“You’re totally sexy and you don’t even know it,” said Holly. “Look at those lips.” She took a handful of my lips and squeezed. “I would give anything for that mouth.” Holly did have very thin lips.

The fall snapped into focus, a blaze of red and yellow. Then the landscape started drabbing back down again. The days at the school were short and muzzy. I was on a slow boil about my mother not having recognized E at the Total Care Center. I truly hated her for the first time in my life. I made excuses not to come home for weekends and went to Holly’s parents’ house in Greenwich for Thanksgiving. My mother was taken aback when I told her, but she accepted my decision with surprising speed. I sensed shame in her voice.

The Total Care Center was very close to Holly’s parents’ house. I discovered this as Holly’s red-faced father, Mr. Talbot, drove us to their place from the school and passed it without a glance. The buildings, single-storied, immaculate, white with shiny black steel roofs, seemed to make no impression whatsoever on his satisfied mind. I imagined my sister locked in her cell on Thanksgiving Day, opening her mouth, her already wide eyes widening high up on that triangular head as she imagined her mother, who was nowhere. I would be her mother now.

Holly’s parents were super gregarious but conservative. Often I wondered how they felt about having a daughter who stalked around their country house in tight leather pants and spent her nights with local boys she snuck in through the back door. I was still a virgin. Holly was a proud slut. I admired her for this.

The Talbots seemed to have retired. They spent every winter on their boat (actually a yacht the size of an ocean liner) in the Bahamas. They flew Holly out for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the winter, while Mr. and Mrs. Talbot were basting themselves like roast turkeys on the deck of their yacht, Holly would be snorting coke and dragging boys through her window in boarding school, and the house in Greenwich would lie empty, with only the housekeeper coming in a few days a week to fluff up the pillows.

Mr. Talbot looked like he was filled to the brim with meat. That Thanksgiving, Scotch in hand, he gave me a robust explanation of the Talbot lifestyle, punctuated by sudden, unpredictable guffaws, while his wife, a solidly built woman with a light dusting of fair hair on her cheeks, smiled in a knowing, wise, possibly sarcastic way.

“At a certain stage in my life, I realized I could live however I wanted,” Mr. Talbot said, an amused expression on his face. “I mean, in terms of scheduling.” And then he exploded in phlegmy laughter as his wife maintained her rigid smile.