to show you something.”

He led her away from the camp, onto an incline. She followed the soft crunch of his footfalls, panting to keep up. Then he stopped, so abruptly that she nearly walked into him. His flashlight showed the earth falling away. They had reached a precipice of some sort. With a click, he cast them into darkness. “Look up,” he said.

The stars were gigantic and glinting. Their ancient light pressed down, the space between the brightest bodies speckled with celestial ash. Lo stood, breathless.

Mr. Stallworth pointed to a band of stars directly above them. “Orion’s Belt. Do you know the story of Orion?”

“No,” Lo said.

“He was a famous hunter. In mythology. He promised his lover he was going to kill every creature on earth.”

“Did he?”

“No. The goddess of the Earth sent a scorpion to devour him. He’s up there, too. On the other side of the sky.” Mr. Stallworth aimed the beam. “You have to draw the lines in your mind. The ancients used these constellations to map the night sky. They had no inkling they were seeing an entire galaxy. The enormity would have crushed them.”

“We learned about constellations in our navigation unit,” Lorena said. “But it was just pictures in a book.”

Stallworth laughed softly, and she worried she had said something foolish. After a moment, he spoke again. “We didn’t have navigation units when I was in school. It was more of a religious curriculum. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand.”

Lorena recognized the passage. It was one of the Psalms.

“They didn’t want us curious. They wanted us obedient.”

She wondered who they were and what sort of child Mr. Stallworth had been and whether he spoke to his own children in this way. She wondered if she should respond somehow, then realized she didn’t have to. They had drifted into an easy silence; she was witnessing another part of him emerge. They stood together, gazing.

“You have to get away from all the light pollution to see them clearly,” he said.

“That’s why you took us so far out?”

He hummed. After a minute, he added, “Certain kinds of beauty make us disappear.”

Lorena had no idea what this meant, but she nodded. She was desperate to remain near him. It made no sense.

She heard the rasp of Mr. Stallworth rubbing his face, his profile faint against the starlight. “Everything back there, it’s all made up—the light and the pavement and the products. We just pretend it’s real.” He was standing closer now, inhaling and exhaling. “You know what I’m talking about. You wouldn’t be out here if you didn’t.”

She listened to him shift his weight. From beneath his shirt came a scribbling against the darkness. The poisonous scorpion in its tiny plastic cell. “You were brave tonight. Not many young women your age would be that brave.”

“They’re so amazing.”

“Dangerous, too. If you pick the wrong one.”

Her mouth had gone dry; her tongue groped for words.

“You picked me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You picked for me,” she said. “So I knew it was safe.”

Her gaze shifted from the stars to his smile, which she could just make out. She smelled smoke, the tang of his sweat, and her breath, when she could breathe again, came hard. It was some power he had: to bring her deeper into herself, to make her feel certain things, to get her confused about what she wanted. He was a grown man. His limbs were thick and covered in hair. The moon was a shard of bone. She cast her eyes on the stars again, struggled to find one that wasn’t pulsating.

“We need to get back,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”

LO WAS NOT invited back to the Stallworth residence for several weeks. She sensed Jenny was angry about the camping trip, and accepted this without complaint. Perhaps it was better that she return to the safe boundaries of her life. Still, at night, she thought of Mr. Stallworth, in the desert, under the stars. She felt his hands gripping her calves. She saw the scorpions—they seemed somehow his—sprinkled across the floor of the desert like a constellation. What made them glow under UV light? It was a mystery that felt bound up in the mystery of him.

The library at Sutter offered nothing beyond a few picture books. At the library downtown, amid the shelves devoted to snakes and spiders, she found just two works on scorpions. The first was a primer published in 1956. The second was a slender volume, a pamphlet really, titled Prince of the Desert Night. An editor’s note read, “Compiled by the Poisonous Animals Research Laboratory of Arizona State College,” though it was clearly the work of one person. “Who among all the creatures of the world must suffer as the scorpion does?” the author demanded. “This shy sovereign, wishing only to abide the ancient stirrings of instinct, must live as an exile in his own habitat, maligned as repulsive, his venom extracted and analyzed in the cold white of wretched labs.” It was like some kind of epic poem, or perhaps a confession of love.

The writer made only passing reference to fluorescence, identifying it as a potential mating signal. That didn’t make any sense, though: male scorpions used chemical cues to locate females. So maybe it was an adaptation left over from an era when ultraviolet rays bombarded the Earth. But why then had the glow endured? Why did it exist across every habitat and climate?

Lorena remembered something Miss Catalis had said at the beginning of their zoology unit. “All animals exhibit an essential nature.” She thought about the scorpion that had scampered across her palm, the ghostly shiver of the hairs it used to detect movement. Scorpions were exquisitely sensitive creatures. Perhaps their fluorescence expressed this. Photosensitivity. That was the technical term.

The author of the pamphlet seemed to be making the same argument. “Miscast as a fearsome hunter,” he observed, “the scorpion is in fact exceedingly wary. Most hours are spent in burrow, safe from the owls and bats who spiral above, eager to feast on the soft flesh beneath his armor.”

Lorena began to imagine the scorpion not as the hunter but the hunted. The insight came to her gradually, then all at once: Fluorescence was a protective mechanism, a kind of alarm system. The glow researchers used to find them was, in fact, intended to help them hide. This was why the black light had set them into motion.

She hunched over her notebook, sketching out experiments that might certify this theory. At a certain point, the lights flickered overhead and a drowsy voice on the loudspeaker announced that the library would close in ten minutes. Lorena had been geeking out. That was what her brother called it. More than four hours had passed.

LORENA BEGAN TO sneak looks at Jenny Stallworth in class, to track her movements through the hallways, into the bathrooms where she touched up her eye shadow. A dozen times she brought herself to the brink of an approach. She was used to this cycle, the thinking and rethinking of what she might say, anticipating how the other person might react, and, in turn, how she might react to this reaction. These were the loops within which shy people lived, and which made it so exhausting for them to initiate contact.

Then one day, Jenny turned from her locker and marched over to Lorena, who was standing nearby trying to look inconspicuous. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Lorena said.

“So I know you’re stressed about this whole science fair thing. But you don’t have to spy on me.”

Lorena glanced at the girls around Jenny’s locker. “I’m not—”

“Yeah, you are.” Jenny reached into her mouth to yank at a rubber band on her braces, then smiled brightly. “You don’t have to go all stalker. Come over on Thursday. I’ve got the books at my house anyway. Cool?”

Lorena rode her bike over. Mr. Stallworth’s Jeep was in the driveway; there was no sign of the Cadillac. Rosemary was out “doing her Junior League bullshit.” Jenny led them up to her room, where they worked for an hour, Lorena recording the questions for their survey in her notebook. Jenny got restless and turned on some music. Then she got a call from a friend in crisis, which she had to take in the den. The moment she heard the trill of Jenny’s phone voice, Lorena glided downstairs, past the kitchen, where Lucia was chopping something. She had no business sneaking down to the basement. It wasn’t how she behaved. She kept telling herself to stop and careening forward, outpacing her caution.

MR. STALLWORTH LOOKED pleased to see her, if a little perplexed. “I heard you might be coming over. How goes the world of the zodiac?”

Her heart beat stupidly. “Okay, I guess. Jenny’s on the phone.”

“Imagine that.” His grin was a little conspiratorial. “Sit, please.”

She did a quick sweep of his desk: a notebook, a survey map, a small dish of pink and white candies, Good & Plenty they were called. “I’m sorry we didn’t do our project on scorpions,” Lorena said, in a nervous burst. “I’ve been reading about them. A little.”

“Have you?”

Mr. Stallworth looked squarely at Lorena. She was glad she had worn her prettiest blouse, which she slipped on in a bathroom before first period because it was cut lower than her mother allowed.

“I couldn’t find too many books about them, though.”

“Scorpions are not a very popular subject of study, I’m afraid, within my family or beyond. Humans find them repellent. It’s an evolutionary response derived from our time as cave dwellers. We don’t like creatures that hunt while we sleep, especially if they sting.” Mr. Stallworth reached out for the Good & Plenty and stirred them with his thumb.

“I’ve been thinking about why they light up,” Lorena said.

“And what did you decide?”

The words spilled out of her, as if she had been gently tipped. She told him about the theories she’d dismissed, then about her revelation: that the scorpion’s glow was maybe photosensitivity, an adaptation to help them find shelter from predators.

Mr. Stallworth leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a minute. “So the cuticle acts as a light receptor,” he said. “That’s what you’re suggesting. A giant proto-eye of sorts. Of course, there are already eyes at the center of the carapace, the anterior median, and several lateral eyes evolved for the express purpose of light sensitivity, which argues against …” He cocked his head. “Still. It is possible.”

“I was thinking about some experiments,” Lorena said. “To test the utility of fluorescence.”

Mr. Stallworth smiled. “Of course you were.”

Lorena wished she’d brought her science notebook, then she was relieved she hadn’t; she knew how silly her sketches would look. She began to describe her most sophisticated experiment, which involved placing scorpions in a terrarium, shifting the light levels, tracking movement.

“That’s good,” Mr. Stallworth said. “But you would need to simulate all sorts of light. Not just the visible spectrum. Starlight. Moonlight, too. And you would have to establish controls, wouldn’t you? That would require occluding ocular capacity in some subjects.” He poured a handful of Good & Plenty into his mouth and chewed them absently. “Blocking their eyes, I mean. This would help establish that the cuticle acts as a photon receptor. We would have to measure locomotory activity at different light intervals, as well.”

“Could you do all that,” Lorena asked. “In your lab?”

Mr. Stallworth laughed. “I don’t have a lab, Lorena. I barely have an office. I do fieldwork. To conduct such experiments in a sound way, a verifiable way, would require thousands of dollars in grant money.” He laughed again, more gently. “You’re disappointed. Don’t be. This is how science works. It takes time. Your ideas light the way, but you have to grope around to get at the truth. That takes money.”

“Right.”

He looked at her and beamed. “Don’t you see, Lorena? What’s really important here? You have the mind of a scientist.”

“I do?”

“You do. If you want to give this subject more consideration, my library is at your disposal.”

“Really?”

“Us scorpiologists have to stick together.” He stood and beckoned for her to join him in front of the bookshelf. “Most of these are technical journals. But there are a few things you might enjoy.”

Lorena’s eyes fixed on the pamphlet wedged between two bulky textbooks.

“Hey,” she said, “I read this one. It was in the library.”

“What did you think?” he asked quietly.

“It was sort of weird and beautiful. Do you know who wrote it?”

“A number of us worked on it, actually.”

“Wait, you wrote it?”

“As I said, it was a collaboration.” Mr. Stallworth cleared his throat, and reached for another book, which he held out to her. “This one would be more instructive.”

