Kitobni o'qish: «Rirefly Lane / Улица Светлячков. Книга для чтения на английском языке»

© КАРО, комментарий, словарь, оформление, 2025

Комментарии и словарь И. С. Гавриш

Chapter one

They used to be called the Firefly Lane girls. That was a long time ago – more than three decades – but just now, as she lay in bed listening to a winter storm raging outside, it seemed like yesterday.

In the past week (unquestionably the worst seven days of her life), she’d lost the ability to distance herself from the memories. Too often lately in her dreams it was 1974; she was a teenager again, coming of age¹ in the shadow of a lost war, riding her bike beside her best friend in a darkness so complete it was like being invisible. The place was relevant only as a reference point, but she remembered it in vivid detail: a meandering ribbon of asphalt bordered on either side by gullies of murky water and hillsides of shaggy grass. Before they met, that road seemed to go nowhere at all; it was just a country lane named after an insect no one had ever seen in this rugged blue and green corner of the world.

Then they saw it through each other’s eyes. When they stood together on the rise of the hill, instead of towering trees and muddy potholes and distant snowy mountains, they saw all the places they would someday go. At night, they sneaked out of their neighboring houses and met on that road. On the banks of the Pilchuck River they smoked stolen cigarettes, cried to the lyrics of “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” and told each other everything, stitching their lives together until by summer’s end no one knew where one girl ended and the other began. They became to everyone who knew them simply “Tully-and-Kate”, and for more than thirty years that friendship was the bulkhead of their lives: strong, durable, solid. The music might have changed with the decades, but the promises made on Firefly Lane remained.

Best friends forever.

They’d believed it would last, that vow, that someday they’d be old women, sitting in their rocking chairs on a creaking deck, talking about the times of their lives, and laughing.

Now she knew better, of course. For more than a year she’d been telling herself it was okay, that she could go on without a best friend. Sometimes she even believed it.

Then she would hear the music. Their music. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” “Material Girl.” “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “Purple Rain.”² Yesterday, while she’d been shopping, a bad Muzak³ version of “You’ve Got a Friend” had made her cry, right there next to the radishes.

She eased the covers back and got out of bed, being careful not to waken the man sleeping beside her. For a moment she stood there, staring down at him in the shadowy darkness. Even in sleep, he wore a troubled expression.

She took the phone off its hook and left the bedroom, walking down the quiet hallway toward the deck. There, she stared out at the storm and gathered her courage. As she punched in the familiar numbers, she wondered what she would say to her once-best-friend after all these silent months, how she would start. I’ve had a bad week… my life is falling apart… or simply: I need you.

Across the black and turbulent sound, the phone rang.

Part one. The seventies

Dancing Queen young and sweet,only seventeen⁴

Chapter two

For most of the country, 1970 was a year of upheaval and change, but in the house on Magnolia Drive, everything was orderly and quiet. Inside, ten-year-old Tully Hart sat on a cold wooden floor, building a Lincoln Log cabin for her Liddle Kiddles, who were asleep on tiny pink Kleenexes. If she were in her bedroom, she would have had a Jackson Five forty-five⁵ in her Close ‘N Play⁶, but in the living room, there wasn’t even a radio.

Her grandma didn’t like music much, or television or board games. Mostly – like now – Grandma sat in her rocking chair by the fireplace, doing needlepoint. She made hundreds of samplers, most of which quoted the Bible. At Christmastime she donated them to the church, where they were sold at fund-raisers.

And Grandpa… well, he couldn’t help being quiet. Ever since his stroke, he just stayed in bed. Sometimes he rang his bell, and that was the only time Tully ever saw her grandma hurry. At the first tinkling of the bell, she’d smile and say, “Oh, my,” and run for the hallway as fast as her slippered feet would take her.

Tully reached for her yellow-haired Troll. Humming very quietly, she made him dance with Calamity Kiddle to “Daydream Believer.” Halfway through the song, there was a knock at the door.

It was such an unexpected sound that Tully paused in her playing and looked up. Except for Sundays, when Mr. and Mrs. Beattle showed up to take them to church, no one ever came to visit.

Gran put her needlework in the pink plastic bag by her chair and got up, crossing the room in that slow, shuffling way that had become normal in the last few years. When she opened the door, there was a long silence, then she said, “Oh, my.”

Gran’s voice sounded weird. Peering sideways, Tully saw a tall woman with long messy hair and a smile that wouldn’t stay in place. She was one of the prettiest women Tully had ever seen: milky skin, a sharp, pointed nose and high cheekbones that slashed above her tiny chin, liquid brown eyes that opened and closed slowly.

“Thass⁷ not much of a greeting for your long-lost daughter.” The lady pushed past Grandma and walked straight to Tully, then bent down. “Is this my little Tallulah Rose?”

Daughter? That meant—

“Mommy?” she whispered in awe, afraid to believe it. She’d waited so long for this, dreamed of it: her mommy coming back.

“Did you miss me?”

“Oh, yes,” Tully said, trying not to laugh. But she was so happy.

Gran closed the door. “Why don’t you come into the kitchen for a cup of coffee?”

“I didn’t come back for coffee. I came for my daughter.”

“You’re broke,” Grandma said tiredly.

Her mother looked irritated. “So what if I am?”

“Tully needs—”

“I think I can figure out what my daughter needs.” Her mother seemed to be trying to stand straight, but it wasn’t working. She was kind of wobbly and her eyes looked funny. She twirled a strand of long, wavy hair around her finger.

Gran moved toward them. “Raising a child is a big responsibility, Dorothy. Maybe if you moved in here for a while and got to know Tully you’d be ready…” She paused, then frowned and said quietly, “You’re drunk.”

Mommy giggled and winked at Tully.

Tully winked back. Drunk wasn’t so bad. Her grandpa used to drink lots before he got sick. Even Gran sometimes had a glass of wine.

“Iss⁸ my birthday, Mother, or have you forgotten?”

“Your birthday?” Tully shot to her feet. “Wait here,” she said, then ran to her room. Her heart was racing as she dug through her vanity drawer, scattering her stuff everywhere, looking for the macaroni and bead necklace she’d made her mom at Bible school last year. Gran had frowned when she saw it, told her not to get her hopes up, but Tully hadn’t been able to do that. Her hopes had been up for years. Shoving it in her pocket, she rushed back out, just in time to hear her mommy say,

“I’m not drunk, Mother, dear. I’m with my kid again for the first time in three years. Love is the ultimate high.”

“Six years. She was four the last time you dropped her off here.”

“That long ago?” Mommy said, looking confused.

“Move back home, Dorothy. I can help you.”

“Like you did last time? No, thanks.”

Last time? Mommy had come back before?

Gran sighed, then stiffened. “How long are you going to hold all that against me?”

“It’s hardly the kind of thing that has an expiration date, is it? Come on, Tallulah.” Her mom lurched toward the door.

Tully frowned. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Her mommy hadn’t hugged her or kissed her or asked how she was. And everyone knew you were supposed to pack a suitcase to leave. She pointed at her bedroom door. “My stuff—”

“You don’t need that materialistic shit, Tallulah.”

“Huh?” Tully didn’t understand.

Gran pulled her into a hug that smelled sweetly familiar, of talcum powder⁹ and hair spray. These were the only arms that had ever hugged Tully, this was the only person who’d ever made her feel safe, and suddenly she was afraid. “Gran?” she said pulling back. “What’s happening?”

“You’re coming with me,” Mommy said, reaching out to the doorframe to steady herself.

Her grandmother clutched her by the shoulders, gave her a little shake. “You know our phone number and address, right? You call us if you get scared or something goes wrong.” She was crying; seeing her strong, quiet grandmother cry scared and confused Tully. What was going on? What had she done wrong already?

“I’m sorry, Gran, I—”

Mommy swooped over and grabbed her by the shoulder, shaking her hard. “Don’t ever say you’re sorry. It makes you look pathetic. Come on.” She took Tully’s hand and pulled her toward the door.

Tully stumbled along behind her mother, out of the house and down the steps and across the street to a rusted VW¹⁰ bus that had plastic flower decals all over it and a giant yellow peace symbol painted on the side.

The door opened; thick gray smoke rolled out. Through the haze she saw three people in the van. A black man with a huge afro and a red headband was in the driver’s seat. In the back was a woman in a fringed vest and striped pants, with a brown kerchief over her blond hair; beside her sat a man in bell-bottoms and a ratty T-shirt. Brown shag carpeting covered the van floor; a few pipes lay scattered about, mixed up with empty beer bottles, food wrappers, and eight-track tapes.

“This is my kid, Tallulah,” Mom said.

Tully didn’t say anything, but she hated to be called Tallulah. She’d tell her mommy that later, when they were alone.

“Far out,” someone said.

“She looks just like you, Dot. It blows my mind.”

“Get in,” the driver said gruffly. “We’re gonna¹¹ be late.”

The man in the dirty T-shirt reached for Tully, grabbed her around the waist, and swung her into the van, where she positioned herself carefully on her knees.

Mom climbed inside and slammed the door shut. Strange music pulsed through the van. All she could make out were a few words: some-thin’ happenin’ here… Smoke made everything look soft and vaguely out of focus.

Tully edged closer to the metal side to make room beside her, but Mom sat next to the lady in the kerchief. They immediately started talking about pigs and marches and a man named Kent. None of it made sense to Tully and the smoke was making her dizzy. When the man beside her lit up his pipe, she couldn’t help the little sigh of disappointment that leaked from her mouth.

The man heard it and turned to her. Exhaling a cloud of gray smoke right into her face, he smiled. “Jus’ go with the flow, li’l girl.¹²”

“Look at the way my mother has her dressed,” Mommy said bitterly. “Like she’s some little doll. How’s she supposed to be real if she can’t get dirty?”

“Right on, Dot,” the guy said, blowing smoke out of his mouth and leaning back.

Mommy looked at Tully for the first time; really looked at her. “You remember that, kiddo. Life isn’t about cooking and cleaning and havin’ babies. It’s about bein’ free. Doin’ your own thing. You can be the fucking president of the United States if you want.”

“We could use a new president, thass¹³ for sure,” the driver said.

The woman in the headband patted Mom’s thigh. “Thass tellin’ it like it is. Pass me that bong, Tom.” She giggled. “Hey, that’s almost a rhyme.”

Tully frowned, feeling a new kind of shame in the pit of her stomach. She thought she looked pretty in this dress. And she didn’t want to be the president. She wanted to be a ballerina.

Mostly, though, she wanted her mommy to love her. She edged sideways until she was actually close enough to her mother to touch her. “Happy birthday,” she said quietly, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out the necklace she’d worked so hard on, agonized over, really, still gluing glitter on long after the other kids had gone out to play. “I made this for you.”

Mom snagged the necklace and closed her fingers around it. Tully waited and waited for her mom to say thank you and put the necklace on, but she didn’t; she just sat there, swaying to the music, talking to her friends.

Tully finally closed her eyes. The smoke was making her sleepy. For most of her life she’d missed her mommy, and not like you missed a toy you couldn’t find or a friend who stopped coming over to play because you wouldn’t share. She missed her mommy. It was always inside her, an empty space that ached in the daytime and turned into a sharp pain at night. She’d promised herself that if her mommy ever came back, she’d be good. Perfect. Whatever she’d done or said that was so wrong, she’d fix or change. More than anything she wanted to make her mommy proud.

But now she didn’t know what to do. In her dreams, they’d always gone off together alone, just the two of them, holding hands.

“Here we are,” her dream mommy always said as they walked up the hill to their house. “Home sweet home.” Then she’d kiss Tully’s cheek and whisper, “I missed you so much. I was gone because—”

“Tallulah. Wake up.”

Tully came awake with a jolt. Her head was pounding and her throat hurt. When she tried to say, Where are we? all that came out was a croak.

Everyone laughed at that and kept laughing as they bundled out of the van.

On this busy downtown Seattle street, there were people everywhere, chanting and yelling and holding up signs that read MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, and HELL NO, WE WON’T GO¹⁴. Tully had never seen so many people in one place.

Mommy took hold of her hand, pulled her close.

The rest of the day was a blur of people chanting slogans and singing songs. Tully spent every moment terrified that she’d somehow let go of her mother’s hand and be swept away by the crowd. She didn’t feel any safer when the policemen showed up because they had guns on their belts and sticks in their hands and plastic shields that protected their faces.

But all the crowd did was march and all the police did was watch.

