I wrote several drafts in which various characters recounted their clashes, run-ins, and romances with a runaway named Justine. One of these characters was a musician. One was a policeman. One was the owner of a Chinatown grocery built on top of a former opium den. Most of these pages ended up being tossed away, except for the character of Sara who, rather rudely, ended up taking over the book for herself.

Sara is a girl besieged. When we meet her, there’s a police officer trying to get into her home, and she’s faint from the heat inside her body. She’s someone who appears cold and aloof, but she has a sudden fever burning up inside her; she’s 103 degrees. I liked the idea of a girl who is trying to be tough and not vulnerable, and is yet suffused with sensations she can’t control or understand; she’s in peril of almost dying. It’s sort of the heightened state of adolescence—you have these extremes of feeling; you have intensity inside you that no one else understands or believes.

With these two central characters in place, I had a frail plot and began to explore what happened when this rather sheltered girl sets off on her own to find someone who’s both a lure into the underworld and a dangerous mystery.

While I was writing the story of Sara and Justine, I was thinking a lot about young girls in other books and my own experience reading about these girls. It’s interesting to me that some of the most formidable and unruly female characters are found in children’s books. There are the orphaned girls in Anne of Green Gables and The Little Princess. These are girls who set out into the world on their own, girls whose unruliness is presented as a natural response to the stifling constraints of their particular worlds, and though they’re ostracized, they’re rarely tamed. But girls like this disappear from young adult books, as the plots become centered on romance and the dreaded “puberty.” I think this type of portrayal has changed drastically in the last several years, but when I was in high school, with the staples being Judy Blume and V. C. Andrews, it was certainly the case.

In literature, the voices of young girls are mostly absent. The adolescent male characters of authors like Salinger and Twain are heroic and flawed, rebellious and heartbreakingly humane. To write about a young girl is to risk being seen as trivial and sentimental. Their stories are so associated with the banalities of the thousands of cheerleaders in Hollywood movies that it’s hard to view a young girl as an anarchic, fierce character in the midst of her own war or journey.