Lorena took the book and looked up to thank him and for just a second he was gazing down the blouse she had worn for his benefit, at the tops of her breasts, which his own daughter had seen and touched. She knew she should be offended or at least troubled, but she remained still, even leaning forward a bit more, suddenly, thrillingly aware of her body, as if her own skin were one giant eye, glowing under his inspection.

Footsteps sounded overhead. Lorena thanked Mr. Stallworth for the book and turned away. At the top of the stairs, a small figure stepped out of the shadows and startled her. “¿Te has perdido?” Lucia asked.

“Lost?” Lorena replied in English.

“I’m asking because this is a big house. A girl like you, who isn’t used to such extravagance, might wind up in the wrong place.” Lucia was still speaking Spanish. The word she used for girl was morenita, which they both knew was meant to draw attention to the darkness of her skin.

“We were just talking,” Lorena explained. “Jenny’s on the phone.”

She tried to get by, but Lucia stepped into her path. She stared at the neckline of Lorena’s top and shook her head. In her fist was a feather duster that looked like a dead bird. “You’re best not to bother the señor,” she said, this time more slowly. “He’s a very busy man. I’m sure Jenny would prefer if you waited in her room.”

ON A MONDAY in late March, Mrs. Stallworth picked up both girls from school. They were to finish their project, but the moment they arrived at the Stallworth home the phone was ringing and Rosemary picked it up and cried out and dashed to the TV room.

The president had been shot, assassinated. That was the word Mrs. Stallworth kept using. She sat in stillness before the TV, which showed Reagan striding to his limousine, grinning exuberantly. Then came a rippling of shots. The man behind Reagan, a secret service agent, set a hand on his shoulder. The camera lurched toward the source of the shots and when it swung back the president had disappeared. The networks aired this sequence over and over, as if it were a magic trick they couldn’t figure out. The camera settled on two men who lay facedown on the sidewalk, blood, the dark startling red of it, seeping from the pudgy one onto the pavement.

The president was rushed to a nearby hospital. A bullet had entered his chest and collapsed a lung. Surgeons were operating.

“His chest. Dear God. Think about Nancy, what she must be going through.” Mrs. Stallworth turned from the screen and took note of Lorena. “We were friendly when they lived here,” she confided. Then, more loudly: “I’m letting you girls watch this because I don’t believe in censorship. You need to see what the world has come to. I thought it would stop with Kennedy. Well, he was a Catholic. He had enemies, he and his brother. Then that despicable Manson girl tried to shoot President Ford, right here in Sacramento. What was her name? Stinky?”

“Squeaky,” Jenny said quietly. “Squeaky Fromme.”

“Then George Moscone. The mayor of San Francisco.” Mrs. Stallworth was stricken and somehow ecstatic. “Is there no end to the savagery? Why do people assault our way of life? Listen to me, girls. We need to pray.” Her eyes lit again upon Lo. “Do you believe? Are you a believer?”

Lo nodded.

“You must believe you can make a difference, or you won’t make a difference. Do you know who said that?” Mrs. Stallworth turned down the TV and dropped to her knees, right on the plush carpeting. She closed her eyes and held her hands out on either side and after a moment the girls joined her. “Let us pray for the safety of our president and his beautiful family. Please don’t let the forces of darkness strike down this loyal servant of the American way.” It was awkward to hear Mrs. Stallworth speak this way, but comforting, too. It bound them together.

Lo knew her mother prayed every night, but she had never actually seen it. Prayer was a private conversation, or maybe a silent form of begging.

When Mrs. Stallworth was done, she hugged her daughter. Then she hugged Lo, and wiped her eyes. “I’ll call Lucia,” she said. “She can make something nice. Lo, is your mother home?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you must stay! I won’t have you returning to an empty home at a time like this. It’s out of the question. I need to make a few more phone calls. If Lucia needs me, I’ll be in my bedroom.”

The girls stared at the TV, at the news men disbursing their sober panic.

“Do you think he’ll die?” Lo said.

“No. Stable condition means he’s okay.” Jenny dug at the straps of her bra. “My mom’s totally in love with Nancy Reagan, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Were they really friends?”

Jenny flipped her eyes with an easy contempt; Lorena waited for a clarification. “They lived around here when he was governor. My mom was gonna sell them a new house, supposedly. Why not a castle, my dad said. Nancy was her big-deal client. Did you know that she has her own personal astrologer?”

Lorena couldn’t quite track all these facts and what they had to do with each other. “So they did spend time together?”

“That’s different from being friends.” Jenny was staring at the screen, her profile a blade. “I doubt Nancy would even know who my mom is at this point.”

Lucia poked her head into the den and took note of Lo, frowningly.

Lo thought about calling her mother at the hospital, though her mother wasn’t allowed to talk during a shift. It had to be an emergency. Did this qualify as an emergency? She feared that Mrs. Stallworth would insist on speaking to her mother, and that her mother would get confused.

Mr. Stallworth arrived home with Glen. Mrs. Stallworth hugged her son and, after a moment’s hesitation, her husband, who spoke to her quietly. They looked like a TV couple, gravely considering what sort of life insurance policy to purchase. Then he glanced up and spotted Lo outside the den and she tried to dampen the electricity firing through her.

At dinner, everyone watched the little portable TV on the kitchen counter. The bullet had been removed. Reagan was resting comfortably. The shooter was identified as a young man from Colorado named John Hinckley. He told the FBI his motive: he hoped to win the attention of a young movie actress named Jodie Foster.

“I don’t understand how he got away with it,” Lorena said.

“The criminal mind can get away with anything,” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“Yeah, but what kind of sicko shoots the president to get a chick?” Glen sneered. “She’s barely legal.”

“His brain was poisoned by luuuust.” Jenny stretched the word into a breathy innuendo.

“It wasn’t his brain, dude—”

From Mr. Stallworth’s place came the scrape of cutlery, so sharp that Lorena flinched. “Enough,” he snapped. He got up and shut off the TV.

Mrs. Stallworth looked briefly forsaken. Then she smiled and said, “Your father is right. We can talk about something more pleasant.”

“HAVE YOU BEEN picking up on all the weird vibes?” Jenny said later.

The question flopped around in Lorena’s gut.

“It’s because my mom paid like a grand to go to some fundraiser at Nancy’s house. They had this big stupid argument. Then my dad didn’t even vote for Reagan. Like it all matters so much.”

Lorena tried to imagine $1,000 in one place. She couldn’t do it.

“Who’d your mom vote for?” Jenny asked.

“She likes Reagan,” Lo said carefully. “Because he talks about his faith.” The politics in their home was of a different sort. Lo had papers. Her mother and brother did not. For as long as she could remember, Lo had known what this meant: that they might disappear into custody at any moment.

“My mom just wanted Nancy to be First Lady so she could get more mileage out of her connection.” Jenny scowled but her eyes looked sad. “They’ve got this whole routine down. Like everything’s so fucking honky-dory.”

DOWNSTAIRS, LUCIA REMOVED the dishes from around Mrs. Stallworth, who stood entranced by the TV on the counter.

“Earth to Mom,” Jenny called out, from the bottom of the stairs.

Mrs. Stallworth looked up and produced a smile. “I’ll be driving you home,” she announced to Lo. “Mr. Stallworth felt—we both felt—it would be best if you got home, given the situation.” She finished her wine and waved her purse.

The moment they’d rounded the corner, Mrs. Stallworth pulled a pack of Virginia Slims from her purse and punched in the cigarette lighter. “I shouldn’t be doing this. I quit years ago. A Russian hypnotized me. There was a whole group of us in a little theater. The man wore a tuxedo with tails!” She dipped her head and lit up with a practiced air. The man on the radio droned on about executive authority. He played audio of the assassination attempt, the hollow popping like firecrackers. “What that family must be going through.”

“Is it true you were friends with her? Mrs. Reagan?” Lo asked shyly.

Mrs. Stallworth hummed, her teeth lavender with wine.

“Jenny loves this story for some reason. You probably know that the governor is supposed to move into a mansion when he takes office? But the Reagans inherited a tinderbox. The wiring was from the 1920s, if you can imagine. Shall I turn on Broadway? Yes? Look at these new homes. Nice. This whole block used to be slums.” Mrs. Stallworth blew smoke out the window. “Anyway, they rented that delicious Spanish Tudor on Forty-Fifth and M Street, which made us practically neighbors. I shouldn’t even tell you this—you’ll think me mad—but I used to slow down when I drove by, hoping to catch her out front. Once, I nearly peeked in the windows, to see how she decorated her rooms. Isn’t that positively ghoulish?”

Mrs. Stallworth flicked away her cigarette and shook out another. “Then the most wonderful thing happened: Shelby, my regional manager, told me he had an anonymous client looking for something in Gold River. An older home with classical bones. Classical—that was the word. You can imagine how I felt when Nancy appeared at that first showing! We hit it off right away. She could walk into any house on earth and tell you where everything should go.”

Lo nodded along. She knew that Nancy Reagan wasn’t really friends with Mrs. Stallworth, but she found herself rooting for the possibility.

“Oh, she saw how the press was going to portray her!” Mrs. Stallworth added, with a sudden vehemence. “She joked about it. Marie Antoinette, they’ll call me! Her only crime was looking out for her family. People forget that—it was all for her family.” Mrs. Stallworth peered through her windshield. They had passed from South Oak Park into Fruitridge Pocket. “Have I gotten us lost?”

“It’s just a few more blocks,” Lo said.

Mrs. Stallworth took in an auto body shop, a storefront church hunched in shadow. “I haven’t been to this part of the city in a while. It used to have a few nice lots. I suppose the government snatched those up for projects.”

“Did Mrs. Reagan buy a house from you?” Lo asked.

Mrs. Stallworth twirled her cigarette like a tiny wand. “Oh, no. In the end they bought an acre over in Carmichael and built themselves. If you want it done right, do it yourself. That was her feeling.” She saw no reason to dwell on ensuing events: the party she attended in Mrs. Reagan’s private garden, Marcus’s abominable reaction, the buzz of informing her mother that she had lunched with the First Lady of California.

They pulled up to Lo’s building. “Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Stallworth peered at the vinyl siding. “Is your mom home yet, do you suppose? Perhaps I should come in and say hello to her. That would be nice. I do worry about you, Lorena. Am I being silly? A girl your age, so much on her own. And now this. I don’t mean to imply that your mother … She just seems to work an awful lot. You do know what I mean, don’t you?”

Lo nodded. “I’m grateful. You’ve been so kind.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this. It’s rather dramatic. But I feel you’ve been brought into our life, Lorena.” Mrs. Stallworth turned to Lo. She looked like a medieval queen, regal and forlorn. “All I’ve ever wanted is for my family to be happy. That’s why we get along. You understand. You appreciate what we’ve built.” Mrs. Stallworth reached out and stroked Lo’s cheek with the back of her hand.