By the time it got dark, she was tired and hungry and her head ached, but they just kept walking, up one street and down another. The crowd was different now; they’d put away their signs and started drinking. Sometimes she heard whole sentences or pieces of conversation, but none of it made sense.

“Did you see those pigs? They were dyin’ to knock our teeth out, but we were peaceful, man. Couldn’t touch us. Hey, Dot, you’re bogarting the joint.”

Everyone around them laughed, Mommy most of all. Tully couldn’t figure out what was going on and she had a terrible headache. People swelled around them, dancing and laughing. From somewhere, music spilled into the street.

And then, suddenly, she was holding on to nothing.

“Mommy!” she screamed.

No one answered or turned to her, even though there were people everywhere. She pushed through the bodies, screaming for her mommy until her voice failed her. Finally, she went back to where she’d last seen her mommy and waited at the curb.

She’ll be back.

Tears stung her eyes and leaked down her face as she sat there waiting, trying to be brave.

But her mommy never came back.

For years afterward, she tried to remember what had happened next, what she did, but all those people were like a cloud that obscured her memories. All she ever remembered was waking up on a dirty cement stoop along a street that was totally empty, seeing a policeman on horseback.

From his perch high above her, he frowned down at her and said, “Hey, little one, are you all alone?”

“I am,” was all she could say without crying.

He took her back to the house on Queen Anne Hill, where her grandma held her tightly and kissed her cheek and told her it wasn’t her fault.

But Tully knew better. Somehow today she’d done something wrong, been bad. Next time her mommy came back, she’d try harder. She’d promise to be the president and she’d never, ever say she was sorry again.

Tully got a chart of the presidents of the United States and memorized every name in order. For months afterward, she told anyone who asked that she would be the first woman president; she even quit taking ballet classes. On her eleventh birthday, while Grandma lit the candles on her cake and sang a thin, watery version of “Happy Birthday,” Tully glanced repeatedly at the door, thinking, This is it, but no one ever knocked and the phone didn’t ring. Later, with the opened boxes of her gifts around her, she tried to keep smiling. In front of her, on the coffee table, was an empty scrapbook. As a present, it sort of sucked, but her grandma always gave her stuff like this – projects to keep her busy and quiet.

“She didn’t even call,” Tully said, looking up.

Gran sighed tiredly. “Your mom has… problems, Tully. She’s weak and confused. You’ve got to quit pretending things are different. What matters is that you’re strong.”

She’d heard this advice a bazillion times. “I know.”

Gran sat down on the worn floral sofa beside Tully and pulled her onto her lap.

Tully loved it when Gran held her. She snuggled in close, rested her cheek on Gran’s soft chest.

“I wish things were different with your mama, Tully, and that’s the God’s honest truth, but she’s a lost soul. Has been for a long time.”

“Is that why she doesn’t love me?”

Gran looked down at her. The black horn-rimmed glasses magnified her pale gray eyes. “She loves you, in her way. That’s why she keeps coming back.”

“It doesn’t feel like love.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think she even likes me.”

“It’s me she doesn’t like. Something happened a long time ago and I didn’t… Well, it doesn’t matter now.” Gran tightened her hold¹⁵ on Tully. “Someday she’ll be sorry she missed these years with you. I’m certain of that.”

“I could show her my scrapbook.”

Gran didn’t look at her. “That would be nice.” After a long silence, she said, “Happy birthday, Tully,” and kissed her forehead. “Now I’d best go sit with your grandfather. He’s feeling poorly today.”

After her grandmother left the room, Tully sat there, staring down at the blank first page of her new scrapbook. It would be the perfect thing to give her mother one day, to show her what she’d missed. But how would Tully fill it? She had a few photographs of herself, taken mostly by her friends’ moms at parties and on field trips, but not many. Her gran’s eyes weren’t good enough for those tiny viewfinders. And she had only the one picture of her mom.

She picked up a pen and very carefully wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner; then she frowned. What else? Dear Mommy. Today was my eleventh birthday…

After that day, she collected artifacts from her life. School pictures, sports pictures, movie ticket stubs. For years whenever she had a good day, she hurried home and wrote about it, pasting down whatever receipt or ticket proved where she had been or what she’d done. Somewhere along the way she started adding little embellishments to make herself look better. They weren’t lies, really, just exaggerations. Anything that would make her mom someday say she was proud of her. She filled that scrapbook and then another and another. On every birthday, she received a brand-new book, until she moved into the teen years.

Something happened to her then. She wasn’t sure what it was, maybe the breasts that grew faster than anyone else’s, or maybe it was just that she got tired of putting her life down on pieces of paper no one ever asked to see. By fourteen, she was done. She put all her little-girl books in a big cardboard box and shoved them to the back of her closet, and she asked Gran not to buy her any more.

“Are you sure, honey?”

“Yeah,” had been her answer. She didn’t care about her mother anymore and tried never to think about her. In fact, at school, she told everyone that her mom had died in a boating accident¹⁶.

The lie freed her. She quit buying her clothes in the little-girls departments and spent her time in the juniors area. She bought tight, midriff-baring shirts¹⁷ that showed off her new boobs and low-rise bell-bottoms¹⁸ that made her butt look good. She had to hide these clothes from Gran, but it was easy to do; a puffy down vest and a quick wave could get her out of the house in whatever she wanted to wear.

She learned that if she dressed carefully and acted a certain way, the cool kids wanted to hang out with her. On Friday and Saturday nights, she told Gran she was staying at a friend’s house and went roller-skating at Lake Hills, where no one ever asked about her family or looked at her as if she were “poor Tully.” She learned to smoke cigarettes without coughing and to chew gum to camouflage the smell on her breath.

By eighth grade, she was one of the most popular girl in junior high¹⁹, and it helped, having all those friends. When she was busy enough, she didn’t think about the woman who didn’t want her.

On rare days she still felt… not quite lonely… but something. Adrift, maybe. As if all the people she hung around with were placeholders.

Today was one of those days. She sat in her regular seat on the school bus, hearing the buzz of gossip go on around her. Everyone seemed to be talking about family things; she had nothing to add to the conversations. She knew nothing about fighting with your little brother or being grounded for talking back to your parents or going to the mall with your mom. Thankfully, when the bus pulled up to her stop, she hurried off, making a big show of saying goodbye to her friends, laughing loudly and waving. Pretending; she did a lot of that lately.

After the bus drove away, she repositioned her backpack over her shoulder and started the long walk home. She had just turned the corner when she saw it.

There, parked across the street, in front of Gran’s house, was a beat-up red VW bus. The flower decals were still on the side.

Chapter three

It was still dark when Kate Mularkey’s alarm clock rang. She groaned and lay there, staring up at the peaked ceiling. The thought of going to school made her sick.

Eighth grade blew chips as far as she was concerned; 1974 had turned out to be a totally sucky year, a social desert. Thank God there was only a month left of school. Not that the summer promised to be any better.

In sixth grade she’d had two best friends; they’d done everything together – showed their horses in 4-H²⁰, gone to youth group, and ridden their bikes from one house to the next. The summer they turned twelve, all that ended. Her friends went wild; there was no other way to put it. They smoked pot before school and skipped classes and never missed a party. When she wouldn’t join in, they cut her loose. Period. And the “good” kids wouldn’t come near her because she’d been part of the stoners’ club. So now books were her only friends. She’d read Lord of the Rings so often she could recite whole scenes by memory.

It was not a skill that aided one in becoming popular.

With a sigh, she got out of bed. In the tiny upstairs closet that had recently been turned into a bathroom, she took a quick shower and braided her straight blond hair, then put on her spazo²¹ horn-rimmed glasses. They were hopelessly out of date now – round and rimless were what the cool kids wore – but her dad said they couldn’t afford new glasses yet.

Downstairs, she went to the back door, folded her belled pant leg around each calf, and stepped into the huge black rubber boots they kept on the concrete steps. Moving like Neil Armstrong, she made her way through the deep mud to the shed out back. Their old quarterhorse mare²² limped up to the fence, whinnied a greeting. “Heya, Sweetpea,” Kate said, throwing a flake of hay onto the ground, and then scratching the horse’s velvety ear.

“I miss you, too,” she said, and it was true. Two years ago they’d been inseparable; Kate had ridden this mare all that summer, and won plenty of ribbons at the Snohomish County Fair.

But things changed fast. She knew that now. A horse could get old overnight and go lame. A friend could become a stranger just as quickly.

“‘Bye.” She clomped back up the dark, muddy driveway and left her dirty boots on the porch.

When she opened the back door, she stepped into pandemonium. Mom stood at the stove, dressed in her faded floral housedress and fuzzy pink slippers, smoking an Eve menthol cigarette and pouring batter into an oblong electric frying pan. Her shoulder-length brown hair was divided into two scrawny pigtails; each one was held in place by a strand of hot-pink ribbon. “Set the table, Katie,” she said without glancing up. “Sean! Get down here.”

Kate did as she was told. Almost before she was finished, her mother was behind her, pouring milk into the glasses.

“Sean – breakfast,” Mom yelled up the stairs again. This time she added the magic words: “I’ve poured the milk.”

Within seconds eight-year-old Sean came running down the stairs and rushed toward the beige speckled Formica table, giggling as he tripped over the Labrador puppy who’d recently joined the family.

Kate was just about to sit down at her regular place when she happened to glance across the kitchen and into the living room. Through the large window above the sofa, she saw something that surprised her: A moving van was turning into the driveway across the street.

“Wow.” She carried her plate through the two rooms and stood at the window, staring out over their three acres and down on the house across the street. It had been vacant for as long as anyone could remember.

She heard her mother’s footsteps coming up behind her; hard on the fake brick linoleum of the kitchen floor, quiet in the moss-green carpeting of the living room.

“Someone’s moving in across the street,” Kate said.

“Really?”

No. I’m lying.

“Maybe they’ll have a girl your age. It would be nice for you to have a friend.”

Kate bit back an irritated retort. Only mothers thought it was easy to make friends in junior high. “Whatever.” She turned away abruptly, taking her plate into the hallway, where she finished her breakfast in peace beneath the portrait of Jesus.

As expected, Mom followed her. She stood by the tapestry wall hanging of The Last Supper²³, saying nothing.

“What?” Kate snapped when she couldn’t take it anymore.

Mom’s sigh was so quiet it could hardly be heard. “Why are we always bickering lately?”

“You’re the one who starts it.”

“By saying hello and asking how you’re doing? Yeah, I’m a real witch.”

“You said it, not me.”

“It’s not my fault, you know.”

“What isn’t?”

“That you don’t have any friends. If you’d—”

Kate walked away. Honest to St. Jude, one more if-you’d-only-try-harder speech and she might puke.

Thankfully – for once – Mom didn’t follow her. Instead, she went back into the kitchen, calling out, “Hurry up, Sean. The Mularkey school bus leaves in ten minutes.”

Her brother giggled. Kate rolled her eyes and went upstairs. It was so lame. How could her brother laugh at the same stupid joke every day?

The answer came as quickly as the question had: because he had friends. Life with friends made everything easier.

She hid in her bedroom until she heard the old Ford station wagon start up. The last thing she wanted was to get driven to school by her mom, who yelled goodbye and waved like a contestant on The Price Is Right²⁴ when Kate got out of the car. Everyone knew it was social suicide to be driven to school by your parents. When she heard tires crunching slowly across gravel, she went back downstairs, washed the dishes, gathered her stuff, and left the house. Outside, the sun was shining, but last night’s rain had studded the driveway with inner-tube-sized potholes. No doubt the old-timers down at the hardware store were already starting to talk about the flooding. Mud sucked at the soles of her fake Earth shoes, making her progress slow. So intent was she on saving her only rainbow socks that she was at the bottom of the driveway before she noticed the girl standing across the street.

She was gorgeous. Tall and big-boobed, she had long, curly auburn hair and a face like Caroline of Monaco²⁵: pale skin and full lips and long lashes. And her clothes: low-rise, three-button jeans with huge, tie-died wedges of fabric in the seams to make elephant bells; cork-bottomed platform shoes with four-inch heels; and an angel-sleeved pink peasant blouse that revealed at least two inches of stomach.

Kate clutched her books against her chest, wishing she hadn’t picked her pimples last night. Or that her jeans weren’t Sears Rough Riders. “H-hi,” she said, stopping on her side of the road. “The bus stops on this side.”

Chocolate-brown eyes, rimmed heavily with black mascara and shiny blue eye shadow, stared at her, revealing nothing.

