When Justine was ten she read a poem about French resisters during the Second World War in her children’s classics book. In it, a French hero was crucified to a barn door with bayonets and tormented by SS men before a crowd of weeping French patriots. The poet dwelt voluptuously on the hero’s torment, and the poem climaxed with the death of the smirking SS captain. It excited her even more than the cartoons that had induced her to make Richie tie her to the swing set. She kept the children’s classics under her bed so she could read it at night with a flashlight and masturbate.

They had moved from Lancelot to Action, Illinois. Richie was no longer at her disposal, and she hadn’t yet found anyone to take his place.

Action was a thriving industrial suburb outside of Chicago. Justine’s father was a successful cardiologist at the Action Medical Center, an interesting building that appeared to be made of plywood and concrete. Her father had told her mother that she couldn’t be his receptionist because they already had a receptionist, so her mother did volunteer work at a center for emotionally disturbed children instead. Their house was a large, wandering, one-story with a flamingo worked into the aluminum grille on the front door.

They had moved there during the summer, when the sidewalks of the new neighborhood were alive with lounging, bicycling, roaming kids. When Justine ventured out onto the pavement, she was accosted by three gum-chewing girls who looked like they were trying to find something wrong with her. But suburban Michigan kids have almost the same laconic, nasal speaking style as the kids of suburban Illinois, and she was immediately accepted into the group.

Justine was drawn to the most sexual of the girls in the neighborhood, Pam Donovan and Edie Bernard, who wore the tightest pants and tightest shirts over their tough little chests. Edie, the blonde, was even sophisticated enough to wear pink powder and black mascara. Although their friends described them as “cute,” they were not pretty. They were skinny and sharp-boned, with sullen, suspicious eyes, thin, violently teased hair, and faces generic to thousands of suburban little girls. But they were made beautiful by the erotic ferocity that suffused their limbs and eyes and lips.

Yet these girls, who harbored such power, were the most passive of the neighborhood gang. The three of them didn’t like to play tag or baseball or even to ride bikes. They liked to sit on the small squares of concrete that were called “porches,” sometimes getting up to walk around the block, getting whistled at and sprayed with light stones by boys. They talked about boys with a nervous mix of fear, disgust, and attraction, about girls with malice or displays of alliance, about their mothers with contempt, and about their bodies with a range of emotions from protective, reverent secrecy to loathing.

There were race riots in Detroit that summer and there was a lot of talk about that. Darcy Guido stood up to imitate Martin Luther King, tap dancing, rolling her eyes and pulling her lower lip down and sticking her tongue up to make weird wet lips that looked like the genitals of an orangutan. The day the national guard flew over their rooftops in helicopters, they stood in the streets and cheered. Even Pat Braiser’s mother came out on her concrete slab and said, “That’ll teach those animals to be decent!”

Justine sat quietly during the first days of the riot, hearing the distant people called animals and watching the genital-lipped, eye-rolling clowning. Her memory of Gemma rose up and stood mute, like a sign forbidding her to laugh at Darcy’s joke, even when Pam, her best friend, nudged her and said, “Why don’t you laugh?”

For days there were pictures of the riot on television. At dinner, Justine and her parents would sit at the table, eating and watching the dark figures run around on the screen while flames flickered in the blackened buildings. Her father would speak on the reprehensibility of rioting and violence, smartly wielding his utensils, the very posture of his haunches expressing the rightness of his disapproval. Her mother would agree, adding praise for Martin Luther King. The people on the TV apparently felt the same way; after showing clips of rioting or angry black spokespeople, they would console their viewers with old footage of Dr. King giving his famous dream speech. Justine became tired of seeing him, and of hearing him, and of hearing him praised. She didn’t see what was so great about him.

Then the riots were over and it was time to go to the Wonderland Mall for clothes. Justine loved Wonderland. It was dotted with shrubs and waste containers, there was a fountain with a rusting cube placed in the center of it. Muzak rolled over everything, decorously muffling sound and movement. Huge square portals led into great tiled expanses lined with row upon dizzying row of racks hung with clothes. Signs that said “Junior Miss,” “Cool Teen,” or “Little Miss Go-Go” in fat round letters protruded from the tops of the racks, some of them illustrated by teenaged cartoon girls with incredibly frail bodies, enormous staring eyes, tiny O-shaped mouths and large round heads with long straight swatches of brown or yellow hair.

The dresses on the Cool Teen racks seemed to have been manufactured in a country where no one sat at home waiting for their mother; it seemed that in wearing the hot orange and yellow polka-dotted “hip-hugger” skirt with matching vinyl belt, the paisley jumper with purple pockets, or the high-collared chartreuse dress, Justine would suddenly occupy a place in which her mother didn’t even exist.

She did real shopping, ironically, with her mother, but what she loved best was to go with Mrs. Bernard and Edie and Pam. All the way to Wonderland, she and her friends would lounge all over the back seat giggling about pubic hair or how stupid somebody was while Mrs. Bernard, a strangely thin woman with a face that looked like it was held in place with tacks, talked to herself in a low, not unattractive mutter. (Edie said her mother had a mustache that she tore off with hot wax, but Justine didn’t believe it.)

