The customers took no notice.

For eleven months she lived in a semi-somnambulistic daze, going to work, coming home, eating something, handing her paycheck over to her parents once a week, then shuffling off to bed where she read until sleep claimed her.

Outside her bedroom window, the soot from the plant’s chimneys became less and less thick but still managed to cover the town in ashes and grayness.

She read books on sociology, countless romance novels and mysteries, biographies of writers and film stars, years-old science magazines, and developed an understanding and love of poetry that had eluded her in high school. Of course she went for a lot of the Romantics, Donne and Keats and Shelley, as well as a few modernists—T.S. Eliot and James Dickey, Rainer Maria Rilke and the lyrical, gloomy Dylan Thomas. Cumulatively, they gave eloquent voice to her silent aches and hidden despairs.

Crime began to spread through the town: holdups, street fights, petty thefts, and acts of vandalism.

And in the center of it all stood the plant, a hulking, roaring dinosaur, fighting desperately against its own extinction as it sank into the tar of progress.

Lucy discovered Jane Eyre in the library one day. Over the next month she read it three times; and the dinosaur howled in the night; and her mother, at day’s end every day, sat alone staring at the television or listening to her scratchy old records; and her father’s eyes filled with more fear and shame as he came to realize he was never going to be called back to work; and somewhere inside Lucy a feeling awakened. She did what she could to squash it but it never really went away. So sometimes, very late at night when shameful fantasies are indulged, she took a certain private pleasure as she lay in her bed, and usually felt like hell afterward, remembering the words to a nursery rhyme her mother used to read to her when she was a child:

“Mirror, mirror, tell me true

Am I pretty or am I plain?

Or am I downright ugly?

And ugly to remain?”

No man would ever want her in that special, heated, passionate way. She was too plain, and the plain did not inspire great passion.

Then Larry Parre, one of the stockroom workers, asked her if she wanted to go to a party on Wednesday evening, her only night off.

She smiled, stunned (no one had ever asked her out on a real date before), then decided that she deserved to enjoy herself a little.

She said yes, and Larry smiled, really smiled, and she felt wonderful, as if she were Miss Eyre meeting Rochester for the first time.

She had managed to save a little over four hundred dollars from her twice-monthly twenty-dollar allowance, and spent nearly a third of it on a new outfit to wear to the party that Wednesday. The thought of having a date and meeting some new people, making some friends, having someone else besides her parents to talk to…well, for the first time since coming home she felt there was something to look forward to.