Just then, the school bus arrived. Wheezing and squeaking, it came to a shuddering stop on the road. A boy she used to have a crush on stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Hey, Kootie, the flood’s over,” and then laughed.

Kate put her head down and boarded the bus. Collapsing into her usual front-row seat – by herself – she kept her head bowed, waiting for the new girl to walk past her, but no one else got on. When the doors thumped shut and the bus lurched forward, she dared to look back at the road.

The coolest-looking girl in the world wasn’t there.

Already Tully didn’t fit in. It had taken two hours to choose her clothes this morning – an outfit right out of the pages of Seventeen magazine – and every bit of it was wrong.

When the school bus drove up, she made a split-second decision. She wasn’t going to go to school in this hick backwater. Snohomish²⁶ might be less than an hour from downtown Seattle, but as far as she was concerned, she might as well be on the moon. That was how alien this place felt.

No.

Hell, no.

She marched down the gravel driveway and shoved the front door open so hard it cracked against the wall.

Drama, she’d learned, was like good punctuation: it underscored your point.

“You must be high,” she said loudly, realizing a second too late that the only people in the living room were the moving men.

One of them paused and looked wearily her way. “Huh?”

She pushed past them, grazing the armoire so hard they swore under their breath. Not that she cared. She hated it when she felt like this, all puffed up with anger.

She wouldn’t let her so-called mother make her feel twisted up inside, not after all the times that woman had abandoned her.

In the master bedroom, her mom was sitting on the floor, cutting pictures out of Cosmo²⁷. As usual, her long hair was a wavy, fuzzy nightmare held in check by a grossly out-of-date beaded leather headband. Without looking up, she flipped to the next page, where a naked, grinning Burt Reynolds covered his penis with one hand.

“I’m not going to this backwater school. They’re a bunch of hicks.”

“Oh.” Mom flipped to the next page, then reached for her scissors and began cutting out a spray of flowers from a Breck ad. “Okay.”

Tully wanted to scream. “Okay? Okay? I’m fourteen years old.”

“My job is to love and support you, baby, not to get in your face.”

Tully closed her eyes, counted to ten, and said again, “I don’t have any friends here.”

“Make new ones. I heard you were Miss Popular at your old school.”

“Come on, Mom, I—”

“Cloud.”

“I’m not calling you Cloud.”

“Fine, Tallulah.” Mom looked up to make sure her point had been made. It had.

“I don’t belong here.”

“You know better than that, Tully. You’re a child of the earth and sky; you belong everywhere. The Bhagavad Gita²⁸ says…”

“That’s it.” Tully walked away while her mother was still talking. The last thing she wanted to hear was some drug-soaked advice that belonged on a black-light poster. On the way out, she snagged a pack of Virginia Slims²⁹ from her mom’s purse and headed for the road.

For the next week, Kate watched the new girl from a distance.

Tully Hart was boldly, coolly different; brighter, somehow, than everyone else in the faded green hallways. She had no curfew and didn’t care if she got caught smoking in the woods behind the school. Everyone talked about it. Kate heard the whispered awe in their voices. For a group of kids who’d grown up in the dairy farms and paper mill workers’ homes of the Snohomish Valley, Tully Hart was exotic. Everyone wanted to be friends with her.

Her neighbor’s instant popularity made Kate’s alienation more unbearable. She wasn’t sure why it wounded her so much. All she knew was that every morning, as they stood at the bus stop beside each other and yet worlds apart, separated by yawning silence, Kate felt a desperate desire to be acknowledged by Tully.

Not that it would ever happen.

“…before The Carol Burnett show starts. It’s ready now. Kate? Katie?”

Kate lifted her head from the table. She’d fallen asleep on her open social studies textbook at the kitchen table. “Huh? What did you say?” she asked, pushing her heavy glasses back up into place.

“I made Hamburger Helper³⁰ for our new neighbors. I want you to take it across the street.”

“But…” Kate tried to think of an excuse, anything that would get her out of this. “They’ve been here a week.”

“So I’m late. Things have been crazy lately.”

“I’ve got too much homework. Send Sean.”

“Sean’s not likely to make friends over there, now, is he?”

“Neither am I,” Kate said miserably.

Mom faced her. The brown hair she’d curled and teased so carefully this morning had fallen during the day and her makeup had faded. Now her round, apple-cheeked face looked pale and washed out. Her purple and yellow crocheted vest³¹—a Christmas present from last year – was buttoned wrong. Staring at Kate, she crossed the room and sat down at the table. “Can I say something without you jumping all over me?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m sorry about you and Joannie.”

Of all the things Kate might have expected, that was not even on the list. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters. I hear she’s running with a pretty fast crowd these days.”

Kate wanted to say she couldn’t have cared less, but to her horror, tears stung her eyes. Memories rushed at her – Joannie and her on the Octopus ride at the fair, sitting outside their stalls at the barn, talking about how much fun high school would be. She shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Life is hard sometimes. Especially at fourteen.”

Kate rolled her eyes. If there was one thing she knew, it was that her mother knew nothing about how hard life could be for a teenager. “No shit.³²”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that word from you. It’ll be easy because I’ll never hear it again. Right?”

Kate couldn’t help wishing she was like Tully. She’d never back down so easily. She’d probably light up a cigarette right now and dare her mom to say something.

Mom dug through the baggy pocket of her skirt and found her cigarettes. Lighting up, she studied Kate. “You know I love you and I support you and I would never let anyone hurt you. But Katie, I have to ask you: What is it you’re waiting for?”

“What do you mean?”

“You spend all your time reading and doing homework. How are people supposed to get to know you when you act like that?”

“They don’t want to know me.”

Mom touched her hand gently. “It’s never good to sit around and wait for someone or something to change your life. That’s why women like Gloria Steinem³³ are burning their bras and marching on Washington.”

“So that I can make friends?”

“So that you know you can be whatever you want to be. Your generation is so lucky. You can be anything you want. But you have to take a risk sometimes. Reach out. One thing I can tell you for sure is this: we only regret what we don’t do in life.”

Kate heard an odd sound in her mom’s voice, a sadness that tinted the word regret. But what could her mother possibly know about the battlefield of junior high popularity? She hadn’t been a teenager in decades. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s true, Kathleen. Someday you’ll see how smart I am.” Her mom smiled and patted her hand. “If you’re like the rest of us, it’ll happen at about the same time you want me to babysit for the first time.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mom laughed at some joke Kate didn’t even get. “I’m glad we had this talk. Now go. Make friends with your new neighbor.”

Yeah. That would happen.

“Wear oven mitts. It’s still hot,” Mom said.

Perfect. The mitts.

Kate went over to the counter and stared down at the red-brown glop of a casserole. Dully, she fitted a sheet of foil across the top, curled the edges down, and then put on the puffy, quilted blue oven mitts her Aunt Georgia had made. At the back door, she slipped her stockinged feet into the fake Earth shoes on the porch and headed down the spongy driveway.

The house across the street was long and low to the ground, a rambler-style in an L shape that faced away from the road. Moss furred the shingled roof. The ivory sides were in need of paint, and the gutters were overflowing with leaves and sticks. Giant rhododendron bushes hid most of the windows, runaway junipers created a green spiky barrier that ran the length of the house. No one had tended to the landscaping in years.

At the front door Kate paused, drawing in a deep breath.

Balancing the casserole in one hand, she pulled off one oven mitt and knocked.

Please let no one be home.

Almost instantly she heard footsteps from inside.

The door swung open to reveal a tall woman dressed in a billowy caftan. An Indian-beaded headband circled her forehead. Two mismatched earrings hung from her ears. There was a strange dullness in her eyes, as if she needed glasses and didn’t have them, but even so, she was pretty in a sharp, brittle kind of way. “Yeah?”

Weird, pulsing music seemed to come from several places at once; though the lights were turned off, several lava lamps burped and bubbled in eerie green and red canisters.

“H-hello,” Kate stammered. “My mom made you guys this casserole.”

“Right on,” the lady said, stumbling back, almost falling.

And suddenly Tully was coming through the doorway, sweeping through, actually, moving with a grace and confidence that was more movie star than teenager. In a bright blue minidress and white go-go boots, she looked old enough to be driving a car. Without saying anything, she grabbed Kate’s arm, pulled her through the living room, and into a kitchen in which everything was pink: walls, cabinets, curtains, tile counters, table. When Tully looked at her, Kate thought she saw a flash of something that looked like embarrassment in those dark eyes.

“Was that your mom?” Kate asked, uncertain of what to say.

“She has cancer.”

“Oh.” Kate didn’t know what to say except, “I’m sorry.” Quiet pressed into the room. Instead of making eye contact with Tully, Kate studied the table. Never in her life had she seen so much junk food in one place. Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch and Quisp boxes, Fritos, Funyuns, Twinkies, Zingers, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. “Wow. I wish my mom would let me eat all this stuff.” Kate immediately wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Now she sounded hopelessly uncool. To give herself something to do – and somewhere to look besides Tully’s unreadable face – she put the casserole on the counter. “It’s still hot,” she said, stupidly, considering that she was wearing oven mitts that looked like killer whales.

Tully lit up a cigarette and leaned against the pink wall, eyeing her.

Kate glanced back at the door to the living room. “She doesn’t care if you smoke?”

“She’s too sick to care.”

“Oh.”

“You want a drag?³⁴”

“Uh… no. Thanks.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

On the wall, the black Kit-Kat Klock swished its tail.

“Well, you probably have to get home for dinner,” Tully said.

“Oh,” Kate said again, sounding even more nerdy than she had before. “Right.”

Tully led the way back through the living room, where her mother was now sprawled on the sofa. “Bye, girl from across the street with the cool neighbor attitude.”

Tully yanked the door open. Beyond it, the falling night was a blurry purple rectangle that seemed too vivid to be real. “Thanks for the food,” she said. “I don’t know how to cook, and Cloud is cooked³⁵, if you know what I mean.”

“Cloud?”

“That’s my mom’s current name.”

“Oh.”

“It’d be cool if I did know how to cook. Or if we had a chef or something. With my mom having cancer and all.” Tully looked at her.

Tell her you’ll teach her.

Take a risk.

But she couldn’t do it. The potential for humiliation was sky-high. “Well…’bye.”

“Later.”

Kate stepped past her and into the night.

She was halfway to the road when Tully called out to her, “Hey, wait up.”

Kate slowly turned around.

“What’s your name?”

She felt a flash of hope. “Kate. Kate Mularkey.”

Tully laughed. “Mularkey? Like bullshit?³⁶”

It was hardly funny anymore, that joke about her last name. She sighed and turned back around.

“I didn’t mean to laugh,” Tully said, but she didn’t stop.

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“Fine. Be a bitch, why don’t you?”

Kate kept walking.

Chapter four

Tully watched the girl walk away.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, noticing how small her voice sounded beneath the enormous star-spangled sky.

She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it, why she’d suddenly felt the need to make fun of the next-door neighbor. With a sigh, she went back into the house. The moment she stepped into the room, the smell of pot overwhelmed her, stung her eyes. On the sofa, her mom lay spread-eagled, one leg on the coffee table, one on the back cushions. Her mouth hung open; drool sparkled the corners of her lips.

And the girl next door had seen this. Tully felt a hot wave of shame. No doubt rumors would be all over school by Monday. Tully Hart has a pothead mom.

This was why she never invited anyone over to her house. When you were keeping secrets, you needed to do it alone, in the dark.

She would have given anything to have the kind of mom who made dinner for strangers. Maybe that was why she’d made fun of the girl’s name. The thought pissed her off and she slammed the door shut behind her. “Cloud. Wake up.”

Mom drew in a sharp, snorting breath and sat up. “Whass³⁷ the matter?”

“It’s dinnertime.”

Mom pushed the gob of hair out of her eyes and worked to focus on the wall clock. “What are we – in a nursing home³⁸? Iss five o’clock.”

Tully was surprised her mom could still tell time. She went into the kitchen, served the casserole onto two white Corningware plates, and returned to the living room. “Here.” She handed her mother a plate and fork.

“Where’d we get this? Did you cook?”

“Hardly. The neighbor brought it over.”

Cloud looked blearily around. “We have neighbors?”

Tully didn’t bother answering. Her mother always forgot what they were talking about anyway. It made any real conversation impossible, and usually Tully didn’t care – she wanted to talk to Cloud like she wanted to watch black and white movies – but now, since that girl’s visit, Tully felt her differentness keenly. If she had a real family – a mom who made casseroles and sent them as gifts to new neighbors – she wouldn’t feel so alone. She sat down in one of the mustard-colored beanbag chairs that flanked the sofa and said cautiously, “I wonder what Gran’s doing right now.”