Once at the mall, the four of them would comb the grounds like a gang of cats, rifling the racks, plunging into dressing rooms, snacking savagely between shops. Mrs. Bernard would wander ahead, continually bush-whacked by salespeople who thought her mutter was addressed to them, leaving the girls to stare and giggle, and to furtively admire the groups of tough older kids lounging on the public benches, smoking cigarettes and sneering. Sometimes glamorous older boys would follow them saying “I’d like to pet your pussy” and other dirty things; this was exciting, like the poem about the crucified man, only it made her feel queasier as it was real and in public. It was horrible to be in front of people having the same feeling that she had while masturbating and thinking about torture. She was sure that Edie and Pam didn’t have feelings like that; probably they didn’t even masturbate. They blushed and giggled and said “You guys better stop it,” but they swung their purses and arched their backs, their eyes half-closed and their lips set in lewd, malicious smiles. Justine would imitate them, and when she did, sometimes a door would open and she’d step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut. The world of Justine alone under the covers with her own smells, her fingers at her wet crotch, was now the world of the mall filled with fat, ugly people walking around eating and staring. It was a huge world without boundaries; the clothes and record and ice cream stores seemed like cardboard houses she could knock down, the waddling mothers and pimple-faced loners like dazed pedestrians she was passing on a motorcycle.

Once, at Sears, she was sullenly picking through the dressing rooms, trying to find a vacant stall, when she flipped back a scratchy yellow curtain and saw a strange person. She was about Justine’s age and weird-looking, Justine thought, ugly, with pale cold skin, a huge exposed forehead, and blue plastic glasses on her face. She was fully dressed and slumped on the floor in a position of utter passivity and defeat, right against the mirror, staring at herself with the lack of expression that comes from extreme mental pain. Their eyes met for seconds—the stranger’s face faintly reflecting embarrassed humanity—and then Justine backed out. The sight of such mute, frozen pain was stunning and fascinating, like an animal with its legs hacked off. Justine had never seen such a naked expression on her parents’ faces, let alone on the face of a stranger. It made her feel queasiness and fear; it also made her want to poke at the queasiness and fear so she could feel it all the more. To see and feel something so raw in the mall was obscene, much more obscene than the whispering boys. She went to get Edie and Pam.

“Come and see,” she said, “there’s a drooling retard in the dressing room.”

Naturally they hurried back. Justine had imitated her deranged slump with embellishments of jaw and eyeballs, and they approached the dressing room with a sense of cruel, illicit excitement. But when they got to the dressing stall and flung the curtain back, there was no one there. They sighed with disappointment and turned to go, and there was the girl again, standing up and peeping at them from behind the curtain of another dressing stall. Her face was accusing and almost snotty. Edie and Pam knew it was her, but somehow they couldn’t make fun of her, even though they would’ve liked to; her staring face made them feel caught.

“God, what a queer,” said Pam as they left the dressing room.

They found Edie’s mother eating candy necklaces at the coffee counter of Woolworth’s and left.

When the first day of school arrived, Justine had accumulated ten interchangeable outfits. And, in spite of all the fussing, picking, and mutual encouragement from her friends in the purchase of them, she was afraid that when she walked into the classroom she would be ostracized for fashion reasons that would become horribly clear to her as she made her way to her desk through a blinding sheet of jeers. What if none of her neighborhood friends were in the class, or even if they were, what if they turned out to be hopeless retards so low down on the social scale that association with them condemned her forever?

She was so numbed with fear that she accepted, without retort, her mother’s breakfast table assurances that she looked “adorable” in her yellow and turquoise checked skirt and yellow knee socks.

The drive to school would’ve taken place in silence, if it hadn’t been for infuriating Adventures in Good Music, which she hadn’t the strength to object to, on the radio. She felt the whole magical summer of huddling safely with her friends, talking trash, and rejecting black people in a blur of hot bright days amid the changeless squares and rectangles of the trusted landscape had taken place in another world that would have no bearing on this terrible new place she was headed.

This was not true. The assigned classroom was filled with murderously aggressive boys and rigid girls with animal eyes who threw spitballs, punched each other, snarled, whispered, and stared one another down. And shadowing all these gestures and movements were declarations of dominance, of territory, the swift, blind play of power and weakness.

Justine saw right away that she’d be at home here.

When they were let out on the asphalt playground that morning, she found Edie and Pam, and they huddled together, chewing their gum and sending sharp stares of appraisal over their shoulders. They told each other who was cool and who was queer. By the afternoon recess, they had gathered three other girls about them, Debby, Dody, and Deidre. The D girls were all big and tough, charmed perhaps by Justine’s sullen beauty and the sophisticated style of Edie and Pam.

