She was afraid only that her neck might snap because of the pressure. He gripped her so tight—his forearm jammed beneath her chin—his clenched fist straining hard, hard into her back, just above her buttocks.

She never closed her eyes because—how did she know this?—the gesture might anger him, might make him rough. There was something about being weak or showing weakness that all the boys were roused by: a dog slinking and cringing, inviting a kick; a cat shying away instead of arching its back when it was stroked. And other children, of course. Smaller children. Of course.

She stared at, she must have memorized, the windshield of the old wreck. It was cracked in cobweb-like patterns that overlapped with one another, doubly, trebly, dense and intricate and fascinating as a puzzle in a picture book. A maze, such things were called. A labyrinth. Can you get to the center without raising your pencil point and without crossing any line? Sometimes Marya could do it at the first try, sometimes she couldn’t. If she got angry she cheated: but then getting to the center didn’t count.

When it rained the raindrops fell in unanticipated patterns on the windshield, rushing in little channels, slanted rivulets Marya could not have predicted. The cracked glass, Marya thought, was like the underside of ice on the canal. Seeing it from beneath. If you were trapped there, lying there . . . seeing it from beneath. The surface was cracked but not broken through the way some of the other windshields in the lot were broken. (How many people had died in these cars, Marya wondered, the first time she explored the lot, poking into the wrecks, frightened of seeing bloodstains. But of course she wanted to see bloodstains. And Lee and his friends said there was worse than that if you knew where to look—in that green Studebaker, for instance—and what to look for.)

When it was over Lee wouldn’t wait to catch his breath but drew away from her at once, flush-faced, panting, his wet lips slack. He never looked at her—they never looked at each other, at such times. He rarely spoke except to mutter, “Don’t you tell anybody, you.”

HOLD STILL. DON’T move. Don’t tell.

As if Marya Knauer required such warnings.