“Pro’ly³⁹ making one of those god-awful PRAISE JESUS samplers. As if that’ll save her soul. Ha. How’s school?”

Tully’s head snapped up. She couldn’t believe her mom had just asked about her life. “Lots of kids hang around with me, but…” She frowned. How could she put her dissatisfaction into words? All she really knew was that she was lonely here, even among her new friends. “I keep waiting for…”

“Do we have ketchup?” her mother said, frowning down at her heap of Hamburger Helper, poking at it with her fork. She was swaying to the music.

Tully hated the disappointment she felt. She knew better than to expect anything from her mother. “I’m going to my room,” she said, climbing out of the beanbag chair.

The last thing she heard before she slammed her bedroom door was her mother saying, “Maybe it needs cheese.”

Late that night, long after everyone else had gone to bed, Kate crept down the stairs, put on her dad’s huge rubber boots, and went outside. It was becoming a habit lately, going outside when she couldn’t sleep. Overhead, the huge black sky was splattered with stars. It made her feel small and unimportant, that sky. A lonely girl looking down at an empty street that went nowhere.

Sweetpea nickered and trotted toward her.

She climbed up onto the top rail of the fence. “Hey there, girl,” she said, pulling a carrot out of her parka’s pocket.

She glanced over at the house across the street. The lights were still on at midnight. No doubt Tully was having a party with all the popular kids. They were probably laughing and dancing and talking about how cool they were.

Kate would give everything she owned to be invited to just one party like that.

Sweetpea nudged her knee, snorted.

“I know. I’m dreaming.” Sighing, she slid off the fence, petted Sweetpea one last time, and then went back to bed.

A few nights later, after a dinner of Pop-Tarts and Alpha-Bits cereal, Tully took a long, hot shower, shaved her legs and underarms carefully, and dried her hair until it fell straight from her center part without a single crease or curl. Then she went to her closet and stood there, trying to figure out what to wear. This was her first high school party. She needed to look just right. None of the other girls from the junior high had been invited. She was The One. Pat Richmond, the best-looking guy on the football team, had chosen Tully for his date. They’d been at the local hamburger hangout last Wednesday night, his group of friends and hers. All it had taken was one look between them. Pat had broken free of the crowd of huge guys and walked right over to Tully.

She’d seen him heading her way and practically fainted. On the jukebox, “Stairway to Heaven” had been playing. Talk about romantic.

“I could get in trouble just for talking to you,” he said.

She tried to look mature and worldly as she said, “I like trouble.”

The smile he gave her was like nothing she’d ever seen before. For the first time in her life, she felt as beautiful as people always said she was.

“You wanna⁴⁰ come to the party with me on Friday?”

“I could make that work,” she said. It was a phrase she’d heard Erica Kane use on All My Children⁴¹.

“I’ll pick you up at ten.” He leaned closer. “Unless that’s past your curfew, little girl?”

“Seventeen Firefly Lane. And I don’t have a curfew.”

He smiled again. “I’m Pat, by the way.”

“I’m Tully.”

“Well, Tully, I’ll see you at ten.”

Tully still couldn’t believe it. For the past forty-eight hours she’d obsessed over this first real date. All the other times she’d gone out with boys it was in a group or to a school dance. This was totally different, and Pat was practically a man.

They could fall in love; she knew it. And then, with him holding her hand, she’d stop feeling so alone.

She finally made her clothes choice.

Low-rise, three-button bell-bottom jeans, a pink scoop-necked knit top that showed off her cleavage, and her favorite cork platforms. She spent almost an hour on her makeup, layering more and more on until she looked foxy. She couldn’t wait to show Pat how pretty she could be.

She grabbed a pack of her mom’s cigarettes and left her bedroom.

In the living room, Mom looked up blearily from her magazine. “Hey, iss almos’⁴² ten o’clock. Where are you going?”

“This guy invited me to a party.”

“Is he here?”

Right. Like Tully would invite anyone to come in. “I’m meeting him on the road.”

“Oh. Cool. Don’t wake me up when you get home.”

“I won’t.”

Outside, it was dark and cold. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in a path of starlight.

She waited by her mailbox on the main road, moving from foot to foot to keep warm. Goose bumps pebbled her bare arms. The mood ring on her middle finger changed from green to purple. She tried to remember what that meant.

Across the street and up the hill, the pretty little farmhouse glowed against the darkness. Each window was like a pat of warm, melting butter. They were probably all at home, clustered around a big table, playing Risk⁴³. She wondered what they’d do if she just visited one day, showed up on the porch and said hey.

She heard Pat’s car before she saw the headlights. At the roar of the engine, she forgot all about the family across the street and stepped into the road, waving.

His green Dodge Charger came to a stop beside her; the car seemed to pulse with sound, vibrate. She slid into the passenger seat. The music was so loud she knew he couldn’t hear what she said.

Grinning at her, Pat hit the gas and they were off like a rocket, blasting down the quiet country lane.

As they turned onto a gravel road, she could see the party going on below. Dozens of cars were parked in a huge circle in a pasture, with their headlights on. Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” blared from someone’s car radio. Pat parked over in the stand of trees along the fence line.

There were kids everywhere, gathered around the flames of the bonfire, standing beside the kegs of beer set up in the grass. Clear plastic cups littered the ground. Down by the barn, a group of guys were playing touch football. It was late in May, and summer was still a ways away, so most people were wearing coats. She wished she hadn’t forgotten hers.

Pat held her hand tightly, leading her through the crowd of couples toward the keg, where he poured two cups full.

Taking hers, she let him lead her down to a quiet spot just beyond the perimeter of cars. There, he spread his letterman’s jacket down on the ground and motioned for her to sit down.

“I couldn’t believe it when I first saw you,” Pat said, sitting close to her, sipping his beer. “You’re the prettiest girl ever to live in this town. All the guys want you.”

“But you got me,” she said, smiling at him. It felt as if she were falling into his dark eyes.

He took a big drink of his beer, practically finishing it, then he set it down and kissed her.

Other guys had kissed her before; mostly they were fumbling, nervous attempts made during a slow dance. This was different. Pat’s mouth was like magic. She sighed happily, whispering his name. When he drew back, he was staring at her with pure, sunshiny love in his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me, too.”

He finished off his beer and got up. “I need more brew.”

They were in line at the keg when he frowned at her. “Hey, you aren’t drinking. I thought you were cool with partying.”

“I am.” She smiled nervously. She’d never really drank before, but he wouldn’t like her if she acted like a nerd, and she was desperate for him to want her. “Bottoms up,” she said, tilting the plastic tumbler to her lips and drinking the whole amount without stopping. When she finished, she couldn’t help burping and giggling.

“Far out,” he said, nodding, pouring two more beers.

The second one wasn’t so bad, and by the third beer Tully had completely lost her sense of taste. When Pat brought out a bottle of Annie Green Springs wine, she guzzled some of that, too. For almost an hour, they sat on his jacket, tucked close together, drinking and talking. She didn’t know any of the people he talked about, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the way he looked at her, the way he held her hand.

“Come on,” he whispered, “let’s dance.”

She felt woozy when she stood up. Her balance was off and she kept stumbling during their dance. Finally, she fell down altogether. Pat laughed, took her hand to pull her up, and led her to a dark, romantic spot in the trees. Giggling, she hobbled awkwardly behind him, gasping when he took her in his arms and kissed her.

It felt so good; made her blood feel tingly and hot. She pressed up against him like a cat, loving the way he was making her feel. Any minute he was going to draw back and look down at her and say, I love you, just like Ryan O’Neal in Love Story⁴⁴.

Maybe Tully would even call him preppie when she said it back to him. Their song would be “Stairway to Heaven.” They’d tell people they met while—

His tongue slipped into her mouth, pressing hard, sweeping around like some kind of alien probe. Suddenly it didn’t feel good anymore, didn’t feel right. She tried to say, Stop, but her voice had no sound; he was sucking up all her air.

His hands were everywhere: up her back, around her side, plucking at her bra, trying to undo it. She felt it come free with a sickening little pop. And then he was touching her boob.

“No…” she whimpered, trying to push his hands away. This wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted love, romance, magic. Someone to love her. Not… this. “No, Pat, don’t—”

“Come on, Tully. You know you want it.” He pushed her back and she stumbled, fell to the ground hard, hitting her head. For a second, her vision blurred. When it cleared, he was on his knees, between her legs. He held both her hands in one of his, pinning her to the ground.

“That’s what I like,” he said, pushing her legs apart.

Shoving her top up, he stared down at her naked chest. “Oh, yeah…” He cupped one breast, tweaked her nipple hard. His other hand slipped into her pants, beneath her underwear.

“Stop. Please…” Tully tried desperately to get free, but her wriggling only seemed to excite him.

Between her legs, his fingers probed her hard, moving inside her. “Come on, baby, let yourself like it.”

She felt herself starting to cry. “Don’t—”

“Oh, yeah…” He covered her body with his, pressed her into the wet grass.

She was crying so hard now she could taste her own tears, but he didn’t seem to care. His kisses were something else now – slobbering, sucking, biting; it hurt, but not as much as his belt, hitting her stomach when he pulled it off, or his penis, ramming—

She squeezed her eyes shut as pain ripped between her legs, scraped her insides.

Then, suddenly, it was over. He rolled off her, lay beside her, holding her close, kissing her cheek as if what he’d just done to her had been love.

“Hey, you’re crying.” He gently smoothed the hair away from her face. “What’s the matter? I thought you wanted it.”

She didn’t know what to say. Like every girl, she’d imagined losing her virginity, but it had never felt like this in her dreams. She stared at him in disbelief. “Wanted that?”

An irritated frown creased his forehead. “Come on, Tully, let’s dance.”

The way he said it, so quietly, as if he were actually confused by her reaction, only made it worse. She’d done something wrong, obviously, been a prick tease, and this was what happened to girls who played at it.

He stared at her for a minute longer, then stood up and pulled his pants up. “Whatever. I need another drink. Let’s go.”

She rolled onto her side. “Go away.”

She felt him beside her, knew he was staring down at her. “You acted like you wanted it, damn it. You can’t lead a guy on and then just go cold. Grow up, little girl. This is your fault.”

She closed her eyes and ignored him, thankful when he finally left her. For once she was glad to be alone.

She lay there, feeling broken and hurt and, worst of all, stupid. After an hour or so, she heard the party break up, heard the car engines start, and the tires pealing through loose gravel as they drove away.

And still she lay there, unable to make herself move. This was all her fault; he was right about that. She was stupid and young. All she’d wanted was someone to love her.

“Stupid,” she hissed, finally sitting up.

Moving slowly, she got dressed and tried to stand. At the movement, she felt sick to her stomach and immediately puked all over her favorite shoes. When it was over, she bent down for her purse, clutched it to her chest, and made her long, painful way back up to the road.

There were no cars out this late at night, and she was glad for that. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why her hair was full of pine needles and her shoes were stained with vomit.

All the way home she relived what had happened – the way Pat had smiled at her when he asked her to the party; the gentle first kiss he’d given her; the way he talked to her as if she mattered; then the other Pat, with his harsh hands and his probing tongue and fingers, with his hard cock and how roughly he’d stuck it up inside her.

The more she replayed it in her mind, the lonelier and more desolate she felt.

If only she had someone she trusted to talk to. Maybe that would ease a little of this pain. But, of course, there was no one.

This was another secret she’d have to keep, like her weirdo mother and unknown father. People would say she had it coming, a junior high girl at a high school party.

As she neared her driveway, she walked a little more slowly. The thought of going home, of feeling alone in a place that should be a refuge for her, with a woman who was supposed to love her, was suddenly unbearable.

The neighbors’ old gray horse trotted up to the fence line and nickered at her.

Tully crossed the street and walked up the hill. At the fence, she yanked up a handful of grass and held it out to him. “Hey there, boy.”

The horse sniffed the handful of grass, snorted wetly, and trotted away.

“She likes carrots.”

Tully looked up sharply and saw her neighbor sitting on the top rail of the fence.

Long minutes passed in silence between them; the only noise was the horse’s quiet nickering.

“It’s late,” the neighbor girl said.

“Yeah.”

“I love it out here at night. The stars are so bright. Sometimes, if you stare up at the sky long enough, you’ll swear tiny white dots are falling all around you, like fireflies. Maybe that’s how this street got its name. You probably think I’m a nerd for even saying that.”

