The Shades moved again right after the eighth grade year ended. Dr. Shade had been offered a prestigious position at a cardiology clinic in the lush suburb of Deere Parke, Michigan, and the Shades were ready to claim the rewards of his profession.

Kids in Deere Parke didn’t hang out on the street, at least not thirteen-year-olds, so Justine didn’t meet anyone the entire summer. This didn’t bother her. She drifted into a pleasant world of television and magazines which led, to her surprise, to reading books. Each book was an invisible tunnel leading to a phantom world that existed silently parallel to real life, into which one could vanish then emerge without anyone knowing. Hardy, Dickens, Poe, Chekhov—she could barely understand the way the characters spoke, but it only made the experience more exotic, more secret, something to which no adolescent social rules applied. How had the hard-edged furniture, neon signs, and minimal hot-colored clothes evolved from the baroque book world, the complex, multilayered universe populated by people who spoke so elaborately and died of tuberculosis? It frightened her to think the world changed so quickly.

Her parents deeply approved of her reading, especially her father.

Her father had grown full and hale during the Action years. He presented himself with his chest pushed out, his eyes vibrant with outgoing energy that allowed nothing in. He came into rooms and clapped his hard little hands together and said, “Well!” His silences were imperious excretions that nobly enshrouded him as he read The New York Times. When they went to eat at restaurants, he gave loud speeches at the table. When they rented a cottage in the Upper Peninsula, he stood calf-deep in the waters of Lake Michigan in his bathing trunks and pretended he was conducting an orchestra while his wife and daughter lolled on the beach. Justine watched him jerking his arms above the waves and wondered why he didn’t look ridiculous.

He took the entire summer as a vacation before beginning his new position, and Justine spent a lot of time with him and her mother. In Action an entire summer of this would’ve been unbearable, but in a new environment where no one was there to see, it was different. In the afternoon she went with her father on long car trips, during which they viewed the new neighborhood and discussed politics and art. He always wanted to know what she was reading and what she thought of it, what were “the main themes.” He would listen intently, vigorously nodding his head. “All art should be about the world,” he would say. “It isn’t just some pretty story about what’s going on in the artist’s mind. It’s about the universal truths, the social truths, the struggle toward decency and equality.” The words awed her so, she didn’t even notice that they were in distinct contradiction to what she read for. The stately lawns, delicate trees, and winding concrete walks of Deere Parke sailed past as though unfolding from her father’s words, a splendid physical manifestation of his orderly sentiments.

At night she sat in the living room with her parents and watched newscasters tell stories illustrated by dramatic film clips of men being led away in handcuffs, men talking behind desks, men giving speeches, men angrily shaking their fingers, and, at the end, smiling women serving muffins to old people or playing with children. Her father praised her for taking an interest in the world. She liked to hear him praise her, but she vaguely knew that she didn’t watch the news for the reasons her father thought she watched it. It simply relaxed her to watch the parade of events organized by newscasters who appeared in orderly sequence desk after desk. The nodding, smiling faces of posing politicians especially relaxed her. It was great to see these smooth-voiced gray images confirm that there existed an apparatus run by men in suits that on the surface had nothing to do with her life and yet supported everything around her—grocery stores, malls, schools—acting as a deep terra firma for her to run around on.

In mid-August the Shades joined the Glade of Dreams country club, and Justine briefly encountered her peers. They were older than she and tall, with round, buttery muscles, modulated voices, and oval nails with neat cuticles. They had none of the raw toughness of her friends from Action, and Justine, while not afraid of them, did not quite know how to approach them. She stalked around the pool in her tiny black two-piece, gloating when older men looked at her. The men were fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their saggy-bottomed hips and their wide-legged stance as they stood staring, their thick pink lips smiling at thirteen-year-old Justine, as if they could know every single thing about her merely by looking at her in her swimsuit while they, on the contrary, remained sweating, lotion-oily sphinxes, about whom she could comprehend nothing, revelling in their complex ugly humanity. She looked at them with dumb, shielded eyes, an imitation of wide-eyed young girlhood she had seen in magazines. They were from the world of the evening news, like her father, part of the apparatus controlling even the little lapping lakes. They were hideous, she wanted nothing to do with them, yet she was happy to intersect with them in that way, playing a magazine girl, a creature they viewed with pleasure and relief. “You flirt well, Justine,” remarked her mother.

On the first day of school Justine was scared. She stared at the mirror again and again trying to decide whether she was ugly or cute, applying another layer of white lipstick, then taking it off. She was confident as a result of her social success in Action, but deeper than that confidence was the fear that had also accompanied her on the first day of school in Illinois.

At first it looked as though her fear would be confirmed: after ten minutes of home room, she could tell that the kids here were different from the old Action crowd. She was too young to think in terms of economic class, but she saw that skirts were longer and modestly looser, makeup lighter, shoes cleatless. Only a few girls with dandruff and submissive eyes ratted their hair. Everyone seemed to be wearing huge sweaters with soft fuzzy hairs protruding from them. She sat sweating, waiting to be made fun of.

