It’s strange that it hadn’t rained sooner: they went practically all of October without a single drop, and now, suddenly, a streak of downpours. What bad luck, they say to each other, looking worriedly at their hideout, now a muddy pit. Old Man showed up with filthy shoes and the hems of his pants a disaster. Soon is wearing her raincoat and boots, but even so they obviously can’t stay there. Rainy days are now lost days, and it’s better to go somewhere else than to lurk nearby—better than going back, again, to the clinic. But they leave separately; they can’t show themselves in public together, and for Soon it would even be weird to see Old Man beyond the shrubs, to see him inside the world she’s trying to escape. She decides on a downtown library full of university students. Next to them she is clearly much younger, but the rooms are so jam-packed that no one stops to look at her longer than two seconds, such is her insignificance, her lack of importance in that alien world of adults. She could arrange to meet Old Man there, in the library, but then she would risk her invisibility; together, they would inevitably draw attention: her, a child, and him, an old man. Imagining it—not that they met up at the library, but that people noticed them and speculated on their relationship—produces a strange thrill in her—the thrill of transgression—and she often dreams up scenarios that include a police intervention, Old Man’s arrest, an interrogation full of questions with hazy sexual connotations under a ruthless spotlight. But it’s one thing to imagine, and quite another to play with fire. She’d be terrified if something like that happened in real life. So what she does when it rains—or when the day threatens rain—is spend the morning alone in the library, writing—she has to entertain herself somehow—a kind of diary where she imagines scenes that could be, that she wishes would happen—but no, but no—scenes that at the end of the day she tears up in embarrassment. Meanwhile, Old Man is surely going other places, more places where she shouldn’t meet up with him, like bars or stores or markets—Soon doesn’t know about that, what Old Man does when he isn’t with her.

Of course she’s heard about the maniacs who pursue children. People are forever telling stories about men who kidnap kids on their way out of school and do bad things to them, even torture and kill them. There’d been one boy from a nearby neighborhood who disappeared, and no one knew anything more about him until two years later, when they found his bones buried in a vacant lot. Soon’s parents made sure to lower their voices when they talked about it, but there was no point in that, the story would reach her ears somehow. The autopsy—as Soon heard on her neighbors’ TV—revealed that the boy had been raped before and after his death. That expression, before and after his death, shocked her even more than the fact of the rape itself, since she wasn’t very clear on what it meant to be raped, and her knowledge was so blurry that she could allow herself to ignore it. But that a maniac was doing horrible things to a boy before and after his death spoke clearly of a death, a death for which that maniac had been present and from which he hadn’t run: death as part of the process. The day Soon heard the autopsy details she was wearing a red summer dress, too childish for her age, too short, with absurd, ruffled sleeves. From that day on she refused to wear it again; her mother never understood why, and she’d only given up because Soon was—could sometimes be—very stubborn. Soon wouldn’t admit the real reason for her aversion, because not even she understood it. She only had to see the dress hanging in her closet and she felt a murky unease, and she knew full well it was irrational, but there it was, marking a change.