“Always thinking of yourself,” Talbot said. He turned onto 520. When they reached the drive-in, he killed the lights. The theater had been closed for nearly five years and the speaker poles had all been removed, but the gray tattered screen still stood facing the wavy acre of asphalt. Talbot floored it, and Karen saw Winkle tense up in his seat. The car felt like a ship crashing into a series of wakes: up one rise and slamming down after it, up the next and slamming down, over and over, until something metal left the back end of the car and Talbot finally slowed down.

“Was that the muffler?” he asked, glancing at his side mirror.

Neither Karen nor Winkle answered him. They drove back to the parkway without speaking. The Newport rattled across the empty parking lot of the bowling alley to the spot where the Datsun was parked next to the bookstore.

Talbot said, “I guess this is where I drop you two off.”

“What do you mean?” Karen asked.

“I’m heading north. Lefty’s parents just bought a house in Merritt Ridge, and you live in Bel Air. It only makes sense.”

She reached inside her jacket for a cigarette. Tapping the filter against her thumbnail, she asked, “You want a ride?”

“Sure,” Winkle said.

The two of them climbed out of the car. Talbot, she expected, would deliver some closing game-show remark, to which she would respond with something gruff and slightly racy. But he said only “Later” and put the Newport into drive.

Karen lit the cigarette and stared at the Datsun. She was the cocky one, out of all her friends. She was the one with the acid tongue, always ready to put whoever in his place. But she felt incapable of doing that, suddenly. What could she possibly say to Winkle that would put him in his place? What was his place? She didn’t even know hers anymore. Finally, to break what would have otherwise been an eternal silence, she said, “That’s people for you. You’ll find out, in a few years: some people don’t ever change; they just get stuck in the asshole stage. Freud wrote about it, the asshole stage, people who’ll never be anything more than—”

He was standing less than a foot away from her, leaning forward. His fingers tapped at the sides of his khakis.