There was something in the gesture that made Lorena think about Jenny, the way her hand took possession, with an ease that was almost innocent, and so different from Mr. Stallworth, who, for all his gruffness, appeared frightened.

Mrs. Stallworth turned away to toss her cigarette onto the street. Then she was dabbing at her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just this shooting that’s got me off-kilter. I have this dreadful feeling that the fates are turning against us.”

MANY YEARS LATER, when she thought back to this era of her life, Lorena Saenz would recall this moment, the cool brush of Rosemary Stallworth’s hand across her cheek, her dire invocation of the fates, those unseen forces that governed distant events.

The First Lady of the United States believed in unseen forces, too. Jenny had been right about that. Nancy Reagan knew others mocked her for relying on astrological guidance. But she trusted the ancient bodies that loomed over the earth. They had guided her to Ronnie, and guided him to the presidency.

Even now, with her husband laid out under a surgeon’s blade, a sacral truth was taking shape: the shooting had been an act of Providence. She held this notion close, like an amulet, in the grim wash of those hours. All around her, staffers marveled at Ronnie’s vitality: how he had insisted on walking into the ER under his own power, then cursed at the doctor who cut off his $1,000 suit. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he told the OR team, with a wink, just before they put him under and pried open his chest.

When at last word arrived that he would pull through, cheers erupted. Nancy found herself revolted by the jubilation. Radio transmissions crackled with their Secret Service code names, Rawhide and Rainbow, as if they were characters in some twisted fairytale Western. She marched outside and ordered her body man to back off. She needed a moment alone, just her and the stars. She stared into the blurry vault of heaven and vowed that her husband’s blood would serve a higher good.

The shooting had tugged at the unseen threads of the universe, and set into motion a chain of events that would lead the First Lady of the United States to intervene in the life of the young woman standing on the cracked steps of an apartment building in Sacramento.

Lorena Saenz waved goodbye to Mrs. Stallworth. The hall light was out, so she proceeded in darkness past the bickering Fajardos and the irate prophecies of the AM preacher who serenaded the widow Gomez. Tony had installed a deadbolt before he left for basic training, to keep them safe he said, but the rod always jammed. As she worked her key back and forth, images from the TV tumbled through her mind: the panicked crowd, the vanished president, the men lying in shadows of blood.

THE GYM SMELLED of mildewed rubber mats and vinegar from countless homemade volcanos. The science fair exhibits were lined under rainbow bunting. Why Coke Corrodes Your Teeth. It’s a Potato—No, It’s a Battery! The girls presented a project called Trusting the Stars: Is Astrology Destiny? There was a large poster with lavish illustrations of the zodiac signs. There was a survey for the judges to fill out, and a mounted chart with quasi- scientific statements about the correlation between planetary configurations and personality.

Mrs. Stallworth arrived in a peach sweater set and hugged both girls. “Look at all this. So professional. You’ll win. I’m certain. Lorena, I hope we won’t stop seeing you.” She looked down at Lo and they both felt the crush of their unexpected affection for one another. Then she strode off to make her rounds, sleek and pristine, the way Jenny would someday look.

“Is your dad coming?” Lorena said.

“As if,” Jenny said.

She knew there was almost no chance she would ever see him again.

Miss Catalis paused before their display and delivered her standard pep talk. She had approved the project with a blank expression, knowing Lorena had acquiesced.

She had hoped the opposite would happen, of course, that Lorena would discover she was just as powerful as Jenny Stallworth, more so in the ways that mattered. Miss Catalis believed in her own version of the fates, that certain students could be rescued by the grace of an eighth-grade science project.

But Lo knew it would take more than that; she wanted to understand the world she wished to enter, and the people who lived there. She thought of her dinners at the Stallworth home. She followed President Reagan’s recovery and envisioned the First Lady hosting a reception, to which Mrs. Stallworth would be invited. She pondered what Mr. Stallworth did all day. Did he have an office at a college? A giant cabinet with a million plastic canisters, a scorpion thrashing inside each? She read the book he loaned her and imagined riding her bike to their house to return it to him.

These fantasies played like movie clips against the dull backdrop of her daily regimen: extra credit assignments, chores, the part-time jobs her mother arranged through church. At school, she hung out with her everyday friends, bookish Mexican girls who spouted the wishful gossip of geeks. They avoided directly addressing Lorena’s adoration of Jenny Stallworth, disguising their envy in gentle mockery. Privately, they longed to know what the inside of the Stallworth house looked like, secrets Lorena refused to surrender.

Sometimes, late at night, besieged by restless impulse, she seized the scorpion paperweight she had taken from Mr. Stallworth’s desk and wrapped it in a thin blanket and pressed it against herself till she felt a twinge. She did this while Graciela snored softly in the next room, while the characters in her favorite telenovela, Los Ricos También Lloran, sang of the pleasures and tortures of love. It was disgusting. She did it only once. Until she did it again.

LORENA KNEW ANY invitation would have to come from Jenny. Their collaboration was over now, a small failure amid the essential failure of middle school. Still, she found herself slowing down as she passed the Stallworth home, hoping someone might appear, Rosemary or even Glen. After science class, she waited in the bathroom behind the portables, just in case. But Jenny didn’t show up there anymore.

Then, one day, she did.

“There you are,” Jenny said. “I was looking for you.”

“Yeah?” Lo made herself look busy at the sinks.

“We should hang this afternoon.”

“Okay.”

“Is your mom around?”

“No, she’s working late.”

“We can do it at your house then.”

Lo tried to conjure an image of Jenny Stallworth inside the apartment she shared with her mother. “It’s kind of far, though.”

“Not a prob,” Jenny said. “I know where it is.”

Lo didn’t understand how this could be true. But there she was when Lo arrived home, in full makeup and skintight Calvin Kleins. A few of the corner guys were eyeing her, spitting through their teeth. Lo hurried them inside.

Jenny flitted around, taking in the paneling, the daybed where her mom slept beneath the blanched portrait of sad blond Jesus, while Lo rushed into the bathroom and ripped down the dingy bras and compression stockings hung from the shower rod, then darted through the kitchen, shoving the pot of beans left out for dinner into the fridge. She and her mother kept the apartment scrubbed, but it still smelled of fry grease.

“There’s really nobody here.” Jenny pulled a lighter and a hard pack of Virginia Slims from her pencil case.

“Where’d you get those?”

“My mom stashes them around the house.”

“Won’t she notice if they’re gone?”

“She forgets. That’s kind of her thing.”

“Maybe we should go out on the patio?”

Lorena puffed at one of her mom’s Trues, while Jenny sought to perfect what she called the French inhale, jutting out her jaw and pulling the smoke into her nostrils. Lorena could see what she was after: a gestural elegance that derived from her mother. “I’m getting a head rush,” Jenny said. “Shit. It kind of stinks out here, right?”

“That’s the Campbell’s plant.”

“Like, the soup?” Jenny made her gagging noise. “Mmm mmm gross.”

Lo could see how lame her room looked: the stucco, the twin bed with its dark rayon bedspread. Worst of all was the little study center she had made at her desk, color-coded by subject. Nerd Central, Tony called it. Jenny barely registered any of it. She flung herself down on the bed and asked for a Coke. When Lorena returned with two cups of cola, Jenny was holding a tiny bottle in her palm, which she displayed like a game-show model. “Chivas Regal,” she announced.

“I didn’t know they made that size,” Lorena said.

“They give these out on flights. Aren’t they just, like, too cute? Wait, have you ever been on a plane?”

“Not yet.”

Jenny shrugged. “Have you gotten wasted at least?”

“More like buzzed. On beer.”

“This is better than beer.”

“Okay, but just a little. I’m a lightweight.”

She was borrowing words from her brother.

Jenny poured herself most of the bottle. “My parents are such assholes,” she said. “I know you think they’re, like, this perfect couple.”

“Did something happen?” Lo said.

“You know why they got married? My mom was knocked up. It’s like they don’t think we can do math.”

“Does she know you’re here?”

“She thinks I’m at Young Life. Making some business plan with God. What a joke. Why did your parents split?”

“My dad just wanted to move out.”

“C’mon. There’s always something else.”

Lorena remembered her father appearing in the middle of the night and her mother—her gentle mother—rushing at him, punching, cursing in Spanish, Tony stepping between them, her dad knocking Tony across the room, a neighbor threatening to call 911, her mother wailing, No! No policia! Then someone was setting her down on the mattress she shared with Tony and telling her to go to sleep, it was just a bad dream, though she could hear her brother howling in the next room. I’m gonna kill him, Mama.

“Are they fighting or something?” Lo said.

“We don’t fight, Jennifer. We discuss. What fucking bullshit.” She flung the mini bottle and it tinkled across the linoleum. Jenny got up to check out the framed photo of Tony in his navel dress, the one Lo’s mother kissed every night before bed. “He doesn’t look like a thug. He looks like a chihuahua in a sailor suit.”

“Don’t let the uniform fool you.”

“Yeah, but, like, what did he do that was so bad?”

“He got busted once for stealing a car,” Lorena said quietly.

“No way.”

“It was more like a joyride.”

“That’s it?” Jenny was staring at her. “I thought he was this big-shit gangbanger.”

Lorena had been warned not to speak of Tony’s life on the streets, which had caused so much strife already. But she felt a perverse impulse to defend his infamy. “There was one other thing.”

“What?”

“He pulled a gun on a guy.” Her voice dropped. “He was at this gang initiation thing and some dude got in his face. He had to defend himself. That’s how it works around here.”

Jenny’s pale smirk was gone. “Holy shit. What gang was it?”

“They’re called the Latin Kings. They do this thing where they initiate members by beating them up. It’s stupid.”

“He’s a Latin King?”

“Not anymore. He was just hanging out with the wrong people. That’s why he joined the navy.” This last part was true.

But the rest was something Lorena had improvised, a tale woven out of bullshit and bravado. Tony was the one who’d been beaten up at the “initiation.” And it wasn’t the Latin Kings, just a bunch of wannabes from the neighborhood. Tony bragged about how he’d fought off three guys, but his face told the story: a split lip, a swollen cheek. The beating had become a bit of neighborhood lore, cited to stave off boredom. It was only after this humiliation that Tony had pledged to get himself a gun.

Lorena was worried her friend would press her for more details. But Jenny suddenly announced that she was bored and dug a cassette of Blondie out of her backpack and lit another cig and French inhaled and began flinging herself around, singing, One way or another, I’m gonna find ya, I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya. “Are you wasted yet? I’m wasted as shit. C’mon, Lo. Loosen up. You’re living the dream. You could have a guy over here every day and your mom wouldn’t know shit.” Then, as if she had just thought of it: “Hey, we should totally do that.”