But she wasn’t. All those hours spent running with mobs, tormenting other children, and having sex in bathrooms had created an aura of sensuality and mystique that she radiated without effort. Besides, she was pretty, even in her blobby eyeliner and subtly ratted hair.

In history class she sat next to an intriguing girl in the back of the room, separated from the distant teacher by rows of heads and a lazy cloud of whispers and note-passing. The girl’s dress was a lowcut wisp of baleful black with a cinched waist, short flared skirt, and elaborate sleeves of lace and chiffon rolling off her shoulders in histrionic puffs. Her face was pale and intelligent, she had honey brown hair, an elegantly crooked nose, and wide, full lips. All of her features were larger and more adult than the pettishly powdered faces around her. She wore no makeup other than a set of obviously false eyelashes. She sat with her body twisted dramatically sideways, her long black-stockinged legs crossed once at the knee and again at the ankle, a Chinese puzzle of tension and beauty, while her torso leaned over the desk with exaggerated indifference. She was sketching in a sketch pad. Was she an artist? Justine noticed a huge book open in her lap, for the moment ignored. She was an intellectual! Her strange, temperate gray eyes met Justine’s. “Hi,” she said.

Within a week Justine was walking home from school with Watley Goode. Watley’s house was decorated in lime green, yellow, and cream—except for Watley’s room which was primary blue, red, and white. Watley’s mother was a fashionable woman who wore checked pant suits and high heels, who made complicated three-tier cookies, watercolor paintings, and shellacked découpage lunch boxes plastered with images cut from magazines. She was a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic who had to take special brain medicine and who would sometimes go nuts anyway and suddenly start yelling things like “Penis!” or “Vagina!” in public. Justine was very impressed; it was the first time she’d met a mother as glamorous as her own.

Watley herself was more glamorous than anyone Justine had ever known. Instead of pictures of TV stars taped to her walls, she had glass-covered museum-size posters of an art deco peacock, a vase of flowers, a woman with large breasts. The antique four-poster bed frame, the satin sheets, the down comforters, the vase of lilies, the full-length gilt-edge mirror, an imitation twenties-style phone—all these things bespoke a level of elegance Justine had never encountered in a girl her own age. Part of her wanted to hold herself aloof and sneer at Watley—as she had heard some girls doing while she was sitting on a toilet—but she was simply too seduced to do so.

Watley didn’t seem to care if she was being talked about; she simply did things and got away with it. She never made fun of the people everyone else scorned but instead reserved her considerable sarcasm for the set of girls she called the “vanilla wafers” who were as popular and formidable as Justine’s little Action gang but without the swagger and sensual style.

She talked about sex as often as the girls in Action but differently. Among the D girls, sex was dirty and mean, like throwing a rock at an old lady; you did it for fun and to prove how tough you were. With Watley it was an act of high style, sophistication, and emotion. While Justine bragged about her experiences to her new friend, she cannily changed the settings from rec rooms and toilets to moon-drenched beaches, rugs before roaring fires, canopied beds. Watley nodded, obviously impressed. Her own experiences had all taken place in her rattling four-poster where she had, with much drama, finally allowed her boyfriend of the moment to take off her bra and then, with many expressions of adoration, put his hand down her underpants. Justine was spellbound; she’d never thought of it that way before. She had grown accustomed to dividing girls into two categories: thin-lipped bores who read books and had conversations, and cruel, lolling beauties with heat seeping from their pores. But Watley was neither, or both. She liked to talk about important subjects like racism, hippies, and presidential elections. She got A’s on papers; she wanted to be a lawyer. She wanted to go out with a boy with whom she could discuss politics, not the greaseballs who tried to look down her low necklines and leered about her “advanced development.”

This was perhaps the reason she had no boyfriend for her entire freshman year. Justine didn’t have one either, and they spent most of their spare time together in Watley’s room, measuring their breasts and talking about imaginary boyfriends.

Their boyfriends had shoulder-length hair, high foreheads, mustaches, muscles and mouths, tortured pasts, complicated feelings, swords of flesh, and souls of silk. They were as feverishly perfect as Mrs. Goode’s découpage lunch boxes, festooned with gold unicorns, pink-faced harp-wielding girls, ladies with wigs and monocles, flying cherubs, rainbows, and wads of flowers, image after frozen image, cut with the tiniest of scissors so that no white edges showed.

They viewed their group-huddling peers with increasing scorn as the year went on. Justine occasionally received a flowered, coyly folded letter from one of her fading Action friends, tattooed with slogans like “Hippies are cool, greasers are fools.” She answered one or two and then thew the rest away after reading them with quick disbelief, no longer able to connect herself with the world she had belonged to so completely less than a year ago. She did talk to Watley about Emotional and, to a much lesser extent, Rose Loris, but without telling her of the conflicted pain these people had caused her. They became unpleasant, minor incidents, having little to do with her. It would be years before she would realize these incidents were lodged in her heart like gristle, ready to pop up into her throat at any sudden slap on the back—and there were lots of those later on.

