So that was the end of my little love affair with Dean Black. I went back inside the school and spent the rest of math class in a toilet stall, staring at my veins and reading the bad poetry on the wall. If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. Someone had scrawled over the last words, so it now read, If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, SHOOT IT.

Heather Hale came into the girls’ room. I recognized her white pumps; she always wore them with white ankle socks. Through the gap under the door of the stall, I watched her hands frantically rubbing dirt off her white pumps. I could hear water running, and her voice saying ShitShitShit as she went down once more with the paper towel, scrubbing her muddy heels. I thought if I went out, she might cry, and I would have to comfort her. Not having a mother around, you’re frightened when you have to hug and console and do all those motherly things. I didn’t want to have to comfort her.

But she wasn’t crying. She was staring in the mirror, putting on lip gloss.

I’m so sorry about that, I said.

She looked startled. She backed away from me. She fumbled with something in her purse.

Sorry about what? she said. Her voice was soft, breathless.

That garden hose thing.

She kept looking in the mirror. She covered her freckles with foundation.

It was just sex, she said. They wanted to do it so I let them. She shrugged her shoulders.

I didn’t smile, though she smiled at me. She shrugged her shoulders again. Erase this, she seemed to be saying, erase, erase, erase. I thought, Fine, disappear before my eyes.

Did I handle that right? I really didn’t know what to do. When I got home from school, I went straight for the wild garden behind our house and looked for Seamus, but he wasn’t around. There was a large apple tree at the back of our garden, and he’d put my rusted tricycle up in the boughs as some kind of monument to my former days as a toddler adventuress.

I wished Everly was around. I hadn’t thought about her for a long time, really. Hey, Mom, should a girl care if a guy sticks a garden hose up her and laughs about it the next day? I doubted she’d know. Maybe she got into that kind of thing too. After all, she’d left me and Seamus for the leader of the Pleasure Family.

When he walked in that night, I stayed in my bedroom, looking at some pictures of models I had torn from magazines. Some glossy good girls. I could hear him, busy, in the kitchen. He might be rolling a joint, sealing the edges of white paper with the roselike tip of his tongue.