Tully wanted to answer but couldn’t. Deep, deep inside she’d started to shake and it took all her concentration just to stand still.

The girl – Kate, Tully remembered – slipped down from her perch. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt with a Partridge Family⁴⁵ decal on the front that was peeling off. As she moved forward, her boots made a sucking noise in the mud. “Hey, you don’t look so good.” A retainer drew the s into a long lisp. “And you reek like puke.”

“I’m fine,” she said, stiffening as Kate drew close.

“Are you okay? Really?”

To Tully’s complete horror, she started to cry.

Kate stood there a moment, staring at her from behind those dork-o-rama glasses. Then, without saying anything, she hugged Tully.

Tully flinched at the contact; it was foreign and unexpected. She started to pull away, but found that she couldn’t move. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had held her like this, and suddenly she was clinging to this weirdo girl, afraid to let go, afraid that without Kate, she’d float away like the S.S. Minnow⁴⁶ and be lost at sea.

“I’m sure she’ll get better,” Kate said when Tully’s tears subsided.

Tully drew back, frowning. It took her a second to understand.

The cancer. Kate thought she was worried about her mom.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Kate said, taking out her retainer, putting it on the mossy top of a fence post.

Tully stared at her. In the silvery light from a full moon, she saw nothing but compassion in Kate’s magnified green eyes, and she wanted to talk, wanted it with a fierceness that made her feel sick. But she didn’t know how to start.

Kate said, “Come on,” and led her up the hill to the slanted front porch of the farmhouse. There, she sat down, pulling her threadbare T-shirt over her bent knees. “My Aunt Georgia had cancer,” she said. “It was grody. Lost all her hair. But she’s fine now.”

Tully sat down beside her, put her purse on the ground. The smell of vomit was strong. She pulled out a cigarette and lit up to cover the stench. Before she knew it, she’d said, “I went to a party down by the river tonight.”

“A high school party?” Kate sounded impressed.

“Pat Richmond asked me out.”

“The quarterback? Wow. My mom wouldn’t let me stand in the same checkout line as a high school senior. She’s so lame.”

“She’s not lame.”

“She thinks eighteen-year-old boys are dangerous. She calls them penises with hands and feet. Tell me that isn’t lame.”

Tully glanced out over the field and took a deep, steadying breath. She couldn’t believe she was going to tell this girl what happened tonight, but the truth was a fire inside her. If she didn’t get rid of it, she’d burn up. “He raped me.”

Kate turned to her. Tully felt those green eyes boring into her profile, but she didn’t move, didn’t turn. Her shame was so overwhelming that she couldn’t stand to see it reflected in Kate’s eyes. She waited for Kate to say something, to call her an idiot, but the silence just went on and on. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She looked sideways.

“Are you okay?” Kate asked quietly.

Tully relived it all in those few words. Tears stung her eyes, blurred her vision.

Once again, Kate hugged her. Tully let herself be comforted for the first time since she was little. When she finally drew back, she tried to smile. “I’m drowning you.”

“We should tell someone.”

“No way. They’d say it was my fault. This is our secret, okay?”

“Okay.” Kate frowned as she said it.

Tully wiped her eyes and took another drag on her cigarette. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“You looked lonely. Believe me, I know how that feels.”

“You do? But you have a family.”

“They have to like me.” Kate sighed. “The kids at school treat me like I’ve got an infectious disease. I used to have friends, but… you probably don’t know what in the heck I’m talking about. You’re so popular.”

“Popular just means lots of people think they know you.”

“I’d take that.”

Silence fell between them. Tully finished her cigarette and put it out. They were so different, she and Kate, as full of contrasts as this dark field bathed in moonlight, but it felt so completely easy to talk to her. Tully found herself almost smiling, and on this, the worst night of her life. That was something.

For the next hour, they sat there, talking now and then and sometimes just sitting in silence. They didn’t say anything really important or share any more secrets, they just talked.

Finally, Kate yawned and Tully stood up. “I better book.”

They got up and walked down to the road. At the mailboxes, Kate stopped. “Well. ‘Bye.”

“‘Bye.” Tully stood there a moment, feeling awkward. She wanted to hug Kate, maybe even cling to her and tell her how much this night had been helped by her, but she didn’t dare. She’d learned a thing or two about vulnerability from her mother, and she felt too fragile now to risk humiliation. Turning, she headed down to her house. Once inside, she went straight to the shower. There, with the hot water beating down on her, she thought about what had happened to her tonight – what she’d let happen because she wanted to be cool – and she cried. When she was done and the tears had turned into a hard little knot in her throat, she took the memory of this night and boxed it up. She shelved it in the back alongside memories of the times Cloud had abandoned her and immediately began working on forgetting it was there.

Chapter five

Kate lay awake long after Tully had left. Finally, she threw back the covers and got out of bed.

Downstairs, she found what she needed: a small statue of the Virgin Mary, a votive candle in a red glass holder, a book of matches, and her grandmother’s old rosary beads⁴⁷. Taking everything back up to her room, she created an altar on top of her dresser, and lit the candle.

“Heavenly Father,” she prayed, head bowed and hands clasped, “please watch out for Tully Hart and help her through this hard time. Also, please heal her mother’s cancer. I know You can help them. Amen.” She said a few Hail Marys⁴⁸, and then went back to bed.

But all night she tossed and turned, dreaming about the encounter with Tully, wondering what would happen in the morning. Should she talk to Tully today at school, smile at her? Or was she expected to pretend it had never happened? There were rules to popularity, secret codes written in invisible ink that only girls like Tully could read. All Kate knew was that she didn’t want to make a mistake and embarrass herself. She knew that sometimes the popular girls were “secret friends” with nerds; like, they smiled and said hi when they weren’t in school or when their parents were friends. Maybe that was how it would be with her and Tully.

Finally, she quit trying to sleep and got up. Putting on her robe, she went downstairs. In the living room, her dad looked up from the newspaper and smiled. “Top of the mornin’ to you, Katie Scarlett. Come give your old man a hug.”

She plopped into his lap, rested her cheek against the rough wool of his shirt.

He tucked a strand of hair around her ear. She could see how tired he looked; he was working so hard, doing double shifts at Boeing⁴⁹ so they could afford their yearly family camping trip. “How’s school going?”

It was the same question he always asked. Once, a long time ago, she’d actually answered, said, “Not so good, Dad,” and then waited for his advice or comfort or something, but no such words had come. He’d heard what he wanted to hear, not what she’d said. Her mom had said it was because he worked so many hours at the plant.

Kate could have been upset by his distraction, but somehow it had made her love him even more. He never yelled at her or told her to pay attention or reminded her that she was responsible for her own happiness. Those were her mother’s words; her dad just quietly went on loving her no matter what.

“Great,” she answered, smiling to reinforce the lie.

“How could it not be?” he said, kissing her temple. “You’re the prettiest girl in town, eh? And your mum named you after one of the great literary heroines of all time.”

“Yeah, Scarlett O’Hara⁵⁰ and I have a ton in common.”

“You’ll see,” he said, chuckling. “There’s a fair bit of life still ahead of you, missy.”

She looked at him. “Do you think I’ll be pretty when I grow up?”

“Ah, Katie,” he said. “You’re a rare beauty already.”

She took those words and tucked them in her pocket like worry stones; every now and again as she got ready for school she felt them, turned them around in her fingers.

By the time she was dressed and ready to go, the house was empty. The Mularkey family bus had left the station.

She was so nervous she arrived at the bus stop early. Every minute that passed seemed to last an eternity, but there was still no sign of Tully when the school bus drove up and came to a shuddering stop.

Kate dropped her chin and took a seat in the first row.

All through morning classes, she looked for Tully, but didn’t see her. At lunch she hurried past the crowd of popular kids, who were busy cutting to the front of the food line whenever they felt like it, and sat down at one of the long tables at the very end of the cafeteria. On the other side of the room, kids were laughing and talking and shoving each other; these tables in social Siberia were sadly quiet, though⁵¹. Kate, like the others seated around her, rarely looked up.

It was a survival skill the unpopular kids learned early: junior high was like the jungles of Vietnam; it was best to crouch low and keep quiet. So intent was she on her lunch that when someone came up to her and said, “Hey,” she practically jumped out of her seat.

Tully.

Even on this cool May day, she wore a cut-to-there miniskirt, white go-go boots, shiny black panty hose, and a tube top. Several peace-symbol necklaces bounced against her cleavage. Her hair glinted with copper streaks in the light. A huge macramé-knot purse hung against her thigh. “Have you told anyone about last night?”

“No. Of course not.”

“So, we’re friends, right?”

Kate didn’t know which surprised her more: the question or the vulnerability in Tully’s eyes. “We’re friends.”

“Excellent.” Tully pulled a package of Twinkies⁵² out of her purse, then sat down beside Kate. “Now let’s talk about makeup. You need help, and I’m not being a bitch. Really. I just know about fashion. It’s a gift. Can I drink your milk? Good. Thanks. Are you gonna eat that banana? I could come to your house after school…”

Kate stood outside the drugstore looking up and down the street for someone who might know her mom. “Are you sure about this?”

“Absolutely.”

The answer was slim comfort, actually. In the day they’d officially been friends, Kate had learned one thing about Tully: she was a girl who made Plans.

And today’s plan was to make Kate beautiful.

“Don’t you trust me?”

There it was, the big question. It was like rolling a Yahtzee⁵³: once Tully said it, Kate lost the game. She had to trust her new friend. “Of course I do. It’s just that I’m not allowed to wear makeup.”

“Believe me, I’m such an expert your mom will never know. Come on.”

Tully walked boldly through the drugstore, choosing eye shadow and blush colors that were “right” for Kate, and then – amazingly – she paid for everything. When Kate said something, Tully said airily, “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

On the way out of the store, Tully bumped her, shoulder to shoulder.

Kate giggled and bumped her back. They made their way through town and followed the river toward home. All the while, they talked about clothes and music and school. Finally, they turned off the old road and went down Tully’s driveway.

“My gran would freak if she saw this place,” Tully said, looking embarrassed. Rhodies⁵⁴ the size of hot-air balloons covered the side of the house. “She owns this house, you know.”

“Does she visit you?”

“Nah. It’s easier to wait.”

“For what?”

“My mom to forget about me again.” Tully stepped over a mound of newspapers and around a trio of garbage cans, then opened the door. Inside, the smoke in the room was thick.

Tully’s mom was in the living room, lying on the sofa, with her eyes half opened.

“H-hello, Mrs. Hart,” Kate said. “I’m Kate from next door.”

Mrs. Hart tried to sit up, but obviously she was too weak to manage it. “Hello, girl from nex’ door.”

Tully grabbed Kate’s hand and pulled her through the living room and into her bedroom, then slammed the door shut. She immediately went to her stack of records, pulled out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and put it on the turntable. When the music started up, she tossed Kate a Tiger Beat⁵⁵ and dragged a chair over to the vanity. “You ready?”

Kate’s nervousness came swooping back. She knew she’d get in trouble for this, but how would she ever make friends or become popular if she didn’t take a few risks? “I’m ready.”

“Good. Sit down. We’ll do your hair first. It needs some highlights. This is exactly what Maureen McCormick⁵⁶ uses.”

Kate looked at Tully in the mirror. “How do you know that?”

“I read it in last month’s Teen magazine.”

“I’m guessing she goes to professionals.” Kate opened the Tiger Beat and tried to concentrate on the article (“Jack Wild’s Dream Date – It Could Be You!”).

“Take that back. I read the instructions twice.”

“Is there any chance I’m going to end up bald?”

“Hardly any. Now be quiet. I’m reading the instructions again.”

Tully separated Kate’s hair into strips and began spraying Sun-In⁵⁷ onto the pieces. It took almost an hour to get it done to her satisfaction. “You are going to look like Marcia Brady⁵⁸ when I’m done.”

“What’s it like, being popular?” Kate hadn’t meant to ask the question; it just slipped out.

“You’ll see. But you’ll stay my friend, won’t you?”

Kate laughed at that. “Very funny. Hey, that sort of burns.”

“Really? That can’t be good. And some of your hair is falling out”.

Kate managed not to make a face. If going bald was the price of being Tully’s friend, she’d pay it.

Tully reached for the blow dryer and turned it on, blasting Kate’s hair with heat.

“I got my period,” Tully yelled. “So at least assface didn’t knock me up.”

Kate heard the bravado in her friend’s voice and saw it in her eyes. “I prayed for you.”

