Every day Bobby was there was further torment for Mary-Sue. She resented his intrusion into the private universe she’d found for herself, the way he appropriated everything of hers as his. Even worse, she knew he was primarily there so he could make a grand entrance when he returned home as the prodigal son. Her family was never huge on biblical thinking but everyone everywhere went awww for that one.

Finally the last straw. Mary-Sue was enjoying a couple hours of afternoon delight with her Colorado cowboy, Steve. Because locks went against house rules, Bobby walked into her bedroom while Steve was going down on her, right as she was about to come. Instead of leaving, Bobby stood and watched. Mary-Sue’s thighs were hiked up over Steve’s shoulders, her head and torso falling off the side of the bed like a trapeze in flight. She shrieked, plucked whatever books she could off the floor, and hurled them at Bobby until he finally cackled and walked away, leaving the door wide open.

“Nice jugs, sis,” he said. She made him pack his bags before the hour was up.

After Bobby went home, Mary-Sue’s housemates spoke so fondly of him that she realized she’d been living with a bunch of halfwits. The peach had lost its bloom. Mary-Sue split Gualala and joined a colony of modern ascetics up the coast in cold, wet Humboldt County, one hundred miles south of the Oregon border. These colonists lived in single huts in the redwoods with the barest necessities: electricity tapped from a nearby power line that went out without warning and a grimy communal cold-water shower. It was as far from a suburban split-level as she’d ever encountered; everything about it made even the group house in Gualala seem plastic and phony. Bourgeois.

The colony didn’t care what you believed in as long as you believed in something and kept yourself clean, kind, solitary and silent. There were a handful of Buddhist, Hindu and Roman Catholic hermits but the rest of them didn’t have names for their beliefs yet—they were still too new, still too original.