Her father was away from the house often; he was home most on the weekends when he slept his numb ten-hour sleep and then rose to pace the house with his chest puffed out, telling stories about what had happened at the hospital, how he’d been called in for an emergency consultation during an operation and had knocked down a nurse while running through the hall. The patient was saved; Dr. Shade swam a vigorous six laps in the hospital pool and bought a milkshake on the way back to the office. Sometimes a patient would die, and he would pace around flailing his arms. “You know when this happens, what do you do, Lorraine? You are so close to it, that space where death and life come together for an instant and then, suddenly, there is nothing.” His hard eyes would shine with fierce opacity.

“He is so upset when a patient dies,” said Justine’s mother. “He cares so deeply.”

And Justine would feel the way she did when there was a dying dog scene on TV; on one hand she could barely control her tears, on the other she felt like being really snotty.

She felt like being snotty almost all the time to her mother, who didn’t have a retard center to work at and was thus at home a lot. Her mother suddenly wanted to be snotty to her, too. After ignoring the tight clothing and white lipstick worn by her daughter in Action, Mrs. Shade began to be obsessed with Justine’s clothing, about which they fought on the stairway and in the driveway almost every morning before school. “Really, Justine, you look like a cow,” her mother would snap as she regarded her daughter’s slight, optimally revealed bustline. “What kind of attention are you trying to attract?” One morning, the dog-walking Mrs. Kybosh next door was treated to the sight of Justine’s mother trying to pull Justine back into the house by her hair and skirt while obscenity-shrieking Justine beat her about the head and shoulders with her purse.

Her mother also censored the clothes she bought, leaning spitefully in the direction of sweaters and long plaid skirts—this when Justine was walking around with a girl like Watley! Justine was forced to shoplift chic ensembles, smuggle them to school in her big leather handbag, and change in the bathroom, stuffing her ugly plaids in her locker.

Once she adopted this strategy, there were no more morning battles, and the criticism shifted to Justine’s laziness and poor posture. The connection between mother and daughter stiffened and frayed down to a wire sharp enough to cut your hand on; it was through a long dark tunnel that Justine viewed her parents as they moved about the house.

The connection between her parents had further frayed as well. Although unaware of it at the time, in retrospect she could see it clearly. As a young child she had watched her parents create constructions of concrete and steel with words that swung triumphantly upward; now they dug circuitous tunnels around each other, one every now and then setting up a cul-de-sac for the other to stumble around in while he or she ran off in the opposite direction. Her father would tell a story about something that had happened at the hospital, emphasizing a particular part with his voice. Her mother would respond to some other part, and he would continue as if he hadn’t heard her. She would respond again to that part of his story he neglected, and relate it to some story of her own about, say, a neighbor. He would discount her story by stating, “Mrs. Kybosh is a stupid woman,” and then disappear behind his wall of important concerns. They seemed to want to create these mazes of crosspurpose and misunderstanding, and to need each other to do it, possibly because they needed the dry rasp of contact that occurred when they collided on their way to their separate destinations.

Justine’s own mazes led away from them both, and she minced around their house like an heiress on an ocean liner. She stayed up late at night, crouched near her radio listening to rock music on “underground” stations and fantasizing about the soft-voiced disc jockeys who played it.

She remembers a strange thing she said one night at the dinner table, without knowing why she said it. Her mother asked her how school had been that day, and, recalling a study hall conversation, she answered, “Sally Hinkel is going to fuck Jim Thorn tonight.” Her father’s eyes widened in alarm, her mother’s mouth opened in midbite, and a mallet of incomprehension flattened their previous conversation.

Perhaps it was this remark that prompted her father to ask her about Dr. Norris. She was in the car alone with him on a weekend errand. They were silently progressing on a scenic back road, when without any preamble he said, “Justine I want you to tell me what happened between you and Ed Norris.”

She didn’t say anything.

“There was an incident, wasn’t there?”

“I remember something,” she said.

“What? He touched you somewhere? Where did he touch you?”

Justine felt the full force of his surgical concentration, probing between her legs. His invulnerable eyes remained fixed on the sunny road. She held her breath.

“I want to know what happened, Justine, because I care for you. What exactly did he do?”

She remembered lying over the lap of some forgotten boy who stuck his fingers inside her. She thought of herself crouched over a mirror thinking how ugly her vagina was. Her pelvis became rigid.

“He touched me between the legs. He masturbated me.”

There was a moment of silence. “That is all?”

She said nothing.

“How many times did it happen?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I should kill him,” said her father. “I should find him and I should kill him.”

He sounded like he did when he complained about an incompetent orderly at the hospital. She listened, interested, but he said nothing more. She refrained from pointing out that it would be ridiculous to kill Ed Norris now, roughly ten years after the fact, if her father actually did mean to kill him, or even yell at him, which she knew he didn’t.

They continued to drive along, her exposed pelvis constricted like an animal in a trap. They went home, and the discussion dropped silently into the deep pool of their three-way life.

Everything was fine until she was caught shoplifting a miniskirt. The store detective took her elbow with such insinuating intimacy that she jerked her arm away from him and gave him an eyeful of the special scorn adolescents reserve for middle-aged mashers before she realized she was staring at a badge.