“You did?” Tully asked. “Wow. Thanks.”

Kate didn’t know what to say to that. To her, praying was like brushing your teeth before bed, just something you did.

Tully clicked off the dryer and smiled, but she looked worried again. Maybe it was the smell of burning hair. “Okay. Take a shower and rinse it out.”

Kate did as she was told. A few minutes later, she got out of the shower, dried off, and got dressed again.

Tully immediately grabbed her hand and led her back to the chair. “Is your hair falling out?”

“Some is,” she admitted.

“If you’re bald, I’ll shave my head. Promise.” Tully combed and dried Kate’s hair.

Kate couldn’t look. She closed her eyes and let Tully’s voice meld into the whine of the dryer.

“Open your eyes.”

Kate looked up slowly. At this distance, she didn’t need her glasses, but force of habit made her lean forward. The girl in the mirror had straight streaked blond hair, parted with precision and dried perfectly. For once it looked soft and pretty instead of thin and lank. The white highlights showed off her leaf-green eyes and the hint of pink on her lips. She looked almost pretty. “Wow,” she said, too choked up with gratitude to say more.

“Wait till you see what mascara and blush can do,” Tully said, “and concealer for those zits on your forehead.”

“I’ll always be your friend,” Kate said, thinking she’d whispered the promise, but when Tully grinned, she knew she’d been heard.

“Good. Now let’s go on the makeup. Have you seen my razor?”

“What do you need a razor for?”

“Your eyebrows, silly. Oh, there it is. Close your eyes.”

Kate didn’t think twice. “Okay.”

Kate didn’t even bother to hide her face when she came into the house. That was how confident she felt. For the first time ever, she knew she was beautiful.

Her dad was in the living room, sitting in his La-Z-Boy⁵⁹. At Kate’s entrance, he looked up. “Good Lord,” he said, clanking his drink down on the French provincial end table. “Margie!”

Mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She wore her school-day uniform: striped rust and olive polyester blouse, brown corduroy bell-bottoms, and a wrinkled apron that read: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE… AND THE SENATE. When she saw Kate, she stopped. Slowly, she untied her apron and tossed it on the table.

The sudden quiet brought Sean and the dog running into the room, tripping over each other. “Katie looks like a skunk,” Sean said. “Pee-ew.”

“Go wash your hands for dinner,” Mom said sharply. “Now,” she added when he didn’t leave.

Sean grumbled and went upstairs.

“Did you give her permission to do that to her hair, Margie?” Dad said from the living room.

“I’ll handle this, Bud,” Mom said, frowning at Kate as she crossed the room. “The girl across the street do this to you?”

Kate nodded, trying to hold on to the memory of feeling pretty.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Me, too, then. I remember when your Aunt Georgia dyed my hair red. Grandma Peet was livid.” She smiled. “But you should have asked. You’re still young, Kathleen, no matter what you girls want to be true. Now, what have you done to your eyebrows?”

“Tully shaved them. Just to give them shape.”

Mom tried not to smile. “I see. Well, plucking is really the way to go. I should have taught you how already, but I thought you were too young.” She looked around for her cigarettes. Finding them on the table, she flipped one out and lit up. “After dinner, I’ll show you how. And I suppose a little lip gloss and mascara would be all right for school. I’ll show you how to make it look more natural.”

Kate hugged her mom. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Now get started on the cornbread. And Katie, I’m glad you made a friend, but no more breaking the rules, okay? That’s how young girls get into trouble.”

Kate couldn’t help thinking of the high school party Tully had gone to. “Okay, Mom.”

Within a week, Kate became cool by association. Kids raved over⁶⁰ her new look and didn’t turn away from her in the halls. Being a friend of Tully Hart’s meant she was okay.

Even her parents noticed the difference. At dinner, Kate wasn’t her usual quiet self. Instead, she couldn’t shut up. Story after story spilled out of her. Who was dating whom, who won at tetherball, who got detention for wearing a MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR T-shirt to school, where Tully got her hair cut (in Seattle by a guy named Gene Juarez – how cool was that?), and what movie was playing at the drive-in this weekend. She was still talking about Tully after dinner, while she and Mom did the dishes.

“I can’t wait for you to meet her. She’s super cool. Everyone likes her, even the heads.”

“Heads?”

“Druggies? Stoners?⁶¹”

“Oh.” Mom took the glass meatloaf pan from her and dried it. “I’ve… asked around about this girl, Katie. She tries to buy cigarettes from Alma at the drugstore.”

“She’s probably buying them for her mom.”

Mom set the dry pan down on the speckled Formica counter. “Just do me a favor, Katie. You think for yourself around Tully Hart. I wouldn’t want you to follow her into trouble.”

Kate threw the crocheted dishrag in the soapy water. “I can’t believe you. What about all your take-a-risk speeches? For years you tell me to make friends, and the second I find someone, you call her a slut.”

“I hardly called her a—”

Kate stormed out of the kitchen. With each step she expected her mother to call her back and ground her, but silence followed her dramatic exit.

Upstairs, she went into her room and slammed the door for effect. Then she sat down on her bed and waited. When Mom came in she’d be sorry; for once Kate had been the strong one.

But Mom didn’t show, and by ten o’clock, Kate was starting to feel sort of bad. Had she hurt her mom’s feelings? She got up, paced the small room.

There was a knock at the door.

She raced over to the bed and climbed in, trying to look bored. “Yeah?”

The door opened slowly. Mom stood there, wearing the floor-length red velour robe they’d gotten her for Christmas last year. “May I come in?”

“Like I could stop you.”

“You could,” Mom said quietly. “May I come in?”

Kate shrugged, but scooted to the left to make room for her mom.

“You know, Katie, life is—”

Kate couldn’t help groaning. Not another life-is speech.

Mom surprised her by laughing. “Okay, no more speeches. Maybe you’re too old for that.” She paused at the altar on the dresser. “You haven’t made one of these since Georgia was in chemo⁶². Who needs our prayers?”

“Tully’s mom has cancer and she was ra—” She snapped her mouth shut, horrified by what she’d nearly revealed. For most of her life she’d told her mother everything; now she had a best friend, though, so she’d need to be careful.

Mom sat down on the bed beside Kate, just as they did after every fight. “Cancer? That’s quite a load for a girl your age to carry.”

“Tully seems cool with it.”

“Does she?”

“She seems cool with everything,” Kate said, unable to keep the pride out of her voice.

“How so?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m too old, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Mom smoothed the hair off Kate’s forehead in a touch that was as familiar as breathing. Kate always felt five years old when her mom did that. “I’m sorry you thought I was judging your friend.”

“You should be.”

“And you’re sorry for being so mean to me, right?”

Kate couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah.”

“I’ll tell you what: Why don’t you invite Tully over for dinner Friday night?”

“You’ll love her. I know you will.”

“I’m sure I will,” Mom said, kissing her forehead. “Night.”

“Night, Mom.”

Long after her mother had left and the house had gone quiet for the night, Kate lay there, too wound up to sleep. She couldn’t wait to invite Tully for dinner. Afterward, they could watch I Dream of Jeannie⁶³, or play Operation, or practice putting on makeup. Maybe Tully would even want to spend the night. They could—

Tap.

– talk about boys and kissing and—

Tap.

Kate sat up. That wasn’t a bird on the roof or a mouse in the walls.

Tap.

It was a small rock, hitting the glass!

She threw the covers back and hurried to the window, shoving it open.

Tully was in her backyard, holding a bike beside her. “Come on down,” she said, much too loudly, making a hurry gesture with her hand.

“You want me to sneak out?”

“Uh. Duh.”

Kate had never done anything like this, but she couldn’t act like a nerd now. Cool kids broke the rules and sneaked out of the house. Everyone knew that. Everyone knew, too, that trouble could follow. And this was exactly what her mom had been talking about.

You think for yourself around Tully Hart.

Kate didn’t care about that. What mattered was Tully.

“I’m on my way.” Closing the window, she looked around for clothes. Fortunately, her overalls were in the corner, folded neatly beneath a black sweatshirt. She slipped out of her old Scooby-Doo jammies and dressed quickly, then crept down the hall. As she passed her parents’ bedroom, her heart was pounding so fast she felt light-headed. The stairs creaked ominously with every footfall, but finally she made it.

At the back door she paused just long enough to think, I could get in trouble for this, and then she opened the door.

Tully was there, waiting. Beside her was the most amazing bike Kate had ever seen. It had curly handlebars, a tiny kidney-shaped seat on a platform, and a bunch of cables and wires. “Wow,” she said. It would take a lot of berry-picking money to get a bike like that.

“It’s a ten-speed,” Tully said. “My grandma gave it to me last Christmas. You want to ride it?”

“No way.” Kate closed the door quietly behind her. In the carport she found her old pink bicycle with the U-shaped handlebars, flower decaled banana seat, and white wicker basket. It was hopelessly uncool; a little girl’s bike.

Tully didn’t even seem to notice. They mounted up and rode down the wet, bumpy driveway to the paved road. There, they veered left and kept going. At Summer Hill, Tully said, “Watch this. Do what I do.”

They crested the hill as if they were flying. Kate’s hair whipped back from her head; tears stung her eyes. All around them black trees whispered in the breeze. Stars glittered in the velvet black sky.

Tully leaned back and put her arms out. Laughing, she glanced at Kate. “Try it.”

“I can’t. We’re going too fast.”

“That’s the point.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Come on. Let go, Katie. God hates a coward.” Then, quietly, she added, “Trust me.”

Now Kate had no choice. Trust was part of being friends, and Tully wouldn’t hang out with a chicken. “Come on,” she said to herself, trying to sound stern.

Taking a deep breath, she said a prayer and eased her arms out.

She was flying, sailing through the night sky, down the hill. The air smelled of the riding stable nearby, of horses and sweet hay. She heard Tully laughing beside her, but before she could even smile, something went wrong. Her front tire hit a rock; the bike bucked like a Brahman bull⁶⁴ and twisted sideways, catching Tully’s tire in its arc.

She screamed, reached for the handlebars, but it was too late. She was in the air, really flying this time. The pavement rushed up, smacked her hard, and she skidded across it, landing in a heap in a muddy ditch.

Tully rolled across the asphalt and slammed into her. The bikes clattered to the ground.

Dazed, Kate stared up at the night sky. Every part of her hurt. Her left ankle might be broken. It felt swollen, tender. She could feel where the road had ripped off her skin in patches.

“That was incredible,” Tully said, laughing.

“Are you kidding? We could have been killed.”

“Exactly.”

Kate winced in pain as she tried to get up. “We should get out of this ditch. A car could come along—”

“But wasn’t that cool? Wait till we tell the kids about this.”

The kids at school. This would be a story, and Kate would be one of the stars in it. People would listen raptly, ooh and aah, say things like, You sneaked out? Summer Hill without hands? It’s gotta⁶⁵ be a lie…

And suddenly Kate was laughing, too.

They helped each other to their feet and retrieved their bikes. By the time they were across the road, Kate barely noticed where she was hurt. She felt like a different girl suddenly – bolder, braver, willing to try anything. So what if trouble followed a night like this? What was a sprained ankle or a bloody knee next to an adventure? For the past two years she’d followed all the rules and stayed home on weekend nights. No more.

They left their bikes by the side of the road and limped toward the river. In the moonlight, everything looked milky and beautiful – the silvery waves, the jagged rocks along the shore.

Tully sat down by a decaying, moss-covered nurse log in a place where the grass was as thick as shag carpeting.

Kate sat down beside her, so close their knees were almost touching. Together they stared up at the star-spangled sky. The song of the river floated toward them, sounded like a young girl’s laugh. Just now, with the world so still and silent, it was as if the breeze had drawn in its cool breath and left them all alone in this place that until right now had been just another bend in a river that flooded every autumn.

“I wonder who named our street,” Tully said. “I haven’t seen any fireflies.”

Kate shrugged. “Over by the old bridge is Missouri Street. Maybe some pioneer was homesick. Or lost.”

“Or maybe it’s magic. This could be a magical street.” Tully turned toward her. “That could mean we were meant to be friends.”

Kate shivered at the power of that. “Before you moved here, I thought it was just a road that went nowhere.”

“Now it’s our road.”

“We can go all kinds of places when we grow up.”

“Places don’t matter,” Tully said.

Kate heard something in her friend’s voice, a sadness she didn’t understand. She turned sideways. Tully was staring up at the sky.

“Are you thinking about your mom?” Kate asked tentatively.