Which was how Peter Stinson wound up at the apartment, an actual tenth grader, tall, sneering, his hair gelled into a frosted blond wedge. “You’re the best,” Jenny said, as she led him into Lorena’s room.

Where else could Jenny Stallworth behave this way? Not at home. Not with her real friends. Lo knew she was being used. But she was using Jenny, too, remaining close to her family. It was what people did. Her father used her mother for sex. Her mother used her father to reach the United States. Pastor Jorge at church used his parishioners to fund his little storefront. They used him to keep their faith in Jesus Christ alive. She had used Tony’s delinquency to enthrall Jenny. There was no shame in any of it. Lo told herself this each time Jenny came over.

TOWARD THE END of the school year, Miss Catalis asked Lorena to stay after class. She had just sent out the notice for parent/teacher meetings and wanted to make sure Graciela Saenz would show up this time.

“I’ll remind her,” Lorena said.

“Good. Because certain parents, if they’re not familiar with how things work, they can worry about having to see official people.” Miss Catalis had her gradebook in front of her, all her prim little notes about who deserved what.

“She just works a lot.”

“I’ll schedule whatever time works best.”

Lorena glared at Miss Catalis, then made her face go blank before her teacher could look up. She knew that it was her role to be grateful for this extra concern, but she found herself annoyed, as if she were being singled out for extra homework.

THEY TOOK THE bus to school together, her mother in church clothes, everything cotton, the colors not too bright, a little mascara. Lorena offered to translate, but it wasn’t necessary because Miss Catalis spoke Spanish. She was made to wait in the hallway outside.

“Look who it is!”

Lo looked up to find Mrs. Stallworth beaming at her. A pair of slender hands stretched toward her and Lo was gathered into a quick, expensive-smelling hug. She thought about Mr. Stallworth, how he had gazed upon her breasts, and a joyous shame ripped through her.

“What are you doing here? A little damage control? I’m kidding, my dear! Lo! You’re so serious. It’s been too long since you came over. You and Jenny haven’t had a fight, have you? I hope not. She can be so moody these days. Why don’t you come over for the party? Glen’s graduating next month. He’s heading off to St. Mary’s.”

That wasn’t really how it worked. They both knew that. But Lo nodded.

Then the door opened and Lo’s mother appeared and Mrs. Stallworth nearly pounced on her. “I’m Rosemary Stallworth. Jennifer is my daughter. Our daughters worked on the science fair together. We absolutely love your Lorena. Such a gift!”

Mrs. Saenz smiled up at this tall immaculate woman; the silver rim on the crown of her left incisor peeked out. “Yes, yes. She love you very much also.”

Lo felt embarrassed, then ashamed of her embarrassment, then furious at her mother and her teeth. She was relieved when Mrs. Stallworth hurried off.

They returned to the bus stop. According to her mother, Miss Catalis said that Lo scored the highest in her class on the standardized tests but that she seemed distracted this term. “If you want to be in the special classes, the AP, you have to be a top student. This woman is trying to help you, Lorena.” Her mother sucked her cigarette and blew the smoke through her bangs. The streetlights showed the cracked skin around her fingernails. Her body was a dull reminder of the labor it did. “I know you’re becoming a woman. I was your age once. Don’t think some boy is going to give you a future. Use your brain, mija.”

Lo stared straight ahead. She’d heard her mom say this to Tony a hundred times. He had absorbed her lectures in mulish silence and stared past her. By the end of his eighth grade, he had started smoking weed, hanging out with a bunch of clowns who called themselves a gang.

The bus driver was listening to the radio. The president was speaking in that soothing way he had, purring the word opportunity over and over.

“And stop stealing my cigarettes. You understand?” Mrs. Saenz grabbed her daughter’s chin and stared into her eyes. “I give you liberties because you’ve never been dumb. Don’t start now.”

SCHOOL ENDED AND Lorena took the job her mom had arranged, washing dishes at a retirement home for two hundred a week, under the table. One evening, she returned home to find a note from her mother. Jennifer called, she wrote, in careful script. Nice manners. Lorena waited a whole day to call back. Jenny talked about Glen’s graduation party, which was epic: pony keg, broken arm, the cops. It emerged, rather indirectly, that Rosemary had hoped to see Lorena there. “Anyway, we’re having a little pool party, if you wanna come.”

Lo rode her bike over and spent ten minutes in the shade of a cedar, dabbing away sweat. Inside her backpack was a swimsuit, an extra outfit (carefully selected), mascara, lip balm, and the book she’d borrowed from Mr. Stallworth. It had been a couple of months since she’d been in the Stallworth home. She had starved herself the entire time. Her curves had become pronounced, womanly. She found a consignment store where, if she hunted patiently, she could find clothes with the right labels, that flattered her new figure. The transformation sent Mrs. Stallworth into a rapture.

“Look at you! Ravishing! I’d kill for all that hair.”

She insisted the girls come along for a pedicure. “A little gift for surviving middle school! Don’t give me that look, Jennifer. Let me spoil you two a little.”

“We had a plan.”

“What plan? Lie in the sun and fry like an egg?”

They went to a place in the fancy downtown mall where Asian women buffed their feet with pumice stone. “Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Stallworth kept saying. They had tea and sandwiches at a Russian tea room, then little desserts called patisseries, each of which had a thousand calories. Lorena could feel herself sinking again into the world of the Stallworths, the cool leafiness of the Fabulous Forties, a world without the drumbeat of duty, where time itself was a luxury.

THE MOMENT THEY got home, Jenny pulled Lo into her room. “She’s like this all the time now.”

“Like what?”

“That. Frantic. Clingy. Wait till cocktail hour.”

“What happens then?”

Clothes spilled from Jenny’s closet onto the carpet. A bowl of macaroni and cheese sat congealing on her desk. “This place is kind of a sty, huh? We had to let Lucia go last week.” Jenny locked her door and peeled off her top.

“What about your dad?” Lo said.

“What about him? He’s a robot basically.” Jenny began imitating her father’s crisply modulated voice. “Hello children! I am your paternal unit! Please don’t express emotion. It is nonempirical data. I must now depart for my fieldwork. Scorpions are my only true friends.”

Lo laughed. “He’s not that bad.”

“He’s not your dad,” Jenny said. “Come on. Get into your suit. Ro doesn’t like to go outside. She’s terrified of skin cancer.”

“Are you going to change, too?”

Jenny nodded, then sat on her bed in her fancy bra and watched Lo undress.

“What are you now?”

“I don’t know. 34C.”

“C? You’re a C.” Jenny’s face collapsed. Within a year, she was going to be the prettiest girl in their class but all she could think about was her flat chest. “I don’t get it. You can fix everything else. Braces. Contacts. But if you want a decent set of tits, it’s like a federal offense. Wait. You’re not going to wear that, right? You can’t. Borrow one of mine. You’ll be pouring out of it.”

Out by the pool, Jenny rubbed in Coppertone and let the sun broil her. Lo stayed in the shade, so she wouldn’t get too dark. Glen turned up with two friends, younger boys who stood behind him like jumpy lieutenants.

“Who’s your friend?” one of the boys said to Jenny.

“That’s Lo.” Glen nodded, his dominion on display. “Scorpion Girl. My dad put one on her hand and she didn’t even flinch. No lie. Look at you, little Lo. You’ve grown a couple of cups since the last time we saw you.”

“Pig,” Jenny said.

Glen jumped into the pool in his soccer shorts and splashed the girls and his lieutenants—they were both named Trent—followed. They leered at Lo’s chest. The pool, with its soft magnifying water, was like a staging ground for desire. But Lo knew her face wasn’t right. She looked too much like Lucia, who’d been fired. Jenny hated her body but she knew how to flirt, how to be needy and a little hateful at the same time.

Glen fired up the grill and made hot dogs. Mrs. Stallworth let them eat around the pool, why not, it was summer. She had to visit a sick friend, but whoever wanted to could stay over. She liked having a full house. She stood and stared at her children, smiling with a glassy intensity that made everyone a little nervous.

She’s lonely, Lo thought. Her mother was lonely, too. But her loneliness had seeped into her, taken its place within her private cabinet of disappointments, while Mrs. Stallworth flaunted hers like a goblet of wine. If she spilled enough, everyone would have to look and she would no longer be alone.

IT WAS NO secret where the wine coolers were. Glen hauled them out the moment his mom drove off. Lo sipped hers carefully. Glen said they should play a game. It was called Pimps and Hos. They sat around on the patio making up rules. The object of the game was to get the girls naked. This was the object of every game ever devised by teenage boys.

Glen ran to the cabana and came back with a snorkeling mask, which the boys took turns using. It was a strange sensation. Lo’s body was being viewed but not touched, like the photos in magazines. She sat on the pool steps in her bikini bottoms, one hand in front of her breasts, the other grasping her wine cooler. Nobody was worried about Mrs. Stallworth coming home. They would hear her.

She wondered if she would see Mr. Stallworth and what he would do if he caught them. She imagined him standing by the edge of the pool, staring down at her body. Everyone else had somehow disappeared; it wasn’t clear what he was going to do next. The wine cooler tasted like cough syrup. She couldn’t let go of it. She felt like she was watching a movie of herself, one of those horror ones where the ugly girl gets killed first. She eventually discerned that she had become drunk. She stood and wobbled toward the patio. One of the boys whistled and the other called out for her to dance and began singing “La Cucaracha.”

“Fucked up,” Glen said, laughing.

Jenny tapped on the bathroom door. “You okay?”

Lo kept herself from throwing up. At least there was that. She told Jenny she should be getting home. She had church the next morning and an afternoon shift. “Wait for my mom,” Jenny said. “She’ll drive you. You don’t want to ride your bike all fucked up.”

They went into her room and Jenny locked the door.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Lo said. “Go hang out. They’re waiting for you.” She lay down on the carpet, which spun.

“It’s okay. I don’t even like those guys. They think they’re hot shit. That one dude, Trent—he’s a fag anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just something I heard.” Jenny flung off her towel and wiggled out of her bikini; the stark white of her skin shone against her tan like a second suit. Then she threw on a T-shirt and pulled a bottle of Absolut from beneath her bed. “This mixes with orange juice. You can hardly taste it.” She went to the kitchen and returned with a giant plastic mug. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s mostly ice.”

A car pulled up outside and Lorena edged toward the window. Down below, Mr. Stallworth emerged from his Jeep and began heaving camping gear from the back. The flare of his triceps made her gut hop. “That’s your dad,” she said. “You should put that stuff away.”

“Don’t stress. He won’t come upstairs. He stays in his little lair.”

