They were listening to a tape Wilson had brought for Marie, and I realized that they had punk in common. They must have met at a show. Or maybe they had gone to one together. Did Wilson take her to those places? He didn’t look anything like a punk rocker, but I could see how the music might appeal to him, the angry parts. On the mountain, everyone listened to rock or heavy metal, and where you stood between Creedence Clearwater and Black Sabbath said something about who you were and who you hung out with. My sister was the only person I knew who was into punk. Girls at school thought she was a freak. Now Marie and Wilson were talking about bands they knew or had seen that Sage and I had never even heard of: Flipper, Killing Joke, the Stick Men. She told Wilson she had gone to see some band in a DJ’s basement in West Philly, and that she had had to stand on a washing machine to see them. They talked about being at The Hot Club.

“Don’t you have to be twenty-one to go there?” I asked. Marie ignored me. Since Christmas, she’d been going into the city to clubs and to see bands. She told Mom that she was staying with her friend Nancy. As far as I knew, they hadn’t been friends since the tenth grade. In the school cafeteria, Marie sat alone with a book at the far end by the window. Nancy sat with other girls with long greasy hair like hers. They tended to look down at the ground or at SAT flash cards. The only friend Marie had from school that I knew of was Rae. She had graduated the previous year and was a freshman at Moore College of Art and lived in her own apartment downtown.

This year, Marie had thrown out her tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirts and bleached jeans in favor of black vintage clothes, fishnets, Doc Martens, and rhinestone jewelry. She’d go into Philadelphia to meet Rae and hang around South Street, Zipperhead, and the basement of Rage Records on Third, which had the best collection of punk music in the city. Over the past weeks she’d started skipping school, taking the bus into Philly after my mom dropped us off at the gates. The nuns didn’t really do anything about it. Sister Benedict brought her in one day to talk to her, but I think they were afraid of adding to my mother’s difficulties and they didn’t get along with her. Plus, Marie had the best SAT scores in her class and had been accepted into Penn on a full scholarship.