“I try not to think about her.” There was a long pause, then she dug into her pocket for a Virginia Slims cigarette and lit up.

Kate was careful not to make a face about the smoking.

“You want a drag?”

Kate knew she had no choice. “Uh. Sure.”

“If my mom were normal – not sick, I mean – I could have told her about what happened to me at the party.”

Kate took a tiny drag, coughed hard, and said, “Do you think about it a lot?”

Tully leaned back against the log, taking the cigarette again. After a long pause, she said, “I have nightmares about it.”

Kate wished she knew what to say. “What about your dad? Can you talk to him?”

Tully wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t think she even knows who he is.” Her voice fell. “Or he heard about me and ran.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Life is harsh. Besides, I don’t need them. I’ve got you, Katie. You’re the one that helped me through it.”

Kate smiled. The sharp tang of smoke filled the air between them, stung her eyes, but she didn’t care. What mattered was being here, with her new best friend. “That’s what friends are for.”

That next night Tully was on the last chapter of The Outsiders⁶⁶ when she heard her mother yelling through the house. “Tully! Answer the damn door.”

She slammed the book down and went out into the living room, where her mother sat sprawled on the sofa, taking a bong hit⁶⁷ as she watched Happy Days⁶⁸.

“You’re right by the door.”

Her mother shrugged. “So?”

“Hide your bong.”

Sighing dramatically, Cloud leaned over and put her bong beneath the end table beside the couch. Only a blind person would miss it, but that was as good as Cloud was likely to do.

Tully smoothed the hair away from her face and opened the door.

A small, dark-haired woman stood there, holding a foil-covered casserole dish. Electric-blue eye shadow accentuated her brown eyes, and rose-hued blush – applied with too heavy a hand – created the illusion of sharp cheekbones in her round face. “You must be Tully,” the woman said in a voice that was higher somehow than expected. It was a girl’s voice, full of enthusiasm, and it matched the sparkle in her eyes. “I’m Kate’s mom. Sorry to come without calling, but your line has been busy.”

Tully pictured the phone by her mother’s bed off the hook. “Oh.”

“I brought you and your mom a tuna casserole for dinner. I imagine she doesn’t feel much like cooking. My sister had cancer a few years ago, so I know the drill.” She smiled and stood there. Finally, her smile faded. “Are you going to invite me in?”

Tully froze. This is going to be bad, she thought. “Um… sure.”

“Thank you.” Mrs. Mularkey moved past her and went into the house.

Cloud lay on the sofa, sort of spread-eagled; she had a pile of marijuana on her stomach. Smiling blearily, she tried to sit up and failed. The failure made her shoot out a few swear words and then laugh. The whole house reeked of pot.

Mrs. Mularkey came to a stop. Confusion pleated her forehead. “I’m Margie from next door,” she said.

“I’m Cloud,” Tully’s mother said, trying again to sit up. “It’s cool to meet you.”

“And you.”

For a terrible, awkward moment, they just stared at each other. Tully had no doubt at all that Mrs. Mularkey’s sharp eyes saw everything – the bong under the end table, the bag of Maui-wowie⁶⁹ on the floor, the overturned, empty wineglass, and the pizza boxes on the table. “Also, I wanted to let you know that I’m home most days, and I’d be happy to drive you to the doctor’s office or run errands. I know how chemo can make you feel.”

Cloud frowned blearily. “Who’s got cancer?”

Mrs. Mularkey turned to look at Tully, who wanted to curl up and die.

“Tully, show our cool neighbor with the food where the kitchen is.”

Tully practically ran for the kitchen. In that pink hell, junk food wrappers covered the table, dirty dishes clogged the sink, and overflowing ashtrays were everywhere; more evidence of her pathetic life for her best friend’s mother to see.

Mrs. Mularkey walked past her, bent over the oven, put the casserole onto the rack, then shut the door with her hip and then turned to study Tully. “My Katie is a good girl,” she said at last.

Here it comes. “Yes, ma’am.”

“She’s been praying for your mother to recover from her cancer. She even has a little altar set up in her room.”

Tully looked at the floor, too ashamed to answer. How could she explain why she’d lied? No answer would be good enough, not for a mother like Mrs. Mularkey, who loved her kids. At that, a wave of jealousy joined the shame running through her. Maybe if Tully had had a mother who loved her she wouldn’t find it so easy – so necessary – to lie in the first place. And now she’d lose the one thing that mattered to her: Katie.

“Do you think lying to your friends is okay?”

“No, ma’am.” So intently was she staring at the floor that she was startled by a gentle touch on her chin that forced her to look up.

“Are you going to be a good friend to Kate? Or the kind that leads her to trouble?”

“I’d never hurt Katie.” Tully wanted to say more, maybe fall to her knees and swear to be a good person, but she was so close to tears she didn’t dare move. She stared into Mrs. Mularkey’s dark eyes and saw something she never expected: understanding.

In the living room, Cloud stumbled over to the television and changed the channel. Tully could see the screen through the rubble of the messy room: Jean Enersen⁷⁰ was reporting on the day’s top story.

“You do it, don’t you?” Mrs. Mularkey said quietly, as if she worried that Cloud might be eavesdropping. “Pay the bills, grocery-shop, clean the house. Who pays for everything?”

Tully swallowed hard. No one had ever seen through her life so clearly before. “My grandmother sends a check every week.”

“My dad was a fall-down drunk and the whole town knew it,” Mrs. Mularkey said in a soft voice that matched the look in her eyes. “He was mean, too. Friday and Saturday nights, my sister, Georgia, would have to go to the tavern and drag him home. All the way out of the bar he’d be smacking her and calling her names. She was like one of those rodeo clowns, always stepping between the bull and the cowboy. By the end of my junior year I figured out why she ran with the fast crowd and drank too much.”

“She didn’t want people to look at her like she was pitiful.”

Mrs.Mularkey nodded. “She hated that look. What matters, though, isn’t other people. That’s what I learned. Who your mom is and how she lives her life isn’t a reflection of you. You can make your own choices. And there’s nothing for you to be ashamed of. But you’ll have to dream big, Tully.” She glanced through the open door to the living room. “Like that Jean Enersen on the TV there. A woman who gets to a place like that in her life knows how to go after what she wants.”

“How do I know what I want?”

“You keep your eyes open and do the right thing. Go to college. And trust your friends.”

“I do trust Kate.”

“So you’ll tell her the truth?”

“What if I just promise—”

“One of us is going to tell her, Tully. It should be you.”

Tully took a deep breath and released it. Though telling the truth went against every instinct she had, she had no choice, really. She wanted Mrs. Mularkey to be proud of her. “Okay.”

“Good. So I’ll see you for dinner tomorrow night. Five o’clock. It’ll be your chance to start over.”

The next night, Tully changed her clothes at least four times, trying to find exactly the right outfit. By the time she was actually ready, she was so late that she had to run all the way across the street and up the hill.

Kate’s mom opened the door. She wore a pair of purple gabardine bell-bottoms⁷¹ and a striped V-neck⁷² sweater with angel sleeves. Smiling, she said, “I warn you, it’s loud and crazy in here.”

“I love loud and crazy,” Tully said.

“Then you’ll fit right in.” Mrs. Mularkey put an arm around Tully’s shoulder and led her toward the beige-walled living room with its moss-green shag carpeting, bright red sofa, and black recliner. A small gold-framed photo of Jesus and another of Elvis were the only decorations on the walls, but dozens of family pictures cluttered the top of the console TV. Tully couldn’t help thinking of the TV in her house; its top was covered with overflowing ashtrays and empty cigarette packs, but no family photos.

“Bud?” Mrs. Mularkey said to the beefy, dark-haired man sitting in the recliner. “This is Tully Hart from next door.”

Mr. Mularkey smiled at her and put down his drink. “Well, well. So you’re the one we’ve been hearin’ about. It’s nice to have you here, Tully.”

“It’s nice to be here.”

Mrs. Mularkey patted her shoulder. “Dinner’s not till six. Katie’s upstairs in her room. It’s the one at the very top of the stairs. I’m sure you girls have plenty to talk about.”

Tully got the message and nodded, unable to rouse her voice. Now that she was here, in this warm house that smelled of home-cooked meals, standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most perfect mom, she couldn’t imagine losing it all, becoming unwelcome. “I’ll never lie to her again,” she promised.

“Good. Now go.” With a last smile, Mrs. Mularkey walked into the living room.

Mr. Mularkey put an arm around his wife and drew her into the La-Z-Boy with him. Immediately they bent their heads together.

Tully felt a longing so sharp and unexpected, she couldn’t move. Everything would have been different for her if she’d had a family like this. She didn’t want to turn away from it just yet. “Are you watching the news?”

Mr. Mularkey looked up. “We never miss it.”

Mrs. Mularkey smiled. “Jean Enersen is changing the world. She’s one of the first women to anchor a nightly news program.”

“I’m going to be a reporter,” Tully said suddenly.

“That’s wonderful,” Mr. Mularkey said.

“There you are,” Kate said suddenly, coming up beside her. “Nice of everyone to tell me you were here,” she said loudly.

“I was just telling your mom and dad that I’m going to be a news reporter,” Tully said.

Mrs. Mularkey beamed at that. In her smile, Tully saw everything that had been missing in her life. “Isn’t that a grand dream, Katie?”

Kate looked confused for a moment. Then she hooked her arm through Tully’s and pulled her away from the living room and up the stairs. In her small attic bedroom, Kate went to the record player and flipped through a small stack of records. By the time she’d chosen one – Carole King’s Tapestry—and put it on, Tully was at the window, staring out at the lavender evening.

The surge of adrenaline she’d gotten from her announcement faded, leaving a quiet kind of sadness behind. She knew what she had to do now, but the thought of it made her sick.

Tell her the truth.

If you don’t, Mrs.Mularkey will.

“I got the new Seventeen and Tiger Beat,” Kate said, stretching out on the blue shag carpeting. “You want to read ‘em? We can take the ‘Can You Be Tony DeFranco’s Girlfriend?’ quiz.”

Tully lay down beside her. “Sure.”

“Jan-Michael Vincent is so foxy,” Kate said, flipping to a picture of the actor.

“I heard he lied to his girlfriend,” Tully said, daring a sideways glance.

“I hate liars.” Kate turned the page. “Are you really going to be a news reporter? You never told me that.”

“Yeah,” Tully said, really imagining it for the first time. Maybe she could be famous. Then everyone would admire her. “You’ll have to be one, too, though. ‘Cause we do everything together.”

“Me?”

“We’ll be a team like Woodward and Bernstein⁷³, only with better clothes. And prettier.”

“I don’t know—”

Tully bumped her. “Yes, you do. Mrs. Ramsdale told the whole class that you’re an excellent writer.”

Kate laughed. “That’s true. Okay. I’ll be a reporter, too.”

“When we get famous, we’ll tell Mike Wallace⁷⁴ we couldn’t have done it without each other.”

After that, they fell silent, flipping through the magazines. Tully tried twice to bring up the subject of her mother, but both times Kate interrupted her, and then someone was yelling, “Dinner,” and her chance for coming clean had slipped away.

All through the best meal of her life, she felt the weight of her lie. By the time they’d cleared the table and washed and dried the dishes, she was stretched to the breaking point. Even dreaming about fame on television couldn’t ease her nerves.

“Hey, Mom,” Kate said, putting away the last white Corningware plate, “Tully and me are going to ride our bikes down to the park, okay?”

“Tully and I,” her mother answered, reaching down into the magazine pouch of the La-Z-Boy’s arm for the TV guide. “And be back by eight.”

“Aww, Mom—”

“Eight,” her father said from the living room.

Kate looked at Tully. “They treat me like I’m a baby.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are. Come on, let’s get our bikes.”

They rode at a breakneck speed down the bumpy county road, laughing all the way. At Summer Hill, Tully flung her arms out and Kate followed.

When they got to the river park, they ditched their bikes in the trees and lay on the grass, side by side, staring up at the sky, listening to the river gurgling against the rocks.

“I have something to tell you,” Tully said in a rush.

“What?”

“My mom doesn’t have cancer. She’s a pothead.”

“Your mom smokes dope. Yeah, right.”

“It’s true. She’s always high.”

Kate turned to her. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You lied to me?”

Tully could barely maintain eye contact, she was so ashamed. “I didn’t mean to.”

“People don’t lie accidentally. It’s not like tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.”

“You don’t know how it feels to be embarrassed by your mom.”