Justine had made friends with Dody, the pretty one of the three. Her prettiness was of an unusual type in this time of anorexic cuties with ironed hair and white lipstick, she being a big raw-boned girl with large fleshy shoulders and hips, and big active hands and feet attached to long, confused arms and legs, multidirectional like rubber. Her eyes were extraordinary, huge and brown, shot with mad glowing strands of yellow and gold which, in conjunction with the tawny mass of hair sprawling frantic and uncontrollable on her head, gave her the look of a restless, fitful lioness. Her size and weight gave her no center; Justine’s first retrospective image of her is of Dody splayed, arms and legs, as though in the middle of a tornado, only laughing, open-mouthed and loud. The next image is an actual memory of the time Dody, humorously displaying her size and strength, picked up a scrawny fourth-grader by a fistful of hair and swung her in a complete circle three times before letting the screaming creature fly. Justine remembers her strange vulnerability, her terror of thunderstorms and spiders, her moment of wide-eyed panic that time she and Justine were making out in the Mall restroom with two boys they’d met, when Justine had to hold her trembling paw. Ten years later, it had not surprised her to read by chance in the paper that Dody LaRec, college junior, had become an unusual statistic, one of the few females to commit suicide with a bullet to the brain.

The others, Debby and Deidre, were not pretty, but they exuded an awful cynicism that impressed people and they knew dirty things—Deidre claiming, at the age of eleven, to have “done it.” Besides, they were brutal. The six of them terrified the other kids as they patrolled the playground, looking for trouble. In gym class they were always on the top team, hand-picking the ablest girls to be on their side, pitting themselves against the feeblest people, whom they happily pounded. Parents were always calling to complain about them pulling down their son’s pants or dropping someone’s lunch in the toilet. Teachers cajoled, pleaded, and occasionally ranted, but they couldn’t do anything and they knew it. Justine believed teachers to be secretly on their side as they trampled the weak and the uncool, people adults have to accept, and, as a result, become like.

There was only a small group of boys who weren’t afraid of them, on account of their being so tough themselves. They were small, sinewy boys whose main strengths were their monstrous voices and inhuman indifference to pain. They were always getting bashed with baseballs, splitting their skulls in rock fights, chipping their teeth, ripping open their elbows and knees, beating each other up as often as they beat retards and queers. They hung around with Justine and her group on the playground, pushing and pinching and pulling up their skirts. Sometimes they’d stand quietly and talk together, and Justine would feel her private torture feeling glowing through her lower trunk. She particularly liked little Ricky Holland, whose beautiful, almost dainty hands were such a contrast to his morbidly cruel personality. He was a loner within his gang, almost protected by the other boys in some unconscious way, as if they knew that just a slight shift in their perception would render him a victim rather than a cohort. He seemed happiest when torturing small animals by himself, yet he had an inexplicable kind aspect that appeared randomly and could lead him to risk rejection, like the time he protected a crippled girl who had been circled by the others. He was the first among them to smoke cigarettes, which, since drugs had not yet come to suburban playgrounds, was as chic as one could be. Justine loved his expressionless face, his blank, lusterless eyes. There was nothing in that face anyone could hurt or even approach. Love would find no opening there except perhaps in that quirky kindness which appeared for no reason and vanished again, too transient to support a reckless prepubescent ardor ready to crucify itself on a heartless boy. He paid no attention to her.

Meanwhile her mother worked at the home for emotionally disturbed children. This was very embarrassing to Justine, and she took pains to make sure her friends never found out about it, forbidding her mother to mention it in front of them. “I’d die if they know my own mom works with the ’tards,” she said, hoping her mother would be ashamed. But her mother just answered, “There isn’t any need for them to know. I understand darling, peer approval is very important at this age.”

Justine alternately despised and admired her mother. It was hard not to admire this tall still-beautiful woman who dressed so well, who kept active, who led the dinner conversation with a ringing voice. Compared to other mothers she was an athlete, still rising in the morning to exercise in her leotard. She impressed all of Justine’s friends, who thought she looked like somebody on TV. Her mother never told her she couldn’t buy a dress because it was too short, like some mothers did. She did talk to her about being “nice” in reference to boys and to bullying other kids, but Justine understood from her tone of voice that “nice” had nothing to do with what anybody really felt or thought or observed but was something everybody had to pretend. Justine could also tell from her mother’s voice that her mother believed this pretense was very important.

This was where she began to despise her mother; once she started she couldn’t stop. She despised her earnest expression when she talked about a “breakthrough” made by some mental case at the center; she despised her straight posture, her diets, her exercises, her humming along to Adventures in Good Music. When they were in the same room together and her mother farted (silently, of course, but Justine could smell it), she felt such revulsion and hatred she wanted to hit her mother in the face. She wanted to see the attractive propriety of her mother’s face collapse into tears, loud, ugly tears.

