She glances at his groin. “I don’t turn you on exactly, do I?”

“You do, you do. Too much. It’s still too strange. I don’t even know your last name.”

“Pendleton.” She drops to her knees on the bathroom rug and takes his penis into her mouth. He backs away as if bitten.

“Wait.”

Jill looks up at him crossly, looks up the slope of his slack gut, a cranky puzzled child with none of the answers in the last class of the day, her mouth slick with forbidden candy. He lifts her as he would a child, but she is longer than a child, and her armpits are scratchy and deep; he kisses her on the mouth. No gumdrops, her lips harden and she twists her thin face away, saying into his shoulder, “I don’t turn anybody on, much. No tits. My mother has nifty tits, maybe that’s my trouble.”

“Tell me about your trouble,” he says, and leads her by the hand toward the bedroom.

“Oh, Jesus, one of those. Trouble-shooters. From the look of it you’re in worse shape than me, you can’t even respond when somebody takes off their clothes.”

“First times are hard; you need to absorb somebody a little first.” He darkens the room and they lie on the bed. She offers to embrace him again, hard mouth and sharp knees anxious to have it done, but he smooths her onto her back and massages her breasts, plumping them up, circling. “These aren’t your trouble,” he croons. “These are lovely.” Down below he feels himself easily stiffening, clotting: cream in the freezer. CLINIC FOR RUNAWAYS OPENED. Fathers Do Duty On Nights Off.

Relaxing, Jill grows stringy; tendons and resentments come to the surface. “You should be fucking my mother, she really is good with men, she thinks they’re the be-all and end-all. I know she was playing around, even before Daddy died.”

“Is that why you ran away?”

“You wouldn’t believe if I really told you.”

“Tell me.”

“A guy I went with tried to get me into heavy drugs.”

“That’s not so unbelievable.”

“Yeah, but his reason was crazy. Look, you don’t want to hear this crap. You’re up now, why don’t you just give it to me?”

“Tell me his reason.”

“You see, when I’d trip, I’d see, like, you know—God. He never would. He just saw pieces of like old movies, that didn’t add up.”

“What kind of stuff did he give you? Pot?”

“Oh, no, listen, pot is just like having a Coke or something. Acid, when he could get it. Strange pills. He’d rob doctors’ cars to get their samples and then mix them to see what happened. They have names for all these pills, purple hearts, dollies, I don’t know what all. Then after he stole this syringe he’d inject stuff, he wouldn’t even know what it was half the time, it was wild. I would never let him break my skin. I figured, anything went in by the mouth, I could throw it up, but anything went in my veins, I had no way to get rid of it, it could kill me. He said that was part of the kick. He was really freaked, but he had this, you know, power over me. I ran.”