Still, it was all just words and symbols, even that incident, since she had never seen a maniac up close. That’s what she called them, maniacs, though lately she had also heard people talk about pedophiles, which must mean more or less the same thing. Depraved was a word that for a long time she’d confused with depressed, and she didn’t know if it had to do with children exclusively, or just with anything of a sexual nature. Like all kids, she had been educated in the suspicion of strangers: don’t talk to them, don’t accept gifts from them, absolutely don’t trust them, etc. But Soon will be fourteen soon, and the rules of the game are starting to change. If she never talked to strangers, she thinks, she’d never get anywhere. An acquaintance was once a stranger, that’s the way of things, no matter what: if we went through life refusing to speak to anyone we didn’t know, we would never meet anyone. People were always insisting she should have more friends, that it was good to interact with others and bad to spend all day shut up in her house. They forced her to do group projects with people she didn’t know anything about, except that they were her age and went to the same school. Just because of that, they’re not strangers? When does a stranger achieve the category of potential friend, and when does he stay, merely, a potential danger? Clearly, Old Man doesn’t fit in the category of friends that her environment wants her to have; rather, he’s dangerously close to the category of maniac or pedophile, but only because of his age and the fact that he doesn’t go to her school. Otherwise, she doesn’t see how he could be suspicious. He has never tried to kidnap her; he’s never even laid a hand on her.

When she was in grade school, three or four years ago, a psychologist came to give a talk about sexual abuse. She told the students they should always tell their parents or teachers if an adult ever touched them in a strange way. At the question of what counted as strange, she gave several examples: a hand between the legs, on the knee or the thigh. One boy raised his hand with a question. He explained that his English teacher would sometimes grab his neck, but as a joke. When he was asked to give more details, the boy said his teacher would grab him from behind, at the nape of the neck, and squeeze him there for a while so he couldn’t get away, as a joke, he repeated. But did he move his hand?, asked the psychologist, and also: how long did he stay like that, holding him? Five minutes, said the boy—though he probably didn’t really know how long five minutes was. Like this long, he said, and then he staged the scene with his friend, both of them rolling with laughter. The psychologist said that she would have a talk with the English teacher, just in case. That bit about the nape of the neck is the only thing Soon remembers about the presentation.