All at once she was the delinquent kid in the manager’s office, sitting with her legs crossed, staring at a corner and pulling her hair across her mouth. The manager, a thin stylishly suited woman, talked about juvenile correction facilities as she paced the office, adjusting papers and emptying the ashtray. “I could see it if you were some poor inner city kid who didn’t have anything nice to wear,” said the manager. “But for somebody like you to steal, it’s sick.”

Justine had to admit it was true. She felt ashamed, but the idea of being sick had a certain drama—or at least she could pretend that it did. Her mother swept in, Saks Fifth Avenue skirt swishing grandly. “Really, Justine, this is impossible,” she said. Justine shrugged her shoulders and scowled while her mother and the manager agreed on how awful she was. Her mother seemed gratified to hear official confirmation that her daughter was bad.

From there, it was a short step to her mother’s surprise visit to the high school, where Justine was discovered in an illicit outfit. She was summoned to the principal’s office for a confrontation, then walked to her locker by both principal and parent, where the hideous cast-off plaid was disgorged. Before the whole milling between-class student body, she was forced to leave school with her mother, clutching the wadded up woolly jumper to her chest. To her irritation, she encountered Judy Hollis and Becky Tootle, two popular girls she and Watley made fun of and who made fun of them in return. She felt acutely the ridiculousness of her position as they stared at her with greedily mocking eyes that lingered with particular satisfaction on the jumper. She’d already heard herself sneered at for “sneaking in clothes and changing so she can parade around in skirts up to here and necklines down to there,” and now, as she was being marched through the hall in this way, she saw a virulent strain of gossip germinate before her eyes.

There was a tedious scene at home, and Justine was informed that she would now have a weekly appointment with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist was a very expensive private doctor named Dr. Venus. He had a burgundy waiting room decorated by large glossy photographs of Siamese cats. He had beautiful teenaged patients, some of whom had interesting personal habits. He was a large, very happy man with completely flat, almost nonexistent hindquarters, pigeon toes, and curly black hair. Justine thought he was an idiot, but she grew to like him. It was hard not to like someone who desired to talk exclusively about her and who also made her feel superior. She was genuinely touched by his obvious concern for her, his wish that she come into the fold of mental health. He was so pleased when she took an interest and joined in. She even told him the Emotional story, the whole thing, and sat there feeling the same tenderness and vulnerability she had felt for Emotional, feeling his approval, feeling like a little girl as they sat smiling at one another.

This is not to say she wasn’t deeply resentful at being forced to see Dr. Venus. She asked her mother: “Why don’t you find another mental health center to work at so you won’t have to use me?”

The summer was damp and uneasy. Dr. Shade took a month’s vacation and slept late every day. Justine’s nervous body awoke every morning at six o’clock, regardless of when she went to bed. She would pad through the silent house and make herself a cup of coffee with three spoons of sugar and sit on the back terrace drinking it as she stared at the bright wet grass and the insects walking on the lawn chairs, trying to decide if she were happy or miserable.

The following fall, Watley found a boyfriend. He was new at the school, a handsome, quiet, studious boy who Justine privately considered a little dopey.

At first the boy (his name was Donald) was a lot of fun for Justine. It was a continual source of entertainment planning strategies for Watley to get his attention, ways to let him know she was intelligent as well as beautiful, for example, by carrying around large volumes on Freud. They both knew these schemes were hare-brained and girlish, but that only added to their enjoyment.

Then Watley acquired the boy, and there wasn’t much for Justine to do except listen to stories about him or admire Watley in her frilly new dresses as she walked arm in arm with him in the halls. She did admire Watley for pursuing a social anomaly like mildmannered Donald when she could easily have had a more glamorous consort; it was in its own way as daring as taking up with some menacing greaseball, except Donald was a lot easier to control. His retiring, polite personality, although it contained the requisite intelligence, was like a nice big screen on which Watley could ardently project her needs. He was easy to direct in the big scene in which modestly weeping Watley lost her virginity, a scene which Justine imagined with a mix of interest, envy, and irritation. She felt abandoned by Watley and she began to resent her for it. Her resentment was exacerbated by Watley’s behavior when Justine visited her; Watley always wanted them to stand before the mirror with their faces together and then compare them, feature by feature, culminating in an analysis of their respective types, something like, “You’re the cute pixie type and I’m the voluptuous beauty type.”

She hoped that her envy of Watley didn’t play too great a role in her strange coupling with Rick Houlihan, a senior bordering on greaseballness. It was springtime; he was a big swarthy boy with muscles, cruel lips, and a long gum line. She met him at the cast party for the drama club version of The Man of La Mancha, in which he played a rapist muleteer. She was drawn by his large virile oiliness and his condescending manner. A skinny red-headed girl who noticed them talking said, “Stay away from the little girls, Rick.” They were sucking face within the hour.

They continued to suck face in the back seat of his friend’s car as the friend drove them home, all the while making sex jokes about sophomore girls. Rick joked back as he felt her breasts, and she giggled, feeling like a soft, palpitating baby animal that might be passed back and forth and petted by these noisy humans and then left by the side of the road.