She never saw this, but once she heard it. She was awakened late one night by the sound of it, although at first she didn’t know what it was; at first she thought the ungainly sounds were a dream. Then she heard her father’s voice. He was angry. Her mother was crying, a deep moaning cry, saying something over and over again to him. Justine was stunned with horror and disbelief. Her father raised his voice and said a bunch of words, out of which Justine could only distinguish “stupid cow” and “off the floor.” And then her mother was quiet. Justine’s heart pounded deep and hard in her chest.

The next morning she watched her parents at breakfast. Her mother was pink and perfectly madeup, briskly leading the breakfast conversation as usual. What Justine now noticed was the reason she was leading it; her father, dourly pushing his eggs around on his plate, was making polite noises, not really responding to her. At first she thought it was because they’d had a fight, but as the week went on she realized he was acting as he always did. Justine thought: He doesn’t like her either.

The thought was disconcerting, and she pushed it away, but it kept coming back, especially when her father began staying away for overnight conferences. Sometimes it would make her gloat, sometimes she’d try to hurt her mother with falsely innocent questions about where dad was. Other times she’d imagine her mother looking old and weak, crying on the floor while her father scorned her, and it would fill her with fear and pity. She would hate her father then and have fantasies of yelling at him, warning him to leave her mother alone. But she never heard him say those things to her mother again, although some nights she lay awake listening for it. Sometimes too, her father would stop ignoring her mother and would act the way he used to, smiling at her, hugging her shoulders, standing beside her, handsome and proud, calling her “my lady.” When this happened, the things Justine had heard that night seemed like something that had happened between people who were only pretending to be her parents.

At the beginning of October a new kid entered Justine’s class. Her name was Cheryl Thomson. She was big, she had acne, and she wore old plaid skirts what were obviously not from Sears or Wards. This would’ve been all right; some very cool kids—Dody among them—dressed this way. But they had a sloppy panache, a looselimbed grace that made their flapping shirt-tails and shifting skirts seem sassy; halting, thick-bodied Cheryl did not. She sat in her seat with her stubby hands in her lap, talking to people politely before class, a dull dreamy look coating her gray eyes. Then the teacher came in and, in an innocent effort to help everyone get to know the new student, opened class by asking Cheryl questions meant to gently reveal her, for example, “What is your favorite food?” Cheryl did all right with that, but when asked about music, instead of saying “the Monkees” or “the Beatles” she answered “country music,” causing a ripple of disbelief to alert the room. From that point on, every answer she gave confirmed her to be a hopeless alien in the world of primary-colored surfaces. She wanted to be a fire fighter when she grew up! Her favorite TV show was Andy of Mayberry! She liked to go fishing! Every answer seemed to come out of some horrible complex individuality reeking with humanity, the clarity and trust in her soft voice made them squirm with discomfort.

In the lunchroom, everybody was talking about how queer she was. Her second day at school, somebody tripped her in the hall; the following week somebody put a tack on her seat. When she sat on it, she cried, and little Marla Jacob sneered, “God, what an emotional!” From that day on she was known as “Emotional,” the worst insult imaginable.

Her presence changed the whole composition of the class, uniting everyone, even other unpopular kids, against her. Everything she said became further proof of her stupidity, her social failure. Every ugly and ridiculous thing introduced into any discussion, in the classroom, on the playground, at the mall, was “like Emotional.” She was most often taunted verbally, but there was also physical abuse—a shower of orchestrated spit balls, an ambush by a dozen or so boys and girls who struck her legs and arms with their belts.

Emotional’s reaction was by turns angry, hurt, bewildered, but her most constant expression was one of helpless good nature. She was too even tempered to remain angry or brooding; she always tried to reverse the tide against her, to make jokes, to be positive, to join in. Once Justine saw a smiling face drawn in Magic Marker on her notebook with the words “Happy-Go-Lucky” written underneath and knew, sickeningly, that it was true, in spite of everything.

Of course, Justine took part in the Emotional pogrom. As with all the other little social massacres she’d taken part in, she was more a goader and abettor than an attacker; she was too small to be a real bully and not aggressive enough to be a ringleader. Besides, she was secretly too ambivalent. When she looked at the chalky, rigid face of some kid who was being shoved to and fro between Deidre and Debby, she felt deep, excruciating enjoyment as well as equally deep discomfort that she deliberately provoked, like she’d chew a cold sore. These two feelings met and skewered her between them while she giggled and cajoled and incited her friends to riot, making her feel monstrously alive and enlarged beyond the boundaries of herself, exploding into the world like her memory of tornado-splayed Dody—yet unable to bear being in the world, turning in on herself like an insect run through with a needle.

These feelings were magnified by Emotional, who, within a few months, became something other than human. Justine always joined in the teasing, yet the sight of Emotional’s unhappy face brought darkness up from some thoughtless pit within her, made her turn away and frown when she should’ve been laughing. When she looked at Emotional she looked into the face of her most private fantasy, the victim crucified before a jeering crowd.

