"Romantic," Paul says.

"You kids and your sarcasm. You joke, but in a weird way, it was romantic. I mean, if you subscribe to this Hallmark fantasy that romance is all about the greeting cards and the dozen roses and the diamonds are a girl's best friend, no, this wasn't that. But it was an… honest connection. Two wayward idiots in the woods, laughing and groping and drinking." She pulls out her pack of cigarettes, sees that she's smoked them all already. She mashes it up and pitches it over her shoulder. "Of course, I went ahead and took a shit all over that beautiful human connection. As I'm wont to do."

"Oh? How so?"

"We get back to his house, and I'm feeling high and giddy and I'm grinning like the cat who killed the mouse, and his mother is waiting for him. For us. She's got one of the local cops with her, this bald prick named Chris Stumpf. Guy looks like an uncircumcised penis. So. Ben's mom starts reading him the riot act, and me, she tells me that if she ever sees me again, I'll be sorry, she'll get me, blah blah blah."

Miriam snaps her fingers.

"That's when it hits me. What we did in the woods. The kindof-beautiful thing he and I shared turns ugly. Shame floods in. I'm like Adam and Eve, made to realize my own nakedness. My own mother wasn't there at that exact moment, no, but Ben's mom did the job well – a perfect stand-in. I could hear my mother's voice clear as the night sky, stripping me of all my dignity, shoving me toward the belching gates of Hell itself. I suddenly felt like I was both used and user, a worthless lazy whore who gave her virginity to some sweet simpleton from down the road. And that was the end of mine and Ben's fleeting half-ass relationship – soak it in crème de menthe, light it on fire, and head home."

Paul shifts uncomfortably. "You never talked to him again?"

"I did, but only in passing." Miriam idly fingers the booze bottle, wishing she had more smokes. She wants to cut this short to go get some, but she can't. Things have to happen a certain way here. Order of operations, and all that. "He tried to talk to me, but I wouldn't have it. I told him that what we'd done was wrong, but he still wouldn't take no for an answer. The dumb idiot told me he loved me, do you believe that? That's when the floodgates opened."

"What happened?"

"I let fly with some of the meanest shit you could imagine. I slung acid in his eyes, pissed in his ears. I called him a moron, a retard, even though he wasn't either of those things; he wasn't even slow, he was smart as a whip but just… came across the wrong way. I told him he had a limp dick, couldn't fuck, wasn't fit to lay a cripple or a coma victim. I mean, it was like I was possessed. I don't even know that I'd heard words like that before, and they came rocketing out past my tongue – I wanted to close my teeth and stop them from coming, but there it was. All that bile. Unstoppable."