But the way he touched was romantic, his embrace a thrilling combination of condescension, rapacity, and gentleness. She knew he believed her to be too stupid and passive to object to what he was doing, and that, while this made him view her with jovial contempt, it also rather endeared her to him as it meant he could fondle all he wanted and feel superior too, free of the guilt that a more human girl might’ve engendered. If he’d known Justine’s history of basements, rec rooms and johns, it would have been different, but he had no idea.

They dropped her off at her house, and he said, “See ya in school, kid.” She immediately called Watley, who was impressed and somewhat chagrined that her little pixie handmaiden had spent time in a back seat with someone so glandular and dashing as the rapist muleteer in The Man of La Mancha. All weekend, Justine fantasized him crushing her to his big pink chest while the very air about them exploded in ribbons of delirious color. On the verge of hysteria, she walked around with pimple cream on her face, her muscles furiously coiling and uncoiling under her skin. Monday came; she flew to her beloved.

He passed her in the hall with a smile and hand flap. She was wounded but she ignored that and submerged herself once more in the loud theme song of their great love. She saw him again in the cafeteria, standing in line with a tray. She noticed for the first time the slug-like curve of his fleshy shoulders, the way his bulky legs seemed to have been hastily jammed into his pelvis, but she didn’t let these details stand in her way.

She admired his manly reserve in greeting her, the way his eyes slowly dropped to view her hand on his arm and then rose to gaze enigmatically into hers. Chatting happily, she followed him to his table, then out of the lunchroom, into the hall, and to the door of his French class.

They didn’t have much to talk about, and the conversation that did occur was strange and arduous. This disturbed Justine, but she found the disturbance easy to ignore. Making out with Rick, his big tongue disporting itself in her head, was a little world which existed beyond the uncomfortable job of conversation and which could be literally touched upon at any moment. Even the distance of reserve and incompatibility had an odd charm; across this distance she could occasionally feel his desultory signals answering her ardent emanation, and the slight tickle of contact was so poignant in contrast with his coldness that it felt to her like a full embrace.

Then there were the hellish fantasies. All day, all night, they battered her until her body was alternately in an agony of sensitivity and completely numb. He lay on top of her in an enormous double bed, cossetted with chiffon and silk, his eyes waxy with desire. Their richly appointed boudoir exploded with flowers; lace curtains flailed the air as the thunderstorm raged outside. Everything in the room became monstrously enlarged and pulsated as the huge event transpired on the bed. He would hurt her but only because he loved her.

However, although her father, who did not like Rick, had intoned that boys that age go out with girls her age to “get one thing only,” she felt that she was more interested in that thing than he was. She began to drop hints. “I don’t know why people think rape is so bad,” she remarked. “I’d like to be raped.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he snapped. “You wouldn’t like it at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head—angrily, it seemed to her. She felt demeaned and hurt. He obviously wasn’t attracted to her, she thought.

It was a sticky summer day, just weeks after school ended, that her parents made a social call, and Justine called Rick, invited him to come over, rather bluntly explaining that her parents were gone. There was a moment of silence, and then he said he’d come.

He arrived wearing dark glasses. His whole body had a defensive yet tenacious look, like that of an animal creeping into a bush with a hunk of food in its mouth.

She invited him into the house, but he said no, he wanted to go into the rec room behind the garage. She reached for his hand and, looking the other way, he let her take it, locking a finger around two of hers.

The rec room was a damp space extending off the garage. It was carpeted with unconnected pieces of thin beige nylon and crammed with cheap hideous furniture which had been left by the people who’d lived there before and which was now covered by dust and cobwebs. On the walls were knickknack shelves and a huge plastic salmon. There was a radio the size and shape of a bread box. Rick turned it on and up very loudly, not bothering to adjust the dial, which was caught between two wavering, incoherent stations. They hit the floor almost immediately, he suffocating her with his weight, his shoulder scraping her face. She made what she hoped were attractive moaning noises as he worked her pants down with one hand, swiping at her mouth with his lips. She barely recognized his body. It seemed to be boiling with conflicting impulses contained by ironlike swaths of muscle. A feeling of alarm and disappointment rose in her, and she fiercely jammed it down. He grappled with his pants, raising his pelvis so that his chest mashed hers. A gasp interrupted her careful moans. He reached away from her and turned the radio up even louder, inadvertently adjusting the dial so that a hoe-down cavorted oafishly through the room. She felt him between her legs and in a burst of reflexive panic tried to close them. He pushed them open, gripped her shoulders and, as he had in her fantasy, hurt her, with a great deal of vigor.

“Hurry and put your pants on,” he said, easing back from her onto his knees. “You’re bleeding.” It was true; she sat up stiffly and saw bright red smears on her inner thighs. He was tucking himself away into his pants with a certain tender efficiency, straightening his shirt, standing up. She stayed on the floor and squirmed into her panties with a rocking hip-to-hip movement. She didn’t want to extend her curled-up body to get her blue-flowered pants out of their broken twist and put them on but she did. She finally stood. Her underpants were a fetid swamp. There was a rug burn on her lower spine. He stared at her from under his dark glasses. His jaw and lips were stiff and stony as if he were angry about something he couldn’t do anything about.

“Okay kid?” he said. His voice sounded like it always did.