To Justine’s discomfort, Emotional began appearing in her dreams. The most outstanding of these dreams featured her and Emotional in the front-line trenches of a war. There were other people in the trench, but there existed between her and the class queer a deep unspoken friendship that was expressed in meaningful glances and, at one point, a fraught hand clasping. The height of the dream was reached when Justine lay injured and paralyzed from an enemy blast, and Emotional ran to her side, ripping off a piece of her blouse to bind Justine’s wounds.

It was perplexing: in many of the dreams Emotional helped or even rescued Justine in various ways, which in real life she couldn’t possibly do. If anything, brooded Justine, she could help Emotional if she wanted to. If she wanted to. Of course, she didn’t want to, but what if she did? She began to nurse strange fantasies of advising Emotional on how to improve her wardrobe, even accompanying her to the mall for a shopping trip, sitting with her at lunch, walking home with her, hearing the weird things that doubtless went on in her mind.

Emotional reappeared in her dreams, smiling and waving.

One morning after a particularly mysterious and moving dream, Justine found herself in a gym class that had been divided into groups, each group performing various athletic acts. Emotional was in her group. As usual, whenever it was Emotional’s turn, the others would try to make her fail. When everyone had to jump over a pole held by two kneeling girls, all would finish their jump with a pause by a pole-bearer and a whispered “make Emotional trip!” Which they did; when Emotional made her jump, the pole came up mid-leap. There was an amusing facial wobble, a mid-air flounder, and Emotional thudded down on her hands and knees. She cried; everybody laughed and said, “God, Emotional!” But Justine, although she laughed too, felt unwanted remorse. This remorse became a secret weight of gentleness and sorrow within her which stayed, no matter how hard she tried to kill it. That afternoon she decided she was going to stop hurting Emotional.

She didn’t want to voice her new tolerance to anyone at school, but what good was it if nobody knew about it? If Emotional didn’t know about it? She would see Emotional and itch with curiosity about her. What did it feel like to be despised and victimized by everyone? How would Emotional react if she knew that in this nest of enemies she had an ally?

One day when Justine’s pack of friends was not with her at the end of the day, she found herself a bare three feet from Emotional, both of them in the act of closing their lockers. Justine couldn’t help it; she turned her head and held the other girl’s flitting glance. “Hi, Cheryl,” she said.

They left school together and continued walking for a few blocks before they had to part. Justine did this because it was late and she didn’t see anyone she knew and because the novelty of talking with this outcast was too fascinating to let go of quickly. But mainly she walked with Emotional because when she allowed contact to occur between them, she was touched by her in a way she had no experience with and therefore no resistance against. Every aspect of Emotional’s body—the shy ducking motion of her head, her injured eyes, her small steps, her arms held protectively close to her body, her soft dislocated voice—was the manifestation of a deep woundedness which Justine, without the harsh interference of her friends, felt acutely. She wanted to salve this wound, to shield it. It was a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time, not even for herself, and it was such a tender feeling that she wanted to prolong it.

That night as she lay in bed, she fantasized about standing between Emotional and the whole brutish world, protecting her, creating a little place between them where she’d be free to like her hillbilly music and wear her uncool clothes and nobody would mind.

She unexpectedly got the chance to act out this fantasy when the next day, before school, she was confronted during the usual pre-class homeroom melee by Debby, Deidre and another girl with terrifying big black hair. They wanted to know: “Are you friends with Emotional?”

She was only telling the truth when she said “No,” but then they wanted to know if it was true she’d walked with her.

“I just wanted to see the queer kinds of things she’d talk about. I just wanted to know what weirdos say. I was pretending to be nice, but she could tell I hated her.”

Later that day she and Dody were alone, ratting their hair in the rest room after school. “Do you really hate Emotional?” Justine asked.

Dody stopped in midrat and stared. “Of course I hate her, what are you, some kind of retard?”

“No really, why do you hate her?”

“Because she’s retarded.”

“Yeah but if she’s retarded, shouldn’t we help her? Shouldn’t we be nice to her if she can’t help being weird?”

“God, Justine, sometimes I wonder about you.” Dody produced a compact and vigorously ground some pink grit into her skin.

The next day Justine had to put up with a lot of sarcastic comments. But she found that once she’d begun expressing what she felt, it was hard to stop; she became reckless, irritated by the choke collar of public opinion. Although she was frightened, she couldn’t help yanking against the restraint, and the more disapproval she got, the harder she tugged against it. A tough little person within her rose and asserted itself. She stuck by what she’d said, more and more vehemently, until finally she exploded. “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore so just shut up, okay?” The other girls stared at her, shocked.

They began savaging poor Emotional even more viciously than before, especially in Justine’s presence. But there was a lack of confidence in their voices as they picked and abused. After a few days it became half-hearted and then stopped. The subject of Emotional was all but dropped in the lunchroom, where Justine sat in her usual place among the others, defiantly eating her dried-up burger and fries.

It was during gym class that the miracle occurred; the girls were dividing into teams, the most popular ones ritually selecting their team mates, when Debby suddenly bawled out, “I want Cheryl! Cheryl Thomson!” There was a moment of silence, and then someone on the other team said, “Aw! I wanted her!” in a voice usually used to coo over the cuteness of babies and bunnies.

