In the middle of this reverie, Marianne appeared.

She stood in the doorway of the grubby Biergarten, a homely shawl clutched around her shoulders, her eyes searching the crowd. For an instant, her eyes met Benita’s and a look of surprise, even shock, registered so transparently in them that Benita felt a corresponding jolt. There was no joining these two worlds—Marianne’s ordered existence on one side, and these boys, this place, this buoyant, drunken feeling of irresponsibility on the other. And so Benita looked away. It was not so much a decision as an instinct. She threw her head back and extended her neck in a way she knew was loose and inviting. She laughed an indiscreet laugh. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marianne hesitate as if considering whether to barge in.

But she didn’t. And a moment later she was gone.

Benita was disappointed and relieved at once.

The boy placed his hand on her knee, rubbing the fabric of her dress against her thigh in a way that made her skin feel rough. What did it matter? Benita rested her head against his shoulder—she was the slut and idiot Marianne had always thought she was. She was nothing but a stupid girl. The empty doorway where Marianne, her friend, her roommate, her coparent, really, had stood, was like a black hole.

Upstairs, in her room under the eaves, what happened was quick and unclear. Benita floated through it as if from above: the sweaty hands on her breasts and the boy’s wurst breath, the hot, surprising baby smoothness of his belly, the hard strength of his thighs. He was no expert. And more surprising, he had a false leg below his right knee, a hard stalk of wood that pressed against her shin through the pants he kept up around his knees. Did she imagine it? She reached down, but he pushed away her hand. And so she let him finish without knowing for sure.

Only after he was asleep, with one arm thrown gratefully across her breasts, snoring slightly, did she verify. Gently pushing up the leg of his pants, she felt the smooth wooden shape of the false limb and ran her hand to the end where it attached to his leg with primitive leather straps. A delicate nub of scar tissue covered the bone, dimpled and uneven, yet still smooth—as delicate as the head of a penis. She winced and the boy stirred in his sleep. Benita sat beside him for a while, in the lamplight that shone through the window, beside his clumsy, damaged body. A war injury, probably, despite his youth. Maybe he had been one of those hapless boys ordered to the front when no one else was left, shot on the spot if they so much as looked the wrong way. Or maybe he had been a cruel child soldier and performed some God-awful task.

As quietly as she could, she gathered her things, the small bag she had packed, the shoes she had kicked off, the skirt she had dropped to the floor. Stepping carefully, she slipped into the hall and down the stairs, this time without question as to where she was going, and with the cold, relieving calm of purpose; and when she shut the door of the inn, there was a satisfying finality to the click, severing her ties to this strange in-between life.