"I'm hardly typical," is her retort.

"You like being hardly typical, don't you?"

"I do. And don't psychoanalyze me. You're nineteen, for Christ's sake."

"You're only twenty-two."

She snorts. "Which makes me your elder, young man. Can I keep telling my story, here? Your readers are going to be on the edges of their seats."

"Sorry."

"So, okay, Dad dies, young girl is left alone with her overly religious, practically Mennonite mother, Evelyn Black. Mother is a repressive force – you know how they always say The Man gonna keep you down? My mother is The Man. Her oppressive thumb makes young girl into a Bible-reading teen who dresses a lot like a forty-year-old librarian, so much so that you expect her to smell like dusty carpets and old books.

"But that's hardly the truth of who she is. It's just what she thinks she should be. It's what her mother tells her is right, is proper. Chaste and charitable, prim and proper, mouth and vagina buttoned up so tight the whole package threatens to strain and pop and take out someone's eye. Ah, but the girl has all these little secrets. To you and everybody else, it's hardly overwhelming, but to her mother, it's the motherfucking Apocalypse. The girl likes to sneak comic books. She likes to stand near other kids listening to their – gasp – rap albums and the Devil's own heavy metal. She gets a secret thrill watching the other kids at school smoke. And then she comes home and doesn't watch TV because they don't have a goddamn TV, and she reads her secret comic books and listens to her mother rant about morality, night after night, over and over, the end."

"The end?"

"Not really. Obviously. It's just the beginning. The young teenaged librarian – let's call her 'Mary' – is starting to suffer a breakdown. Not in front of anybody, but she goes back to her room at nights and cries herself to sleep, and she has these thoughts where she pulls out great bloody clumps of her own hair, or she knocks her teeth out with hammers, or other selfdefacing horrors. She doesn't act on any of them, which in some ways is worse: It further tightens her, squeezing her until she's ready to explode.

"Thing is, it's not like the mother is exactly a bad mother. She's not physically abusive – she doesn't whip the girl with wire hangers or anything, doesn't smack her in the tits with a curling iron. She's not exactly nice though. She insults the girl daily. Sinner, slattern, slut, whatever. The girl represents a constant disappointment. A big black smear. A bad girl, even though she's a good girl. Maybe the mother can smell the promise of sin. Maybe the mother senses the taint of buried evil."

"So," Paul asks, "what did you do? You did something. You couldn't take it anymore, and you did something."

"I had sex."

Paul blinks. "So?"

"Right. So what? You come from a world where twelve-yearold girls are texting – excuse me, 'sexting' to each other about how they gave some guy a blumpy–"