Emotional took her place on the team looking like she’d been hit in the head with a brick and was stoically preparing for another blow. She played her usual clumsy but serviceable game, and every successful move she made was wildly cheered with greeting-card enthusiasm while her fumbles were loudly excused in the same awful tone. Her expression throughout was the same as when she was abused: hurt, bewildered, remote. Did she have any suspicion that she was a new fad?

It lasted for a few weeks. In the lunchroom, in the halls, on teams of all kinds, Emotional was the hip thing. Her presence was demanded everywhere although she didn’t say or do much but stare, sad and frozen. This was further proof of her exotic idiocy, and they cooed and twinkled over her as if she were a wounded animal in a box.

Justine didn’t know what to think. She felt ashamed and angry. The sound of the others “being nice to Emotional” was even worse than their cruelty—her cruelty—which at least had been a clear, consistent message, potentially refutable by its recipient. This insulting mockery of friendship hadn’t been what she had imagined when she’d resolved to be kind, but she was afraid to interfere again.

Mercifully, they soon got bored with it, and the gym teacher had once more to force a reluctant, groaning team to accept Emotional. There was some change, however; after such an elaborate show of friendship and kindness, it was hard for them to revert completely to all-out sadism, and all but the meanest kids pretty much ignored her. She finished out the school year as a lumbering ghostly presence, her humanity unknown and unacknowledged.

When Justine started seventh grade in the new junior high, Deidre, who had breasts and hair between her legs, began seeing a boy from the eighth grade. He went to a different junior high school across town; she had met him while sitting beside the copper cube fountain in the mall, smoking a cigarette alone. His name was Greg Mills. He had a concave torso, thin legs, narrow eyes, long lank hair, and red pimples which only added to his lurid charm. He wore a black vinyl windbreaker and spoke in monosyllables. Justine was secretly uncomfortable around him and wondered why, if he was so cool, he didn’t have a girlfriend his own age.

Deidre described going with him and his friends to an empty housing development, breaking into one of the finished houses, and throwing a party with their transistor radios, smoking, drinking, making out, and doing it, leaving ashes and stains on the bedspread of the display bedroom. It shocked and thrilled Justine to picture them sitting in the cold deserted rooms with their jackets on, smoke and alcohol in their throats. She imagined Deidre pulling her ski pants off, her bottom on the bedspread, the mattress naked underneath. She would be all goose flesh and tiny leg hairs sticking up, her feet clammy, her genitals hairy and weird between her big thighs. Did Greg pull her legs apart and look at her or did he just stick his thing (reportedly hairy itself) inside her in the dark? Did he take off his pants and show his butt or did he just unzip? Justine would look at Greg and decide that either way was nasty and exciting. She admired Deidre tremendously.

Deidre began asking if they wanted to come with her some time. “Not to some scuzzy development,” said Justine. “I don’t wanna freeze my butt.” Neither did anybody else until one Saturday Deidre called Justine and Dody and told them Greg’s parents had left for the day, that he was inviting over some really cute eighth grade guys, did they want to come?

Greg’s house was just like Justine’s and Dody’s and everyone else’s. Greg and Deidre were on the couch, and there were two other boys, one of them with the empty pretty eyes of a TV star. Justine saw, with a rush of excitement and fear, that they were drinking alcohol mixed with Coca-Cola. She didn’t want to drink it, but she didn’t want to say no in a prudish way, so when one of them offered it to her, she turned it into an occasion for sexual tension, saying, “Uh uh, I know what you guys are trying to do!” “Yeah,” said Dody, taking her cue, “you wanna get us drunk and make us do things.” She smiled in fake innocence, fake sophistication, and real sexuality. Her gold eyes were half-lidded and glinting.

The boys liked this. “You’d better be good,” said Greg. “We’re baby-sitting you seventh graders, and if you don’t do what we say, you’re gonna get it.”

The game was on. They sat on the couch, moving closer and closer, the boys getting drunk, the girls getting giggly and excited. They teased and flirted and made fun of each other, the boys commanding the girls to do things, like pick a piece of paper up off the floor. The girls would fiercely resist and then do it, pouting and flouncing. There was a thick current of feeling coursing through the room, a wide band of glittering yellow-gold that swept them off the floor and into another sphere. At first Justine stood aloof and looked at this process with wonder; then she let it move her.

Greg and Deidre left the room, disappearing behind a closed door. The two other boys became rougher and more demanding; one of them told Dody to make him a drink, and when she didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed her hair and pulled her toward the kitchen. “You leave my friend alone!” Justine yelled in the phony little-girl voice employed by sluts and whores the world over (and she an actual little girl!) as she leapt up to grab the boy’s shirt, pummeling his back with deliberate futility. She and Dody overpowered him and pinned him to the wall, greedily savaging him with tickling fingers until his friend leapt off the couch and the girls ran screaming until they were cornered in a parental closet.

