I went back in the shed and closed the door. There was no way to lock it. I kept my hand on the flimsy handle and watched Jake’s shape in the window. He hesitated, maybe listening, maybe watching for me, too. Then he walked away, crunching through the snowy leaves around the shed. I pictured ice clinging to his bare ankles. I hoped it hurt.

None of the women in the shed had moved. Starla pulled off Jamey’s nipple with a pop, and a tear of yellow milk slid down Jamey’s stomach. She brushed it away like a bug.

“I have to get out of here before dinner’s over,” I said.

Jamey started buttoning up her shirt. “They wanted me to siphon the gas from your truck earlier.” Her eyes flicked up. “I just pretended.”

“Don’t you ever want to get high?” Lisbeth asked me.

Behind the Church was a parking lot, an old loading dock with Dumpsters and pallets, and behind that, a hill sloped to a ditch. A field stretched on the other side before the river, brown and unchanging. Later, it would change: white, and white, and white again.

We used to sit on that hill after services. Lisbeth hiked her skirt to her knees. Her leggings beneath were white, the knees already kissed green. Grass was green then.

“No,” I said.

“Not even a little? Not even sometimes?”

“It’s not really my thing. I’ve seen a lot. It can make people stupid. It can make them forget and get paranoid. It can do good things. It’s medicine—I do believe that, and I believe it should be legal, available. But if you smoke every day, every day multiple times...” Every day since you were ten, as Lobo had.

“Well, I wouldn’t do that,” Lisbeth said. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t know what I would do,” I said.

Lisbeth believed in God and her parents, and that kissing me didn’t count. She also thought she should know, at least a little bit, what she was giving up, what she was sacrificing for the kingdom of forever.

She met me regularly at Crossroads for Coke or coffee. We had gone to the roller rink once after it was outlawed, and one of the girls had passed her a cigarette. She inhaled greedily as if it were food, the red tip lighting up our dim corner like neon. One moment of sin. Then she folded over in a fit of coughing. Everybody laughed. It was fun to see the church girl fall.

There was another night I had gone with her to the biker bar in town. It was karaoke night—eighteen and up, ladies always free—and Lisbeth said she had her eye on the prize, two hundred dollars in cash. I think she just had her eye on the stage, a small raised platform in the back by the bathrooms. The stage lights shone out sickly green from the rims of old coffee cans. The host was an old man who had been to our farm. We nodded at each other, in the way of those who know not to say more. Nobody checked IDs.