She nodded yes.

“Good.” He put an arm around her shoulders. This gesture pierced her, and she huddled against him, nuzzling his chest with her nose and thinking at last they could enter their special make-out world. But instead of that remote condescending tenderness she knew and relied on, she felt him squarely there with her, every organ, synapse, and pustule in full operation, the whole hot engine of his body receiving her with utter indifference.

“Come on,” he said. “I have to go.” He kissed her on the nose and walked out, bearing her with him. When they got outside he let go of her shoulder and walked down the gravel driveway slightly ahead of her, as if he were going to get a beer or something. He turned towards her. “Bye,” he said.

She went into the house and into her room. She pulled her pants down and looked at the blood and sperm. Some of it had dried, but the center of her underwear was still slimy and rank. She stared at it a minute and then pulled her pants back on and sat on the bed, feeling the sticky gunk squish against her genitals and thighs. She thought of her little hairs mashed up in it.

The main problem was, she’d told Watley about her planned seduction of Rick. She could lie about what really happened, but at the moment she didn’t feel up to it. Instead she listened to album after album of soft music about love that lasted forever as she lay in bed under a blanket, feeling the bleak air-conditioned air all around her.

Eventually she called Watley and told her story, working an element of truth into it so Watley wouldn’t be puzzled to hear it was all over between her and Rick. “He probably was afraid of his own feelings, which he projected onto you,” said Watley. “He was probably intimidated by your intensity.”

Weeks after the event, she told Dr. Venus, not because she needed to tell someone but in response to a series of questions, the first being, “Did you take the miniskirt because you were trying to attract boys?”

The late afternoon light was pouring in like a visitor from space, which after all it was. She absorbed the burgundy atmosphere of plant fronds and crystal paperweights. In the waiting room she had been listening to “Hey Jude” on the intercom, and she felt wrapped in its residue. She looked at the pictures of dreamy long-haired girls on the walls and thought with mild astonishment, “This is what a therapist is for.”

So she told him about Rick. He nodded, his heavily lidded eyes widening only in their innermost muscles, which he had not learned to control. “And that has been your only experience?” he asked cordially.

It sounded to her as if she’d disappointed him, that he’d been expecting juicier stuff; what if everybody who came in here had better stories than she? A little cautiously, she talked about her Action adventures, checking his face for reactions all the while, seeing empathy and encouragement in his nods, leg-crossings, and head-tiltings. As she talked she felt as if she were talking about someone else—someone who was complex and interesting, a femme fatale, yet a sad sensitive femme fatale who’d seen and done too much too soon, like one of those teenagers in decadent-society TV specials who drank or something. She recounted everything as matter-of-factly as she could, even the things that had shocked and upset her, like the afternoon with Rose Loris.

Here she noticed a discernible change in Dr. Venus. His whole body seemed to constrict even before Rose had all her clothes off.

“Do you think this is weird?” she asked. She’d noticed an uncharacteristic twitching in his jaw, and it gave her pause.

He shrugged jerkily. “My job isn’t to judge,” he said.

At the end of the session she felt like a character in a rock song. Even the thing with Rick didn’t seem so bad; it seemed very cool to have lost her virginity on the floor of a garage, cooler in its own way than her florid fantasy. Now that was out of the way and she could have one desperate-youth-of-today experience after the next until she met Him, the one who would look past her tough exterior to her tenderness and pain and then—

“Justine, could you tell your mother to come in and speak with me for a few minutes alone? You can just relax and enjoy a magazine. We won’t be long.”

This was the first time Dr. Venus had made this request, but she didn’t think anything of it. She sat in the waiting room listening to the Rolling Stones and thinking about sex for at least ten minutes before the potentially disastrous implications of this unusual move sank in. She remembered the promise Dr. Venus had made early on not to repeat the things she told him to her parents. She was reassured for a moment and then wondered what else he would have to discuss with her mother for ten minutes; she remembered the tic in his jaw. She made eye contact with the young Nehru-collared secretary behind her lavender, triangle-shaped desk. “Sandy,” she said as she stood, nonchalantly replacing a magazine. “Could you tell my mother when she comes out that I went to the Burger Boy? I’m really hungry.”

Sandy said “Sure,” and Justine walked out of the building and down the block until she was out of Sandy’s sight. Then Justine, who never ran, not even in gym class, pumped her elbows and shaved knees and flew until sweat ran down her back.

A block and a half later she gave up, suddenly embarrassed, and out of breath. She continued to walk away from Dr. Venus’s complex, panting, her heart leaping in her chest, her right foot sliding out of her battered sandal. She was on a sidewalk separated from a four-lane freeway by a thin strip of bright sod, and the rush-hour traffic droned by as she walked against it, its familiar sounds of motion highlighting her aimlessness. She saw the Hudson Mall a few blocks away and walked towards it thinking she’d call Watley.