Lorena wanted to ask what that meant, but Jenny said, rather abruptly, “What do you think of Peter Stinson, anyway? He’s kind of a dick, right? I gave him head, like, a month ago. He kind of made me. His crotch smelled like old laundry. Is that gross? Do you think I’m a slut?”

“Of course not.”

“We’re not hanging out anymore. By the way. He’s fucking some slut from Roseville now.” Jenny took another glug from her giant mug. “I’m telling you cuz you know how to keep your mouth shut. If you say anything, I’ll tell everyone you were the one who sucked him off.” Jenny started laughing, then she was sort of crying.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. I wanted to do it. I was fine with it. It was so nothing.” She closed her eyes. Within a minute, she was asleep.

Lo got up to get a towel, just in case. There was a small window, through which she could see down onto the pool. The boys were still out there, pale naked bodies flickering in the blue water. Glen had the scuba mask on and he kept dipping his head underwater to look at his friends. Lo knew then—without wanting to—what his secret was.

She slumped down onto the carpeting and stared at the glint of the Absolut bottle. The Stallworths were careless. Sloppy. They could afford to be. That was the thrill they imparted. She felt liberated among them, from the confines of her discretion, the prison of careful habits she had constructed at her mother’s behest. The risk of being found out was the heart of the whole thing. That was what Lo would decide in the end, though the end was still a long way off.

HER DECISION TO go down to the basement that night had little to do with her mind. It resided in her body, which was a month from turning fourteen, which yearned without precedent and thus without restraint, which kept her up at night, a tender riot, a fumbling shame; she imagined Mr. Stallworth’s hands and the particular way his lips and tongue formed the word empirical.

Mr. Stallworth was unpacking camping gear, all manner of which lay strewn about the office, so that when Lorena appeared in the doorway she was able to admire the efficiency of his movements for a few moments. At last, he looked up.

“Lorena?” The lower half of his face was masked in whiskers that had grown beyond stubble but not yet into beard. “You’ve grown up a little, haven’t you?”

She blushed fiercely. Her outfit consisted of a thin halter top, denim cutoffs, and mascara; she’d had to steady her hands to apply it a few minutes earlier.

“What are you doing here this late? It’s past eleven.”

“I’m staying over.”

“Where’s Jenny?”

“Asleep. I just wanted to return your book.”

“My book? Of course.” He set down the portable stove he’d been disassembling. “What did you think?”

“Yours was better.”

“The romantic babble of a young man,” he muttered.

“It’s not babbling,” Lorena said.

“Tell you what. You can borrow my copy, if you’d like. I’ll trade it for the one you’ve been lugging around.” He went to his bookshelf and pulled out Prince of the Desert Night. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the science fair, by the way. I heard you two did great,” he said, more softly. “Just put the book on my desk. I’m sorry about the smell in here. I’ve been on something of an expedition.”

“Where were you?”

“The Chocolate Mountains.”

“Where are those?”

“Near Joshua Tree.”

Lorena shrugged.

“I can show you on a map. Let me get this place aired out and maybe we can take a look tomorrow.”

Lorena nodded but didn’t move. She’d been waiting so long to see him. The alcohol in her system helped blur things. “I don’t mind the mess.”

Mr. Stallworth squinted and grinned. “I’ll take you at your word then.”

He went to his backpack and pulled out a laminated topographical map of California and opened it on his desk. She came and stood next to him. The map had a scattering of notations, all set down in his cramped, meticulous script. “The Chocolates are down here, a couple of hours past Fresno. High desert. Pretty terrain.”

“And the spots you’ve marked, the Xs, those are campsites?”

“Right.”

“How long were you camping?”

“Not quite a week.”

“What’s it like out there?” Lorena said.

Mr. Stallworth cocked his head and scratched at his beautiful neck. “Honest,” he said. “The wilderness doesn’t lie the way we do. Plants and animals deal in truth.”

“I’d like to go out there again.”

“You’d like it.”

Neither one of them had moved toward the other but now their flanks were brushing. The scent of him, an animal ripeness, rose up around her. She should have been disgusted. She imagined running her fingers through his hair. She imagined them snagging.

“Were you gathering specimens?”

“This was more of a planning trip.”

“What are you planning?” she said.

“Top-secret stuff.”

“I really would like—”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve had a feeling about you.”

She felt her hip beginning to tremble. Then, somehow, they were facing each other and his hand was on her cheek and he was lifting her chin with his thumb, very gently, so that she had no choice but to look directly into his eyes.

“I think you should leave before things get complicated.”

“Complicated?” The trembling was awful. She didn’t want it to stop.

“Animals don’t lie,” he said quietly. “And we’re both animals.”

LO STUMBLED UPSTAIRS. Mr. Stallworth had touched her. He had confirmed the thing between them, but only vaguely, as if that thing were happening by accident and you didn’t get to have feelings about it. Even his expression had been a puzzling blend of benevolence and something sharper—impatience or maybe disdain. She knew she should go home.

She went to fetch her backpack and found that Jenny had thrown up a little in her sleep, which meant she had to clean that up and get her friend into bed and pour the rest of the Absolut down the bathroom sink and stash the bottle at the bottom of the kitchen garbage. The backyard was a mess, too, so she cleaned that up, her body antsy and confused, half waiting for him to appear again. But it was Mrs. Stallworth who thumped into the house as she was finishing up. The zip of her purse in the foyer, keys cast into the crystal bowl, a soft grunt as she toed off her heels.

“Oh, hello! You decided to stay. How nice.”

“Jenny’s asleep,” Lo said quickly.

“Of course she is. You’re up late though, aren’t you? Keep me company. We’ll have some tea. Do you drink tea, Lo?” Before Lo could say anything, Mrs. Stallworth weaved toward the kitchen. “Who did all this cleaning up? It must have been my little elf. You should have left it for Lucia. That’s her job. It’s how she makes a living for her family. We all have our roles to play. Did you call your mother, Lo? Does she know you’re here? I wouldn’t want her to think you’d been kidnapped.”

Mrs. Stallworth got out a fancy wooden box of tea bags and dropped one in a mug, then filled the kettle, though she appeared to lose interest and never actually turned on the burner. “Your mother is a labor nurse,” Mrs. Stallworth continued. “That must be such a blessing. To help bring new lives into the world. I would have liked to become a baby nurse. I suppose I never took college seriously enough. I got distracted.”

“By what?”

“Boys. Social duties. I grew up in a certain milieu. Do you know what I mean by milieu?” Mrs. Stallworth went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of pink wine. “We had money. I’m not going to apologize. The president is right. Prosperity breeds aspiration. I saw this myself, when I visited San Miguel for a service project. That was one of the great adventures of my life. Do you know that village? Which part are you from again?”

“My mom is Honduran.”

“That’s right. I so enjoyed meeting her! She’s a bit shy, isn’t she? Still, it must have taken great courage for her to come to America. And great hope, too.”

Lorena worried that Mrs. Stallworth would start asking questions about her family history, which she knew only in fragments: that her father had left El Salvador for Honduras and met her mother, that they married young, that her mother’s parents disapproved. That her father had crossed the border with Tony and her mother had followed, seven months pregnant, so Lo could be born in America. It was supposed to be a story of triumph. But her early memories didn’t feel triumphant. They involved adults yelling, a mood of sullen accusation, crowded rooms in which something indispensable—a key or a document or a pack of cigarettes—had always been lost.

Mrs. Stallworth poured her wine into the mug with the tea bag. “The important thing is you’re here now. You get to make your own way. Don’t let anyone else drive the bus. That’s my advice. The bus is officially yours. Sit, Lo. Oh my. I was going to have tea, wasn’t I? I don’t even like tea. It’s just something I always think I’m going to like. What a silly.” Mrs. Stallworth wore a scoop-neck blouse trimmed in lace, from which her throat rose like a mottled stem. It was an odd outfit for visiting a sick friend.

“Jenny said you fired Lucia,” Lo said suddenly.

Mrs. Stallworth looked at her with no great concern. “That’s more of a provisional situation. Jennifer knows better than to discuss family matters. It’s gauche. Shall I drink this rosé? Wait a second. We were talking about something interesting. What were we talking about? Oh, San Miguel. Can you keep a secret, Lo? I fell for a man down there, a married man.” She put a finger to her lips. “We were mad for each other. Jesus Armas. Chuy. We were going to run off together. To the Sierra Madres. Catch the train in Chihuahua City. What did they call it? The Chicken Train! I believe it transported actual chickens. Chuy had a cousin with a ranch near the Copper Canyon. We had provisions stashed in the basement rectory of the church we were rebuilding. It was all terribly romantic. Can you imagine? I would have lasted a grand total of two minutes on the Chicken Train. But we clung to the idea. Everyone is entitled to a getaway plan.”

“What happened?”

“We got caught. That was the point, I guess. What a scandal! I walked around like Hester what’s-her-name. Pastor Tom had me shipped home a month early. Such is the power of the forbidden. We dream in our waking moments and walk in our dreams. Is that the line? Something like that.” Mrs. Stallworth fished the tea bag out of her mug and drained her wine, then eyed the bottle, a little accusingly. “I don’t have to tell you how it is to be young. Glen is already dating. Whatever it’s called these days. You and Jenny will have suitors soon enough. Don’t look so embarrassed, Lo. It’s perfectly natural. The body matures. The rest is chemistry.”

Mrs. Stallworth chattered on in her bright oblivious way. Lorena felt guilty, but also a sort of jumbled gratitude. Her own mother never discussed any of this with her. The closest she had come was leaving a stack of pads on the toilet tank, the bulky kind from the maternity ward. The rest of her instruction had come from the Bible and bits of lore picked up in church basements and laundromats. Young ladies should behave in ways that were decent and honorable. This meant doing well in school, respecting elders, stifling urges. In this way, God might consent to forgive you.

“The most important thing is to make good decisions. Don’t let boys decide for you. They can’t think straight at your age. At any age, really. They just keep telling you how beautiful you are until they get what they want.”

“Is that what happened with Mr. Stallworth?” Lo said.

Mrs. Stallworth sat back. Lo had meant this question to be amusing but she could see at once that it had been wildly inappropriate. Mrs. Stallworth released a short sharp laugh. “You’re a funny little bird, Lo. I can’t quite figure whether you don’t know anything, or whether you know it all. Neither one keeps you safe. That’s the point I was making. Or was I just being a boring old fool?”

It was difficult to resist Mrs. Stallworth when she exposed her doubts so openly. “I’m not bored,” she said. “I like listening to your stories.”

Mrs. Stallworth examined Lo, searching for signs of sarcasm. “How sweet you are, Lo. I’ve always seen it. This is what I mean. We’ve got to stick together, us girls. We have to look out for each other.”

