IF YOU’RE WHITE, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch. It doesn’t matter if your dad’s the foreman or the rancher—you’re still a ranch girl, and you’ve been dealt a bad hand.

If you’re the foreman’s daughter on Ted Haskell’s Running H cattle ranch, you live in the foreman’s house, on the dirt road between Haskell’s place and the barn. There are two bedrooms with walls made of particleboard, one bathroom (no tub), muddy boots and jackets in the living room, and a kitchen that’s never used. No one from school ever visits the ranch, so you can keep your room the way you decorated it at ten: a pink comforter, horse posters on the walls, plastic horse models on the shelves. Outside there’s an old cow-dog with a ruined hip, a barn cat who sleeps in the rafters, and, until he dies, a runt calf named Minute, who cries at night by the front door.

You help your dad when the other hands are busy: wading after him into an irrigation ditch, or rounding up a stray cowcalf pair when you get home from school. Your mom used to help, too—she sits a horse better than any of the hands—but then she took an office job in town, and bought herself a house to be close to work. That was the story, anyway; she hasn’t shown up at the ranch since junior high. Your dad works late now, comes home tired and opens a beer. You bring him cheese and crackers, and watch him fall asleep in his chair.

Down the road, at the ranch house, Ted Haskell grills steaks from his cows every night. He’s been divorced for years, but he’s never learned how to cook anything except steak. Whenever you’re there with Haskell’s daughter Carla, who’s in your class at school, Haskell tries to get you to stay for dinner. He says you’re too thin and a good beefsteak will make you strong. But you don’t like Haskell’s teasing, and you don’t like leaving your dad alone, so you walk home hungry.

When you’re sixteen, Haskell’s ranch house is the best place to get ready to go out at night. Carla has her own bathroom, with a big mirror, where you curl your hair into ringlets and put on blue eye shadow. You and Carla wear matching Wranglers, and when it gets cold you wear knitted gloves with rainbow-striped fingers that the boys love to look at when they get drunk out on the Hill.