But Watley wasn’t home. She hung up without leaving a message and walked among the counters laden with jewelry and perfume, soothed by the gleam of chromium and the caress of Muzak. She tried to think of what to do. She imagined herself hanging around the mall with her chest out, making eye contact with middle-aged men. Perhaps one would eventually offer to buy her a drink, and they would drive to a motel together. She found a middle-aged man and fixed her gaze on him experimentally. He smiled back uncertainly. Emboldened, she tried another one, a big one with eye-wrinkles and a nose like a snout. His cold eyes zipped up and down the length of her body; his smile was both rapacious and dismissive. She decided she’d go try on some clothes instead.

She returned to the doctor’s office imagining the trouble and punishment waiting for her there. Dr. Venus and her mother gravely discussing her incipient emotional illness, the recommendations of intensive therapy, of tranquilizers, maybe of institutionalization! She felt almost tearful as she imagined Dr. Venus advising her mother of her daughter’s complex emotional difficulties and needs. How would her mother react? With anger at first, probably a few tears, and then? Justine steeled herself as she walked the last half block feeling frightened, revealed, yet resolute. She opened the door to the office and there sat Dr. Venus and her mother, her thighs tensely crossed, the sharp toe of one fashionable shoe jabbing the air. Dr. Venus rose as she entered, his face consternated, his eyes moving rapidly from Justine to her mother.

“Justine, this is the height of rudeness,” said her mother. “Where have you been? I only hope the roast isn’t ruined.”

Dr. Venus’s eyes continued to move to and fro. He lifted his hand in the beginning of a gesture and gave up. “Well then,” he said.

In the car they were silent as her mother furiously negotiated the rush-hour traffic, twice hitting the brake so abruptly that she and Justine jerked then stiffly bobbed in their seats. Her mother seemed angry but not necessarily at Justine; she did not seem shocked or worried. Justine waited, her anxious fantasies crowding round, her memory of the middle-aged man with the cold eyes gliding among them. He had been sexy in a way, she thought with a pang of regret.

“What did Dr. Venus want to talk to you about?” she asked.

Her mother tossed a lock of hair from her forehead. “He was just giving me a summary of your progress to date. Most of what he said was encouraging, but your rudeness does not speak well for his treatment.”

“He’s a shrink, not an animal trainer,” muttered Justine.

Her mother gripped the wheel more tightly and didn’t answer.

Perhaps Dr. Venus hadn’t repeated what she’d told him. Or perhaps he’d repeated it glowingly, seeing in her confession evidence that she was normal after all. Slowly, Justine’s images of punishment and drama decomposed, leaving a bewildering cloud of half-formed feelings in their wake. She sat in the uneasy silence of this cloud, relieved but unnerved.

A few days later, her mother told her they were going to end her sessions with Dr. Venus because it seemed she had recovered. Justine felt angry but, as she had always resented and complained of being forced to see Dr. Venus, she didn’t feel she could protest being forced not to see him. But after telling Dr. Venus those things about herself, she didn’t want to stop seeing him. She didn’t see how he could be sitting there knowing all those things about her and not be seeing her. It was like being on the verge of consummating your love and then being snatched from the arms of your loved one and borne out the door. She began to dream about him. Sometimes he would be standing on the periphery of the action, watching her with a mysterious, caring expression. In other dreams he played a more central role, such as the time he stood watching, fatherly and encouraging, while Justine had sex with Rick on his office couch. She had told him her secrets, and he had understood her—or had he? Perhaps he had been the one to end the sessions because he found her stories repugnant. No, she thought. The look on his face had spoken only of understanding and acceptance.

She wasn’t trusting enough of his understanding and acceptance to call him and see if it was still there. But it haunted her and she ached to experience it again.

She was at Watley’s house, in Watley’s bed with Watley, a pale fluffy comforter pulled up to their chests. They ate from a box of chocolates, some of which had ladies’ faces imprinted on them, and talked about sex. Watley was saying how unfortunate it was that it couldn’t always be like the first time, that possibly it got boring after a while.

“Watley,” said Justine, “I didn’t like the first time very much.”

“But wasn’t it very passionate?” asked Watley. “Wasn’t it an animal passion kind of experience? I thought it sounded incredible.” There was a subtle but firm insistence in her voice; Justine ignored it.

“I made it sound that way,” she said, “because I didn’t want to tell you the truth.”

Watley sat back and looked at her with wide impassive eyes, mouth serenely chewing a chocolate.

“I don’t even know if he wanted to do it with me in particular. It was my idea and I think he went along with it because naturally he wanted to have sex with somebody.” The truth of this stung her for the first time. “And at the last minute I didn’t want to do it but I couldn’t get out of it. And it really hurt.” This was not like it had been in Dr. Venus’s office at all. This hurt too, and to Justine’s fright she began to cry. “It wasn’t in my bed either,” she said in a trembling voice. “It was on the floor of the garage.”

“He raped you!” cried Watley.

“No,” said Justine, now really crying for the first time in years. “No, that’s not what happened.”

Like with Rick, it was too late to stop and she told the story in all its terrible physicality. “God,” said Watley, “God!” When it was finished Justine did not feel the warmth and mutuality which she had felt with Dr. Venus. She felt uncomfortable and resentful of Watley without knowing why. She snorted prettily, sucked in some tearrelated snot, and ate another chocolate.