LO SPENT JUNE racking dishes and staring into mirrors at the broadness of her nose. She wanted to call Jenny but it was against the rules. Her mother dragged her to church; nagged her to eat. Lorena biked to the pet shop in Oak Park to see if they had scorpions, but it was just smudged cells of puppies and bleating parakeets.

In July, her brother, Tony, returned home for the first time in six months, buzz cut and draped in camouflage. Graciela had flown into a panic when he first joined, certain he would be deported. But Tony assured her that the navy had a special program for guys like him, with a green card at the end of the rainbow. The recruiter had explained it all.

He wound up stationed at a base called China Lake, down in the Mojave. It didn’t make sense to Lorena. What was a naval base doing in the middle of a desert? Tony said China Lake was where they assigned all the advanced weapons personnel. His work was Top Secret.

Tony the Hero, strutting around the July Fourth picnic at Rinconada Park in his white tunic and polished boots, saluting all the viejos while Graciela beamed. Tony showing the little vatos how to take apart a rifle in thirty seconds, talking calibers and muzzle burn, blast radius, how pussy can’t resist a uniform. Tony who had turned his life around. He escorted his mother to church in full service dress and kissed her on the forehead. But when she was gone, he prowled the corners with his old crew and glowered at Lorena. Tony was the same person who’d left for basic a year ago: a bully on the sly.

A few days after the Fourth, able to stand it no longer, Lorena called the Stallworths. She got Rosemary, who promised to have Jenny call her back. Lorena knew this would never happen, but the next weekend—under orders, no doubt—Jenny did call. There was her voice, sort of friendly, sort of bored, her inflection soaring at the end of every sentence. Maybe Lo wanted to come over for, like, a swim or whatever. They would have the place to themselves. Lo stared through the window at the blistered paint of the dumpster, the sulfurous spatters of fireworks on the pavement. “Cool,” she said.

Tony emerged from the room they had shared, which he had commandeered. “Who the fuck is that?”

Lo covered the receiver. “None of your business.”

“I need the phone.”

“Who’s that?” Jenny said.

“Nobody,” Lo said. “My brother.”

“The Latin King? I thought he was in the navy.”

“He’s on leave.”

“Does he still look like a chihuahua?” Jenny said.

Tony, now aware he was being talked about, hollered, “Off the phone. Now.”

“Oooh, an angry chihuahua! I’d spank his little butt if he yapped at me like that.”

“I’d like to see that,” Lorena whispered, curling away from Tony. “Maybe I’ll bring him.”

Jenny let out a squeal. “I totally dare you.”

The line went dead and Lorena turned to find Tony grinning, his thumb on the hook switch. “I warned you.”

Lorena went into the bathroom to comb out her hair and put on some makeup but Tony planted himself in the doorframe. “Don’t you got work today? Ma doesn’t want you skipping work.”

“It’s my day off.”

“Look at you. Putting on your whore paint. You got some kind of hot date? I’m serious, gordita. Where you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“I’m not fucking around.”

“To a friend’s.”

“What friend?”

“You don’t know her.”

“Bullshit. Is it that little Vargas slut? What’s her name? Where’s she live?” Tony wasn’t going to let up until he got an answer. With a pride that was almost vengeance, Lorena murmured, “The Fabulous Forties.”

“Bullshit,” Tony said. “Seriously? You hanging with some richie rich now? Some guera?”

Lorena knew it was best to ignore Tony, let him work off his tedium. But she kept thinking about how excited Jenny would be to meet Tony, and how small he would seem in the realm of the Stallworths. “You can drive me over if you don’t believe me.”

“Fuck that,” he said.

But a few minutes later he was insisting on it. Tony drove the Mercury Bobcat he’d borrowed from one of his burnout friends. It had chrome hubs and a busted muffler that roared.

“Ma says you’ve been fucking up in school,” Tony said.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Starting to get an attitude, too.” Tony had a beer jammed between his legs. His right hand rested lightly atop the steering wheel, which was composed of welded chain links. “Don’t fucking smirk.”

“I’m not smirking.”

“You grew some titties and lost a few pounds and you’re big shit now? A big-shit ninth grader. Just because mom won’t crack down on you don’t mean I won’t.”

“Right,” Lo said. “You’re in the navy, so you get to be my dad now.”

Tony slammed the brakes. Right in the middle of the Alhambra. “What did you just say to me?” He swung just to watch her flinch. “Look at me, gordita.”

She wouldn’t.

Tony swiped at his nose then reached down and pulled something out of his waistband and tossed it onto the seat next to her.

She glanced down at a small nicked pistol. “What the hell?”

“Don’t back talk me, Lorena. I’ll fucking end you.”

Lo stared out the window. So Tony was doing coke again. Maybe he’d never stopped. “You’re acting crazy,” she said quietly. “You’re gonna get busted again.”

Tony snorted. “That’s registered. I own that shit.” He gunned the engine.

Lo had messed up. But asking Tony to drop her off on the corner would only infuriate him. He whistled when he caught sight of the mansion. “That’s some Masterpiece Theater shit right there.”

Mr. Stallworth’s Jeep gleamed in the driveway and Tony’s eyes locked onto it.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said.

He grabbed her arm. “Hold up. Don’t just fucking jump out of the car.” The engine’s idling felt out of place, lewd.

The front door opened and Jenny stepped onto the porch in a leopard print one-piece that rode up her slender hips. She looked down at the rumbling car and waved.

“Let go of me,” Lo muttered to Tony.

“You’re not going to introduce me to your little friend?”

“Please.”

He released her arm and snatched up the gun and tucked it into his waistband. Then he got out of the car and waved at Jenny, who was still squinting. “She’s a pretty little flaca, ain’t she?”

Lo got out of the car and walked around to where Tony was. “Please,” she said again, and her voice was quavering.

“Okay. Calm down. I’m not going to mess with your rich bitch friend. She’s a fucking little kid. No tits and braces on her teeth. Shit.” Tony snapped into his military posture and swung his boots together so they smacked. He had tucked in his shirt and now offered a crisp salute to Jenny, who had ventured down the stairs to investigate. She stood canted against the railing, her legs radiant with tanning oil.

“Hey,” she sang out to Lo.

“Hey,” Lo said, then, to Tony, “Thanks again.”

“Are you Lo’s brother?” Jenny called out.

“Correct.”

“You’re in the navy?”

“Right again.”

“Lo told me about you.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.” He glanced at Lorena. “You going to introduce us?”

“This is my brother, Tony.”

Jenny descended to the sidewalk. She was trying to figure out if she should shake hands with Tony, what it would mean if she touched him. He wasn’t tall or handsome or rich or suave. He was nineteen, though.

“You’re, like, launching missiles from a submarine.”

“Not quite. Advanced munitions.”

“How old are you?” Jenny said.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough.” She folded her arms across her chest. “And you’re back on leave or whatever.”

“What are you doing hanging around with my sister?” Tony said.

Jenny smiled carefully to avoid showing her braces. “Did you go to Sac High? Maybe you knew my brother, Glen?”

Tony shook his head like it didn’t really matter. “You shouldn’t be walking around in a bathing suit.”

“Why not?”

“You got neighbors. They might talk.”

“It’s summer,” Jenny said. “We have a pool.”

All three of them were sweating. Lo had moved to the steps. She feared Tony would walk up on Jenny, the way he did with the younger girls in their building. But the neighborhood held him in check, the size of the homes, the grand trees and lawns shimmering with money. Next door, some old lady was watering her roses.

“You’re welcome to come inside if you want to cool off,” Jenny said.

Tony took a few seconds to mull this offer. Then he glanced at Mr. Stallworth’s Jeep, the rear door of which was ajar. He strolled over and leaned against it in a way that showed the faint outline of his pistol. “Nice ride.”

“That’s my dad’s.”

“I thought he was at work,” Lo said.

“What do you care?” Jenny said. She was playing to Tony now.

“He wouldn’t want some stranger touching his car,” Lo said softly.

Tony laughed. “Some stranger. Lorena. Always the good girl.” He ran his finger along the roll bar, like the supermodel in the TV commercial, and recited taglines in a mocking falsetto: “Going off-road turns me on. Why drive when you can Jeep? Danger is my compass.”

Jenny laughed like it wasn’t that funny but whatever.

The old lady from next door was watching them now, her eyes shifting apprehensively from Tony to the exhaust belching from the Bobcat’s tail pipe.

“What’s that in your belt?” Jenny said.

“What’s what?”

“That bulge?”

“Listen to that mouth. What do you know about bulges?”

“More than you think.”

“That so?” Tony let his eyes roam over her body and Jenny reddened. An awkward desire jellied the air between them—sudden, racking, almost hostile.

Then the front door swung open and Mr. Stallworth appeared at the top of the stairs. An oversized backpack hung from one thick arm. He looked down the stairs at his daughter, half naked, then spotted Lo on the curb and his face took on an agitation that made her take a step backwards. She had come over hoping to see him. In a way, his reaction confirmed this; he had been waiting for her, too.

“Get some clothes on,” he snapped at Jenny.

Mr. Stallworth couldn’t see Tony, who was off to his left in the driveway. But Tony saw him and sauntered back toward his car.

Mr. Stallworth’s eyes shifted from his daughter to Lo to the rattling car parked in front of his house. Then he spotted the young man—a Mexican, he assumed, by the looks of him, with sweat glazing his forehead—and hurried down the steps.

“Have fun with your little guera,” Tony muttered to Lo. He swung into the driver’s seat and slammed the door and gunned the engine.

Mr. Stallworth arrived at the bottom of the stairs just as Tony peeled away from the curb. He was darker than the last time Lorena had seen him. Golden hairs shone on his forearms and the backs of his hands. “Who the hell was that?”

“Lo’s brother,” Jenny chirped. “He’s in the navy.”

Mr. Stallworth wheeled around and ordered his daughter inside, then trained his gaze on the skid marks Tony had left on the street. “What kind of person drives like that? Is he training to be a getaway driver?”

Lo stared miserably at the chipped remnants of her first and only pedicure. “He was just dropping me off. I’m sorry.”

Mr. Stallworth stalked toward his Jeep, then turned and waited for Lo to look him in the eye. She could feel the heat of his scorn, his disappointment. “Tell your brother to show some respect.”

“HE HAD A gun,” Jenny gushed. “Right in his waistband.”

“He just wants people to think that,” Lo said.

“I, like, saw it.”

“That was a bowie knife.”

“Whatever,” Jenny said. “He’s too short, anyway. He’s got one of those Napoleon complexes.”

They were in her room. Lo had put her swimsuit on at home, so she wouldn’t have to take her clothes off in front of Jenny.

“Is that why he joined a gang?”