“You guys are really gonna get it now,” advised the blank-eyed boy. “You have to stay in here and wait while we decide what we’re gonna do. You have to stand back to back with your hands behind you.”

The boys left the room, and they did as they were told, standing and telling each other how afraid they were in thrilled voices. “Do you think we should try and run for it?” asked Dody. “No, we’d better not,” Justine said. “They’d really kill us then.” Justine thought of her parents sitting at the table eating dinner, her mother daintily picking an errant morsel from her teeth, and for a minute she actually did feel afraid. What if she really was in another sphere and couldn’t get back to the old one? Then she relaxed; but of course, it would be as simple as the times she lay in bed and, putting her hand between her legs, became a victim nailed to a wall, and then, as her body regained its tempo, became Justine once more.

The boys came back into the room. One of them said, “Okay LaRec, follow me.” And Dody sneering, “Oh, I’m really scared,” followed him into the bathroom, visible at the end of a short hall, leaving Justine to stare at this pretty-eyed creature with chiseled features, peachy skin, and no human expression. Her heart pounded. She wanted to sit down. He forbade her. He told her his friend was “going to strip Dody and finger her.” Her underwear became wet. She told him Dody was probably beating his friend’s butt, but no sound of butt-beating emanated from the bathroom. They stood silently, Justine’s breath getting quicker and shallower, every detail of the boy’s bored, sideways-looking face becoming larger by the moment. She felt as if he were right next to her, his breath filling her pores, his smell up her nose. The longer they stood the more genuinely afraid she became. The more afraid she became, the more bolted to the floor she was, her armpits damp, her throat closed, her pelvis inflamed and disconnected from her body, her head disconnected from her neck. She heard Deidre laughing in the bedroom.

The bathroom door opened, and Dody paraded out with her boy lurking and smirking behind. Her face was red but her body exuded pride.

“Come on,” said Justine’s boy, “your turn.”

The bathroom was pink-tiled and green-rugged, the sink decorated with large, stylish shells and glass jars filled with bubble bath balls. The boy sat on the green toilet and looked at her. “You hafta get over my lap,” he said.

Justine thrust her hip out and tried to look like she was making fun of him, but she didn’t know how to do that without her friends. The music from a ballpoint pen commercial was playing in her head, and she imagined huge-eyed Cool Teens dancing to it. “I’m not gonna do that,” she said.

“You hafta.”

Back and forth they went. Heat and tension sat between her legs; the rest of her felt cold. He grabbed her hand and pulled her face down across his lap. She tried to appear graceful, feeling heavy and fat on his slim haunches. She looked at the toilet cleaning brush in the corner as he pulled down her pants. Her breath held itself as his numb fingers pushed into her numb contracting body. He fingered her with strange mechanical movements. His hand felt far away even when his fingers were inside her, as if he were doing something someone had told him to do and was pleased because he’d succeeded in doing it, not because he liked it. His remoteness made him authoritarian and huge, like a robot in a comic book. It inflamed her. She thought of Richie whipping her at the swing set amid the red flames of her little cartoon hell. His fingers hurt her. She gripped his thighs—and, in contrast to his hand, felt him there, a quick boyish spirit in the warm, feeling body of a young human. “It hurts,” she said.

Perfunctorily, he stopped, took his fingers out of her, wiped them on her bare ass and moved his hands so that she could stand.

She walked out of the bathroom feeling like a busty blonde on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; womanly, proud, almost inert in the majesty of her dumb, fleshy body.

Then she and the D girls went to Dody’s house and had ice cream and vanilla wafers.

She never saw those particular boys again but, although she had occasion to “make out” a few times after that, the boys who kissed her and felt her tiny breasts never made her feel the way she had felt while standing in Greg Mills’s house. The only person who provoked that feeling again was a girl—a girl she didn’t even like much! She was Rose Loris, a mousey pretty thing with thin lips and eyebrows who wanted with fierce anemic intensity to be “in the group” and who was tolerated on the fringes because she was Debby’s friend, although it was a friendship based mainly on Rose’s devotion to Debby, who was always standing Rose up at the mall.

This intent yet drooping girl with the shoulders of a rag doll and the alert, quizzical head of a bird, whose sleepy limbs seemed at odds with her straight spine, followed Justine around wanting to be her friend. This annoyed or flattered Justine, depending on her mood. Rose was always saying weird things that she thought would sound cool, and it embarrassed Justine. Still, she sometimes went to Rose’s house to watch television and to look at Mr. Loris’s pornography collection.

Among the many magazines, postcards, and books, Mr. Loris had a comic entitled Dripping Delta Dykes about two huge fleshy rivals who, through a strange plot with many perplexing changes of locale, battled each other in their changing lingerie ensembles. On the kitchen table, in the boxing ring, on tropical isles, in hospital rooms (where they worked as nurses), they met and settled one another’s hash, the brunette, after a lot of hair-pulling, arm-twisting, and tit-squeezing, generally trussing the blonde up in a variety of spread-eagled poses so she could stick different objects into her vagina.