It was hard for her to call Watley again after that, and an entire week passed without Watley calling her. She finally called Watley, not because she wanted to talk but to be reassured that Watley was still her friend. Watley sounded happy and relieved to hear from her. But when they saw each other, Justine felt discomfort bud between them.

School began. Watley spent most of her time with the enslaved Donald. She and Justine talked on the phone and sat together on the radiator before home room; the discomfort burgeoned. Once Justine saw Watley walking in the hall in friendly conversation with Justine’s enemy, Becky Tootle! And when Watley saw that Justine saw them, her face became first guilty, then subtly contemptuous, then friendly. “Hi, Justine!” they cried.

One day Justine was in the bathroom applying Erace to the dark circles under her eyes in the silent, bright-eyed company of two mascara-wielding girls. Justine rounded the corner to leave the bathroom, opened the door, and then paused in the short foyer to dig into her purse, letting the door sigh shut without going through it.

“God, can you believe the garage floor?” said one voice.

“And Watley says she told her that she had to drag him in there, that he wasn’t even interested,” said the other.

“No wonder they made her see a shrink. I don’t know how Watley can stand her.”

“She can’t.”

Justine walked out of the bathroom and down a long hall out an exit door into the parking lot. The smell of cars in the sun rose around her. She walked through the parking lot into a stunted huddle of foliage and trees where boys often gathered to smoke. She walked with her arms around her middle feeling loneliness and humiliation coupled with the sensation that she was, at this moment, absolutely herself.

Her parents got divorced that winter. They told her of their decision during a long drive that had been taken for that purpose. “Whatever happens,” said her father, “whatever unpleasant things we might say to one another during this time, you must know: your mother and I still love each other. And you, Justine. Relationships may not last. But love goes on forever.” His voice vibrated in the dry car air. A large muscle in her mother’s jaw twitched in smothered anger; her mother’s chapped fingers toyed with an errant strand of hair. They silently passed a snowy field in which some beautiful black-and-white cows posed.

Justine waited for the unpleasant things to be said, but they never came. Less and less was said at all as the household felt itself inexorably rearranged by the invisible machinations of papers being processed. The sharp gaze of her father’s eyes was focused somewhere far away, and his confident morning cough seemed to apologize for its confidence. Strange bottles of medication with her mother’s name on them appeared in the medicine cabinet. Her mother’s features seemed to be trying to draw themselves into the center of her face. The voice of the television followed Justine from room to room.

Her relationship with Watley had shriveled to saying “Hi” as they passed one another in the hall. Watley’s face would open for a second to allow Justine into her world, her eyes would briefly acknowledge the role Justine had played in it, and then her face would close again. Justine did not make other friends, beyond joking and talking with the skinny raspy-voiced boys who smoked cigarettes behind the parking lot. Her loneliness was painful yet it was strangely satisfying to her; in the same way that she had acutely felt her own presence at the moment of her betrayal by Watley, she now felt herself in her aloneness, and she savored herself bitterly.

When her father moved away to live in a large apartment in Ann Arbor, her loneliness drew her closer to her mother. During the divorce her mother had become swollen, dull-eyed, and unbeautiful. Justine looked at her and thought: this is what it means to be a grown woman. Fleshy, jowly, expensive clothes over big haunches, red veins in the hooded eyes, makeup in the facial creases. Her mother exercised still, and her pelvis and belly were strong and sturdy, full of deep sounds and smells, yet ugly and coarse, helpless and rejected in their ugly strength. Justine looked at her and wanted to be delicate and weak forever, never to have that strong womanly flab packed around her hips and thighs. She never wanted to make the slight grunting noise her mother made when she bent to lift a heavy object, a noise that briskly drew up her ugly pelvic energy and helped her do the things that had to be done. She closed her mouth and held her diaphragm still, shutting the door to her own lower body whenever she heard her mother make this noise for any reason.

Still she liked to sit with her in the evening, doing her homework while her mother read about current affairs in important magazines, so she could discuss events with women at Glade of Dreams. She liked to be in the car with her, both of them in sunglasses, listening to Adventures in Good Music. She even liked to shop with her mother sometimes, feeling protective towards this big, chic, but pathetically dreamy woman in the short skirt and knee-high suede boots. Sometimes they would go to Glade of Dreams, and Justine would lie next to her in a lounge chair, aware that they were objects of speculation, the divorcee and her troublesome daughter.

She liked being with her mother better than she liked visiting her father on the weekends. Her father was no longer handsome; his face had been weakened and coarsened by sagging and wrinkles, his body was paunchy and brittle. Their conversations were meticulous affairs about music, books, politics. He didn’t ask her about her life, and she didn’t desire to talk about it with him. There were occasional discomfiting moments when his sharp brown eyes would swivel into focus and he would seem to be looking right at her, wondering about her, perhaps pitying her. She hated that and tried to distract him immediately. He was easy to distract so they had polite dinners, and then her father kissed her, put his hand on her head and said, “Good night, my beauty!”

Thus she calmly moved from parent to parent to school, counting the months, holding her aloneness around her like a magic cloak.

When she moved to New York after graduating from college years later, the cloak was wound about her so completely she no longer knew it was there.