“He’s not really doing that anymore.”

“That’s where he must have gotten the gun,” Jenny decided. “Thank God my dad didn’t see it. He would have gone mental.”

They went out to the pool to lay out. That was the phrase she used: lay out. It sounded European. Lorena could hear Mr. Stallworth in the garage. He had pulled the Jeep in to load it up. She told Jenny she was going to the bathroom.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Stallworth said.

“I wanted to apologize for my brother.”

“You did so already.”

“I just felt bad.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ve still got your book,” Lorena said, as if she’d just thought of it. “Should I bring it back?”

“Fine. I really do need to get on the road now.”

“Another top-secret mission?”

Mr. Stallworth bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. We were just joking last time.”

“I don’t remember that,” Mr. Stallworth said curtly.

Lorena began to tear up. He was being so cold to her, because he knew now what kind of family she came from, which she couldn’t help. All she wanted was to be close to him, to talk about scorpions, but he wouldn’t look at her. He kept pushing her away, kept leaving. She wiped at her eyes, furiously.

“Please,” Mr. Stallworth said.

She turned, hoping to slip away before the humiliation grew worse, but he was upon her with a swiftness that was stunning, drawing her into an embrace, his hands moving across her back. The rough pads of his fingers almost stung. His mouth made the shushing sound parents used to comfort children. She smelled licorice on his breath, the sweet and bitter of it. Then that same mouth bent down to brush against the hollow of her throat, leaving an imprint there. She pressed against him. The instant she did this, he shoved her away.

“No,” he murmured, more to himself than her. “Not that.”

“Did I do something?”

“You need to leave. Now.”

In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet and traced the patch of skin his mouth had moistened. She closed her eyes, eager to conjure that mouth. Lorena could sense what they were up to, the skirting of a sacred border; she would need courage to cross over, to touch what lay beyond.

LO RETURNED TO the Stallworth home a few weeks later, at the invitation of Rosemary. “We’ve got this new VCR and she wants to have a girls’ movie night,” Jenny said. “I could just barf.” Lorena expected a group, but it was just the three of them.

“Here she is,” Mrs. Stallworth said, when Lorena arrived. “Our little scholar! Marcus mentioned that you might have a book of his. He said to leave it on his desk.” While Jenny and her mom argued over what to watch, Lo ducked down to the basement.

She was surprised to find a laminated map on his desk, which she took to be the same one he had used to show her the Chocolate Mountains. But this map covered a much larger area, all the way down to Mexico, and it was blanketed in notations. There were four red Xs and beneath each were two numbers in parentheses, carried out to the third decimal point and followed by the letters N and W. Coordinates. Latitude and longitude.

Beneath each coordinate was another notation—5 gal; 3 gal—which might have stood for gasoline, or water. A neat, dotted line connected the Xs and extended south from Death Valley to something called the Coachella Canal, then east to the Colorado River and into southern Arizona. The only name Lorena recognized was Yuma, where long ago her father and Tony had crossed into the United States. In the lower left-hand corner of the map, Mr. Stallworth had printed three words, in letters so tiny she had to lean close to read them: The Scorpion Escapes.

Lorena stared hard at this odd phrase. Her eyes tracked back to the red Xs and the coordinates beneath them. Was this the secret mission Mr. Stallworth had joked about? She needed more information, something to explain the map, his behavior, to bring him closer. Her mother would have warned her not to be a meddler (No seas metiche, mija!). But her mother wasn’t around.

His desk drawers contained office supplies. Playing cards. A bridge manual. Three boxes of Good & Plenty. A Spanish/English pocket dictionary. There was a sofa in the corner. The cushions smelled of him, the deodorant he sometimes wore and, more faintly, his body odor. She spied the pale corner of a bedsheet. Was he sleeping in his office now?

She moved on to the file cabinet behind his desk, from which he had drawn the laminated map. Both drawers were locked. Lorena hesitated a moment, then took a paperclip from his desk. Tony had showed her how to jimmy locks one afternoon long ago, back in the days when he took pride in corrupting her.

The top drawer contained file upon file of meticulous field reports. But in the bottom drawer, stashed way in back, Lorena found a cardboard box filled with a confounding array: three pairs of rubber gloves, a razor blade, a Xerox copy of a manual entitled “Police Forensics.” Beneath the box were two folders. The first was marked “Family.” It contained school photos of Glen and Jenny, the whole family posing atop the groomed snow of a ski resort, a wedding portrait showing both of them smiling, unbearably young and clearly terrified.

The second folder was marked “confiscated.” It contained two pornographic magazines of a sort Lo had never seen before. There was no brand name on the front. The models were young men, not much older than Glen, clearly amateurs. They lay about in awkward postures of seduction, regarding the camera with expressions meant to project a flagrant ennui. Lorena could hear Jenny mocking these guys, their ridiculous dangling cocks. Then she realized that the magazines had, most likely, belonged to Glen. Beneath them was a single blurry Polaroid of a young naked girl sitting on the steps of a swimming pool, her face turned away from the lens, her breasts floating in the blue. It took Lo a few seconds to recognize herself.

Then Jenny was calling out her name; the photo slipped from her fingers. She picked it up and set everything back in order and her damp hands shook.

“WHERE WERE YOU?” Jenny said. “We’re watching Mommie Dearest. Joan Crawford beats her daughter with a wire hanger. It’s totally choice.”

“Why not Chariots of Fire?” Mrs. Stallworth said. “It’s supposed to be stirring.”

“I’m fine with either,” Lo said quietly.

Jenny snorted. “Such a diplomat.”

They watched Mommie Dearest. “They always turn the mother into a villain,” Mrs. Stallworth said.

“Sometimes the mother is a villain,” Jenny said.

Mrs. Stallworth looked at her daughter for several seconds. Onscreen, Joan Crawford was berating her spineless husband.

“It must be so satisfying to know so much at such a young age.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I can assure you, my dear, that a time will come when the world informs you of how little you know.”

“A lecture? Really? In the middle of the movie?”

“Not a lecture,” Mrs. Stallworth said. “A prediction.”

WHEN THE MOVIE was over, Lorena quietly excused herself and slipped back downstairs. She stared at the map on Mr. Stallworth’s desk, trying to decide if he had left it out for her to find or whether it had been an oversight. She grabbed a pen and copied the coordinates from the map onto a piece of paper, which she stuffed into her pocket. It was an action—like snooping through his drawers—she would not have been able to explain or justify in the moment. Her behavior felt guided by animal instinct. Perhaps she was something like a scorpion herself, groping in the dark at perils she could only vaguely sense, aglow with an alarm that would become visible only after it was too late.

IN EARLY AUGUST, Tony showed up at home again. He told their mom he’d been granted a longer furlough, based on merit. He no longer bragged about missile technology or green cards. The moment Graciela left for work, he turned mean. It didn’t take Lorena long to figure out that he’d gotten the boot. So now she had that secret to keep, too.

A week later, Jenny Stallworth called to invite her over. Lorena knew she should stay away from the Stallworths. But she felt a part of their dramas now. She could no more resist them than cast away her own shadow.

Jenny had gotten her braces off and there were her teeth, bleached white and straight as any model’s. She had her father’s eyes. Jenny was obsessed with the new Blondie video. She mimicked the lead singer with a practiced fervor, the haughty sway of rebellion cushioned by money, a blondie twirling in her blondie world. In a few weeks, high school would start, and Jenny would be absorbed into a caste of older girls and her dealings with Lo would be quietly expunged from the record.

She took some vodka from the cabinet and mixed it with Sprite and they went out to the pool, which had begun to lose its blue sheen. Jenny smoked Virginia Slims and swigged her Sprite. “I’ll tell you one thing that’s weirding me out. Mommy Dearest and the Robot have gotten all lovey dovey recently.”

“What do you mean?”

“The other night I caught them, like, necking right outside my room.” She shuddered.

“That’s good, right?”

“They can’t stand each other for a decade and all of a sudden it’s like The Newlywed Game around here. It’s fucking creepazoid.”

BY THE TIME her mother returned, Jenny was sprawled on her back, snoring through her pretty new mouth. Lo listened to Mrs. Stallworth pour herself a drink, then snap on the TV. Lo wanted to wander into the den, to see what the alcohol might shake loose. Was it true Rosemary and her husband were in love again? Did she know anything of the strange items hidden away in his office?

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, then stopped in front of Jenny’s door. Mrs. Stallworth’s face slid into view. Lo heard her name whispered, tenderly, drunkenly. She kept her eyes shut and waited for the door to click.

Later that night, the Jeep pulled into the driveway. The whine of hinges sounded. Half a minute later, the whir of running water from the basement. Even in darkness, she could feel the opulence of the Stallworth home, the lush carpet into which her bare feet sank, the fluted silhouette of the spindles that moonlight cast across her body as she descended to the first floor. She stalked past the kitchen, the den, the room where Glen slept amid his trophies and rancid laundry. Downstairs, light seeped from under the door of the bathroom across from Mr. Stallworth’s office. The sink was on full blast.

Her toe caught the edge of the door and it swung open. Mr. Stallworth was facing away from her, shirtless. His back was broad, swathed in muscle and dark hairs. It rippled as he hunched over the sink, frantically rinsing something. The air smelled of gasoline. His horn-rimmed glasses rested atop the toilet tank, a brown smear on the left lens. A plump black duffel had been wedged between the toilet and the sink. She could have gone back upstairs. She still had time. Then Mr. Stallworth glanced behind him and noticed the door. He tensed and turned to peer into the dim hallway.

“Who’s there?”

“Me.” Lorena edged into the light.

Mr. Stallworth’s pupils were enormous. Blood dripped off his wrist, making little red fangs on the scalloped bowl of the sink.

“You’re bleeding,” Lo said faintly.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Stallworth grabbed a towel and wrapped his hand. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from me? We had that discussion.” He sidled toward her, his wounded hand cocked like a club. Then he seemed to catch himself, and his eyes—soft and stunned without glasses—blinked. “Go to bed, Lorena,” he said. “Please. This is none of your business.”

“What isn’t?”

He shut the door and she stood in the dark hallway, listening to the faucet turn on and off, the toilet flush.

Just as suddenly as the door had closed, it opened again and Mr. Stallworth appeared, looking more orderly, his shirt and glasses back on, a thicker towel draped over his injured arm in the manner of a French waiter.

“I’m sorry about that, Lorena. You startled me. You shouldn’t be skulking around this house. It isn’t your place.”

“What happened?”

Mr. Stallworth offered a faint laugh. “I cut my hand, that’s all.”

“How?”

“The door to my Jeep. There’s a ragged bit of metal and it sliced into my palm.”

“Where were you?”