Although Rose laughed and squealed “Gross!” while perusing this book, Justine noticed she kept coming back to it over and over. Rose’s reaction irritated Justine; it made her want to shove or slap Rose. Instead she said, “God, this is no big deal, I’ve done this stuff with Debby. It’s fun.”

Rose’s stunned face seemed to fractionally withdraw, and for a moment Justine was embarrassed at her lie. But Rose drew near again. Then, as had happened in Greg Mills’s house, they crossed a border together.

Justine went on talking, saying that not only had she and Debby done the things depicted in the comic but that everybody did this, didn’t Rose know? She never knew if Rose believed her, but at the moment she also knew it didn’t matter, that Rose was going to pretend she believed her. The torture feeling was roused and roaring as she wheedled and teased, moving closer to the agitated, awkward kid until she was all but cornered against the wall, pulling her hair across her lips, Justine whispering that Rose was a baby, a goody-goody, that she didn’t know anything.

It took surprisingly little to get her in the basement bathroom, where they were least apt to be discovered.

It is with a mixture of incredulity, guilt, and conceit that she remembers that dreamy session in the Lysol-smelling toilet with the concrete walls of a jail cell. She was incredulous at Rose’s docility; every cajolement or command elicited another trembling surrender, and every surrender filled Justine with a boiling greed that pushed her further into the violation she’d started as a game. The occasional feeble resistance—Rose’s pleading hand on the arm that rampaged down her pants—only increased Justine’s swelling arrogance and made her crave to rip away another flimsy layer of the hapless girl’s humanity. Justine felt her eyes and face become shielded and impenetrable as Rose’s became more exposed; she felt her personality filling the room like a gorging swine. Rose was unquestionably terrified and doubtless would’ve liked to stop, but she had been stripped of the territory on which one must stand to announce such decisions, as well as most of her clothes. For although Justine had only meant to cop a feel, within a few delirious moments Rose was placed on the closed lid of the toilet, her pants and panties in a wad on the floor. Her shirt was pulled up to reveal her tiny breast mounds, her legs splayed and tied with her own knee socks to conveniently parallel towel racks, her hands ritualistically bound behind her back with a measuring tape, her mouth stuffed with a small roll of toilet paper.

Justine stood and surveyed her victim. She was shocked at the sight of the hairless genitals; they reminded her of a fallen baby bird, blind and naked, shivering on the sidewalk. It disgusted her to think she had something like that too, and she focused the fullness of her disgust on Rose. There were no more cajoling words, the mouse had been hypnotized, she was free to strike at leisure.

Fascinated by the meek unprotected slit but too appalled to touch it, she plucked a yellowing toothbrush from its perch above the sink—pausing to glance at herself in the mirror as she did so—and stuck the narrow handle into her playmate’s vagina. From the forgotten region of Rose’s head came a truly pathetic sound; her face turned sideways and crumpled like an insect under a murdering wad of tissue, and tears ran from her closed eyelids.

But it was not the tears that brought Justine to her senses, it was the stiff, horrified contraction of the violated genitals which she felt even through the ridiculous agent of the toothbrush, a resistance more adamant than any expressed so far. Suddenly she realized what she was doing.

She left the sobbing child crouched on the cold concrete floor, pulling on her clothes with trembling fingers, while she bounded up the basement stairs and out the back door yelling, “I’m gonna tell everybody what I made you do!”

But she didn’t. Out of a muddled combination of shame and barely acknowledged pity, she kept it to herself, for her own frenzied, crotch-rubbing nocturnal contemplation.

Rose was absent from school for a week and then appeared like an injured animal dragging its crushed hind legs. No one remarked how her head, previously so busy and alert, had joined the collapse of her shoulders, or how her cheerful little spine had somehow crumpled. She avoided Justine and the gang, then tentatively approached and realized no one knew. She once accompanied Justine home from school in an abject silence that Justine was too embarrassed to break, except when they both mumbled “Bye.”

Although Justine told no one, the other girls sensed some new vulnerability in Rose, unconsciously recognized the loss of that nervous puppy spirit that had been her particular charm. They became aggressive and cruel to her; Debby was especially unkind. Rose walked home with Justine one more time and, at the corner where they would’ve said goodbye, blurted out an invitation to Justine to come play the game they played before, in the bathroom. Justine snarled and turned away. Rose never came near the gang again. Since she was not in Justine’s class, Justine only caught occasional glimpses of her in the halls or on the periphery of the playground, wandering by herself or standing with a crowd of other mousey unpopular girls.

This incident did not interfere with Justine’s other make-out activities, except in one way: after a squatting self-examination over a mirror, she vowed that while they could touch it all they wanted, she’d never allow anyone to look at that ugly thing between her legs. But she was only eleven and knew nothing at all about her future, so one can’t be too hard on her for breaking vows made at this time.