So the girls at the Center were trouble. I knew that going in. They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who reveled. They were girls who liked boys and back seats, who slid things that weren’t theirs into their tight pockets, who lit fires and did doughnuts in the high school parking lot. They were girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck. Girls who drank whiskey and worse by the waterfront, looking out at the smeared reflections of the streetlights, making plans instead of wishes. They were girls who ran away, who inked their own arms with needles and ballpoint pens, who got things pierced below the neck. Below the neck, ladies, can you believe it? Only whores, etc. etc., as my mother never tired of telling me. They pierced too, these girls, and hit, and were sent out of gym class for raising bruises on the girls whose daddies brought them to school in Porsches, though some of their daddies had Porsches too. That wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point! They had their problems. They had their demands. They were shoplifters and potheads, arsonists and bullies, boy crazy and girl crazy, split and scarred. They were, some of them, cruel. They were, more of them, angry—angry at their parents, at their schools, at their congressmen, at their bodies, at the painted white lines they saw everywhere, telling them no no no when they wanted yes—they were girls who were bored, so bored, or they were girls who were the opposite, who were so full up of feeling that they couldn’t simply do their times tables or learn their French conjugations or go to the movies on a Saturday night and discuss the relative cuteness of so-and-so’s haircut and let the age-appropriate boy next to them drag his sweaty palm around and around and around their pretty knees. They were too full up for that. They were too full up for caution. So they were girls who got caught. And they were girls who got sent away. They were girls whose mothers couldn’t deal with them for one more minute, not alone, not without help, not this summer while you sit in the office all day and come home late after “golf,” Carl, really, I can’t; girls whose fathers thought maybe some Good Clean Mountain Air and some Good Far Eastern Religion would cure them, since nothing else had. You know the girls I mean, because every school has them, every neighborhood, including yours, especially mine. I was not one of them, of course. Not yet.