Mr. Stallworth took a deep breath through his nose. “Please, Lorena. I’ve had a pretty long night.”

“Shouldn’t you maybe go to the emergency room?”

“I appreciate your concern, but you need to respect certain boundaries.” He was speaking now in the modulated way his daughter mimicked. “I have tried to be patient with you. I have tolerated your advances, and your … pool parties. But my patience is not inexhaustible. I don’t like that you stay over without being invited. I realize Mrs. Stallworth makes exceptions for you. She fears you may not have a secure home life. Your mother, as I understand it …” He pinned her with a cold appraisal. “My wife is a sensitive woman, Lorena. That is why I love her so deeply. But she can be taken advantage of.”

Lo’s head had begun to reel. “You want me to leave?”

Mr. Stallworth looked about impatiently. “I’m going to forget we had this little chat,” he said finally. “I suggest you do the same.”

He brushed past Lo and a chill swept through her: Mr. Stallworth was in the midst of something illicit. She dimly recalled the way her father had lashed out at her mom when he’d been caught in a lie, his ruthless tone of injury. It occurred to her suddenly where the photo of her in the swimming pool had come from. Glen hadn’t taken it. He had.

IN THE KITCHEN, she dialed her house. “What’s wrong, mija?” her mother said, in groggy Spanish.

For a piercing moment, Lo wanted to tell her everything. But where did everything end? She had wandered too far away already, into another life. “Is Tony there?” Lo started to lose control of her breathing. She put her hand over the receiver and plunged a thumbnail into her thigh.

“What happened, Lorena?”

“Nothing. I’m fine. Jenny got sick, that’s all. I need a ride home.”

“At this hour?”

“Can you please just get Tony?”

After a minute, Tony came on the line. “What the fuck?”

“I need a favor.”

“That’s what you get for trusting a rich little bitch.”

“She’s sick.”

“Bullshit, gordita. You did something. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I just need a ride.”

“You owe me, you little slut.”

SHE SLIPPED OUT the kitchen door, locking it behind her, and walked to the front of the house, where she stood in the shadows at the bottom of the front steps. A minute later, she heard the kitchen door open. Mr. Stallworth looked like a dad you might order from a catalogue: freshly showered, chinos, a thin wool sweater. “There’s no need for you to go.” He strode toward her. “You’ve misunderstood me.”

“It’s alright. I called my brother,” she said. “He’s coming.”

“There’s been a misunderstanding.”

He reached her and stood breathing. Moonlight put a blue tint on his face. “Please, Lorena. Don’t make this into a production. There’s no need to get people upset. I cut myself and panicked a little. It was stupid. The remarks I made—disregard them. Come inside.” Mr. Stallworth raised his eyebrows, as if to usher her back into the realm of reasonable behavior.

“My brother is on his way,” Lorena repeated.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Lorena. I don’t want that.” Mr. Stallworth took another step forward, then stumbled so that he was suddenly on his knees. “Please, Lorena.” His voice cracked on the middle syllable of her name and she could hear, for the first time, a beseeching tone beneath his fatherly composure. A white bandage spanned his left palm. “I’m trying to do the right thing. For all of us.” He winced, like the hero in an action movie who’s just taken a bullet. “You’ve got a sharp enough mind to see it.”

His right hand moved forward cautiously until his palm was touching hers. His fingers slipped between hers and slid slowly down the length of each. “In another life,” he whispered. He had started making small undulations, so that she could feel the power in his hands. She thought of the mating dance he had described, and knelt down, perhaps to kiss him, but he turned away.

“I need to know more about you. Whether I can trust you.”

“You can trust me,” Lo said. “I’m a friend of Jenny’s.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Behind them something creaked—the house settling, some distant static—and he loosened his grip. Lorena swayed back. She had stumbled into the territory between desire and suspicion. Or had she been dragged there?

“It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Stallworth said, as if she had spoken her thoughts aloud. He bowed his head and his hands reached up to sculpt the air around her until his arms looped around her waist. He held the pads of flesh above her hips and pressed his face against her belly and exhaled. She felt the warmth of his breath travel through her jeans and swimsuit. The Stallworth home rose behind him like a rampart, its majestic windows smudged with yellow light from the old-fashioned streetlamps.

Mr. Stallworth let out a muffled sob. He was still kneeling, pressing his nose against her mons pubis. His hair, showered and combed, quivered in the light. She could see now into the tiny box at the center of him, which contained his helplessness. Lo expected to feel desire or pity or alarm. But the sensation that coursed through her was vindication. “I’m the one you want,” she said.

This was what she had been chasing, the realization that kept eluding her, scurrying into the shadows. She wasn’t just some charity case summoned to gaze upon the golden lives of the Stallworth family. Mr. Stallworth desired her. He was on his knees, shaking now, awaiting her blessing. “You don’t really love Mrs. Stallworth at all,” she concluded, in quiet amazement.

The words bit into him.

Lorena began to run her fingers through his hair.

He sobbed out a muddy phrase and pressed his mouth against the place where her legs joined.

“What?”

He spoke the words again: Find me.

“You’re right here,” Lo said.

From down the street came a burst of noise, the corroded flatulence of Tony’s Mercury. Mr. Stallworth flinched. He tried to pull away from her, but Lo curled her fingers so that her nails bit into his scalp. He barked in pain and twisted away. Headlights scrolled across them as they staggered apart, Lo toward the sidewalk, Mr. Stallworth toward the stairs.

Tony leaped from the car. “What the fuck?” he yelled. “What the fuck’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” Lo said. “Calm down.”

“It didn’t look like nothing.”

Tony bounded toward Mr. Stallworth, who was leaning against the bannister.

“He was waiting with me. To make sure nothing happened. Mr. Stallworth, this is my brother, Tony.”

Mr. Stallworth rose to his full height and nodded down at Tony.

“Were you stepping up on my sister?” Tony said.

“What?”

“Jesus, Tony. Calm down. He dropped his keys. We were looking for them.”

“What are you accusing me of, young man?”

Tony squinted at Mr. Stallworth: the Izod sweater, the chinos, the hair freshly combed but mussed.

“Jenny got sick,” Lo said. “She threw up. He was trying to be a gentleman.”

Tony cocked his head. “Cuz this neighborhood’s so fucking scary. Fucking three in the morning. You kick a girl out of your house?”

“Nobody kicked anyone out—she insisted on leaving.”

Tony glowered at Mr. Stallworth and spit on the ground. “Rich fucking assholes.”

“You had better watch your mouth,” Mr. Stallworth said.

“Why? You gonna fucking do something, Dad?”

Lo stepped in front of Tony. “Stop it.”

Tony reached into his waistband and drew out his small gun. “Or what? Or what? You’ll call the cops?”

Mr. Stallworth shrank back at the sight of the weapon.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Tony smiled his coked-up smile. “I am the fucking cops.”

In the car, she let Tony run down a little. He talked about how the world looked at someone like her, how men thought and behaved. “You think you know it all. But you don’t know shit.”

“He wasn’t doing anything,” she said quietly. “He’s a professor.”

“A professor.” Tony smirked.

“What if he calls the cops?”

“He ain’t calling shit. He’s a fucking punk.”

“You got it all wrong.”

“No, I don’t,” Tony said simply. “And you can’t lie to save a fucking ant.” He lit up a cigarette and gunned through a red light.

Lo wanted to thank him. She might have even said the words. He had come when she called, thinking to rescue her. But the way he had done so was savage, out of control. She understood now that there was nothing she could do to rescue her brother. He was doomed—not by the drugs, but whatever hidden demons prompted them.

“Stay away from those people, gordita. It’s the fancy ones that’ll fuck you up.”

THE GIRLS HAD no classes together that fall. From time to time, Jenny appeared in the halls, across the quad, amid her flock, all of them dabbing lip balm on with their pinkies and balancing like cranes.

Lo watched from her quiet glade of regret. There was no appeal, no moment of cruel dismissal. Their friendship was over. It was almost nothing personal.

But what was there to regret, exactly? Had she been too timid in their midst, or too daring? Had she allowed the Stallworths to use her? Or had she wanted to be used? Was it possible two opposing things could be true at once?

Tony stuck around for another few weeks. Then he got into some kind of hassle with a guy, probably his dealer. He told their mother he had to report back to the base, though he drove down to Fresno where his friend had a cousin who had gotten him a job at an oil change place. Lo knew this but said nothing.

In September, Lo turned fourteen. Her face remained plain, her nose too broad, but her body continued to swell with curves. With Tony gone, the boys around the building whistled at her.

Some nights, a vision of Mr. Stallworth would come unbidden, the shape of his shoulders as he knelt before her and breathed; she would lie in a state of delighted torment, whispering find me. She thought of Mrs. Stallworth, too, her drunken affection and silly stories. Late one night, Lorena dug out the notebook marked “Science Fair,” the one filled with idiotic astrology facts and flowery quotes about scorpions. She tore out the pages and dumped them in her trash can, along with the paperweight she had taken from Mr. Stallworth’s desk, the tiny scorpion in its amber coffin. After a few moments, she retrieved the paperweight.

IT WAS LATE October when word began to spread of a tragedy involving Jenny Stallworth. She had been abducted. That was the word kids kept murmuring, in hushed tones, savoring the hard consonants: abducted. As if to confirm this account, Jenny went missing from school. Then the story changed. It wasn’t Jenny who’d been abducted but her father. He’d vanished into the desert. Beamed up by aliens. Dragged off by Big Foot. Kidnapped by burnouts. Nobody knew anything, which meant everything was possible.

Lo went to the library and scoured the Sacramento Bee. The story was true, confirmed by a single column of type on page 17A. Marcus Stallworth, age 41, an adjunct professor of zoology, had been reported missing by his wife on Monday, October 26. Four days later, a sheriff’s deputy had found his Jeep Laredo at the end of a dirt road south of Death Valley. His belongings had been rifled through. There was blood on the upholstery of his vehicle and what the police characterized as “signs of a struggle.” The investigation was proceeding as a case of foul play.

Lo thought about the blood drops on the bathroom sink, the forensic manual, the laminated map. She thought about his “top secret” plan. For a moment, it seemed clear to her what had happened. Then that moment passed and she thought about Jenny and Mrs. Stallworth and what they must be going through.

Jenny appeared in school the next week, brightly dressed but hollow-eyed. Lo wanted to say something and couldn’t imagine doing so. It was only chance that brought them together, for a few moments, in the little alcove outside the attendance office.

“I’m really sorry,” Lo whispered.

“Thanks,” Jenny replied without looking up.

“I’m sure they’ll find him,” Lo said.

“How would you know?” Jenny said quietly. “How in the fuck would you know?”

A day later, two police officers showed up on the doorstep of Lorena Saenz. The next era of her life had begun.