“Are you kidding? You should have seen what my mom wore out to dinner last—”

“No,” Tully said. “You don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

Tully knew what Kate was asking of her; she wanted the truth that had spawned the lie, but Tully didn’t know if she could do it, turn all her pain into words and pass them out like cards. All her life she’d kept these secrets close. If she told Kate the reality and then lost her as a friend, it would be unbearable.

Then again, if she didn’t tell the truth, she’d lose the friendship for sure.

“I was two years old,” she finally said, “when my mom first dumped me at my grandparents’ house. She went to town for milk and came back when I was four. When I was ten, she showed up again and I thought it meant she loved me. That time she let go of me in a crowd. The next time I saw her I was fourteen. My gran’s letting us live in this house and sending us money every week. That’ll last until my mom bails again – which she will do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. My mom isn’t like yours. This is the longest amount of time I’ve ever spent with her. Sooner or later she’ll get bored and move on without me.”

“How can a mother do that?”

Tully shrugged. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. She’s the loser. But I still don’t get why you lied to me.”

Tully finally looked at her. “I wanted you to like me.”

“You were worried about me?” Kate burst out laughing. Tully was just about to ask her what was so funny when she sobered and said, “No more lies, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“We’ll be best friends forever,” Kate said earnestly. “Okay?”

“You mean you’ll always be there for me?”

“Always,” Kate answered. “No matter what.”

Tully felt an emotion open up inside her like some exotic flower. She could practically smell its honeyed scent in the air. For the first time in her life, she felt totally safe with someone. “Forever,” she promised. “No matter what.”

Kate would always remember the summer after eighth grade as one of the best times of her life. Every weekday, she rushed through her morning chores without complaint and babysat her brother until three o’clock, when her mom came home from running errands and volunteering on the 4-H council. After that, Kate was free. Weekends were, for the most part, her own.

She and Tully rode their bikes all over the valley and spent hours inner-tubing down the Pilchuck River. In the late afternoons, they stretched out on tiny towels, wearing neon-colored crocheted bikinis, their skin slick with a mixture of baby oil and iodine, listening to Top 40 music on the transistor radio they never left behind. They talked about everything: fashion, music, boys, the war and what was still going on over there, what it would be like to be a reporting duo, movies. Nothing was off-limits; no question couldn’t be volleyed over the net⁷⁵. Now it was late August and they were in Kate’s bedroom, packing makeup for their trip to the fair. As usual, Kate had to change clothes and put on makeup after she left the house. If she wanted to look cool, anyway. Her mom still thought she was too young for everything. “You got your tube top?” Tully asked.

“Got it.”

Grinning at their own brilliant plan, they headed downstairs, where Dad was sitting on the sofa, watching television.

“We’re going to the fair now,” Kate said, thankful that her mother wasn’t here. Mom would notice the bag that was too big for the county fair. Her X-ray vision would probably see through the macramé exterior to the clothes, shoes, and makeup within.

“Be careful, you two,” he said without looking up.

It was what he always said now, ever since girls had started disappearing in Seattle. The news was calling the killer “Ted” these days because some girl at Lake Sammamish State Park had actually gotten away and given a description and his first name to the police. Girls all across the state were terrified. You couldn’t see a yellow VW Bug⁷⁶ without worrying that it was Ted’s car.

“We’ll be super careful,” Tully said, smiling. She loved it when Kate’s parents worried about them.

Kate crossed the room to kiss her dad goodbye. He curled an arm around her and handed her a ten-dollar bill. “Have fun.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

She and Tully headed down the driveway, swinging their bags beside them.

“Do you think Kenny Markson will be at the fair?” Kate asked.

“You worry too much about boys.”

Kate bumped her friend, hip to hip. “He has a crush on you.”

“Big whoop. I’m taller.”

Suddenly Tully stopped.

“Jeez⁷⁷, Tully, be a spaz, why don’tcha⁷⁸? I almost fell over—”

“Oh, no,” Tully whispered.

“What’s the matter?”

Then she noticed the police car parked in Tully’s driveway.

Tully grabbed Kate’s hand and practically dragged her down the driveway, across the street, and to the front door, which stood open.

A policeman was waiting for them in the living room.

When he saw them, his fleshy face pleated into clownlike folds. “Hello, girls. I’m Officer Dan Myers.”

“What did she do this time?” Tully asked.

“There was a spotted owl protest up by Lake Quinault that got out of hand yesterday. Your mother and several others staged a sit-in⁷⁹ that cost Weyerhaeuser⁸⁰ a full day’s work. Worse, someone dropped a cigarette in the woods.” He paused. “They just got the fire under control.”

“Let me guess: she’s going to jail.”

“Her lawyer is seeking voluntary treatment for drug addiction. If she’s lucky, she’ll be in the hospital for a while. If not…” He let the sentence trail off.

“Has someone called my grandmother?”

The officer nodded. “She’s expecting you. Do you need help packing?”

Kate didn’t understand what was happening. She turned to her friend. “Tully?”

There was a terrible blankness in Tully’s brown eyes, and Kate knew that this was big, whatever it was. “I have to go back to my grandma’s,” Tully said, then she walked past Kate and went into her bedroom.

Kate ran after her. “You can’t go!”

Tully pulled a suitcase out of the closet and flipped it open. “I don’t have any choice.”

“I’ll make your mother come back. I’ll tell her—”

Tully paused in her packing and looked at Kate. “You can’t fix this,” she said softly, sounding like a grown-up, tired and broken. For the first time, Kate understood the stories about Tully’s loser mom. They’d laughed about Cloud, made jokes about her drug use and her fashion sense and her various stories, but it wasn’t funny. And Tully had known this would happen.

“Promise me,” Tully said, her voice cracking, “that we’ll always be best friends.”

“Always,” was all Kate could say.

Tully finished packing and locked up her suitcase. Saying nothing, she headed back to the living room. On the radio “American Pie” was playing, and Kate wondered if she’d ever be able to listen to that song again without remembering this moment. The day the music died⁸¹. She followed Tully out to the driveway. There, they clung to each other until Officer Dan gently pulled Tully away.

Kate couldn’t even wave goodbye. She just stood there in the driveway, numb, with tears streaming down her cheeks, watching her best friend leave.

Chapter six

For the next three years, they wrote letters faithfully back and forth. It became more than a tradition and something of a lifeline. Every Sunday evening, Tully sat down at the white desk in her lavender and pink little-girl’s room and spilled her thoughts and dreams and worries and frustrations onto a sheet of notebook paper. Sometimes she wrote about things that didn’t matter – the Farrah Fawcett⁸² haircut she’d gotten that made her look foxy or the Gunny Sax⁸³ dress she wore to the junior prom – but every now and then she went deeper and told Katie about the times she couldn’t sleep or the way she dreamed of her mother coming back and saying she was proud of her. When her grandfather died, it was Kate to whom Tully turned. She hadn’t cried for him until she got the phone call from her best friend that began with, “Oh, Tul, I’m so sorry.” For the first time in her life, Tully didn’t lie or embellish (well, not too much); she was mostly just herself, and that was good enough for Kate.

Now it was the summer of 1977. In a few short months they’d be seniors, ruling their separate schools.

And today was the day Tully had been working toward for months. Finally, she was going to actually step onto the road Mrs. Mularkey had shown her all those years ago.

The next Jean Enersen.

The words had become her mantra, a secret code that housed the enormity of her dream and made it sound possible. The seeds of it, planted so long ago in the kitchen of the Snohomish house, had sprouted wildly and sent roots deep into her heart. She hadn’t realized how much she’d needed a dream, but it had transformed her, changed her from poor motherless and abandoned Tully to a girl poised to take on the world. The goal made her life story unimportant, gave her something to reach for, to hang on to. And it made Mrs. Mularkey proud; she knew that from their letters. She knew, too, that Kate shared this dream. They would be reporters together, tracking down stories and writing them up. A team.

She stood on the sidewalk, staring at the building in front of her, feeling like a bank robber staring at Fort Knox.

Surprisingly, the ABC affiliate⁸⁴, despite its clout and glory, was in a small building in the Denny Regrade section of town⁸⁵. There was no view to speak of, no impressive wall of windows or expensive art-filled lobby. Rather, there was an L-shaped desk, a pretty-enough receptionist, and a trio of mustard-yellow molded plastic lobby chairs.

Tully took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and went inside. At the receptionist’s desk, she gave her name, and then took a seat along the wall. She made sure not to fidget or tap her feet during the long wait for her interview.

You never knew who was watching.

“Ms. Hart?” the receptionist finally said, looking up. “He’ll see you now.”

Tully gave her a poised, camera-ready smile and stood up. “Thank you.” She followed the receptionist through the doors to another waiting area.

There, she came face to face with the man to whom she’d been writing weekly for almost a year.

“Hello, Mr. Rorbach.” She shook his hand. “It’s excellent to finally meet you.”

He looked tired; older than she’d expected, too. There were only a handful of reddish gray hairs growing on his shiny head, and none of them were where they should be. The pale blue leisure suit he wore was decorated with white topstitching. “Come into my office, Miss Hart.”

“Ms. Hart,” she said. It was always better to start off on the right foot. Gloria Steinem said you’d never get respect if you didn’t demand it.

Mr. Rorbach blinked at her. “Excuse me?”

“I’ll answer to Ms. Hart, if you don’t mind, which I’m sure you don’t. How could anyone with a degree in English literature from Georgetown be resistant to change? I’m certain you’re on the cutting edge of social consciousness. I can see it in your eyes. I like your glasses, by the way.”

He stared at her, his mouth hanging open the slightest bit before he seemed to remember where he was. “Follow me, Ms. Hart.” He led her down the bland white hallway to the last fake wood door on the left, which he opened.

His office was a small corner space, with a window that looked directly at the monorail’s elevated cement track. The walls were completely bare.

Tully sat on the black fold-up chair positioned in front of his desk.

Mr. Rorbach took his seat and stared at her. “One hundred and twelve letters, Ms. Hart.” He patted the thick manila file folder⁸⁶ on his desk.

He’d saved all the letters she’d sent. That must mean something. She pulled her newest résumé out of the briefcase and set it on his desk. “As I’m sure you’ll notice, the high school paper has repeatedly put my work on its front page. Additionally I’ve included an in-depth piece on the Guatemalan earthquake, an update on Karen Ann Quinlan, and a heart-wrenching look at Freddie Prinze’s last days. They’ll surely showcase my ability.”

“You’re seventeen years old.”

“Yes.”

“Next month you’ll start your senior year of high school.”

All those letters had worked. He knew everything about her. “Exactly. I think that’s an interesting story angle, by the way. Going in to senior year; watching the class of ‘78. Maybe we could do monthly features about what really goes on behind the doors of a local high school. I’m sure your viewers—”

“Ms. Hart.” He steepled his fingers and rested his chin on the tips, looking at her. She got the impression he was trying not to smile.

“Yes, Mr. Rorbach?”

“This is the ABC affiliate, for gosh sakes. We don’t hire high school kids.”

“But you have interns.”

“From UW⁸⁷ and other colleges. Our interns know their way around a TV station. Most of them have already worked on their campus broadcasts. I’m sorry, but you’re just not ready.”

“Oh.”

They stared at each other.

“I’ve been at this job a long time, Ms. Hart, and I’ve rarely seen anyone as full of ambition as you.” He patted the folder of her letters again. “I’ll tell you what, you keep sending me your writing. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

“So when I’m ready to be a reporter, you’ll hire me?”

He laughed. “You just send me the articles. And get good grades and go to college, okay? Then we’ll see.”

Tully felt energized again. “I’ll send you an update once a month. You’ll hire me someday, Mr. Rorbach. You’ll see.”

“I wouldn’t bet against you, Ms. Hart.”

They talked for a few more moments, and then Mr. Rorbach showed her out of his office. On the way to the stairs, he stopped at the trophy case, where dozens of Emmys and other news awards glinted golden in the light.

“I’ll win an Emmy someday,” she said, touching the glass with her fingertips. She refused to let herself be wounded by this setback, and that was all it was: a setback.

“You know what, Tallulah Hart, I believe you. Now go off to high school and enjoy your senior year. Real life comes fast enough.”

Outside, it looked like a postcard of Seattle; the kind of blue-skied, cloudless, picture-perfect day that lured out-of-towners into selling their homes in duller, less spectacular places and moving here. If only they knew how rare these days were. Like a rocket blaster, summer burned fast and bright in this part of the world and went out with equal speed.

Holding her grandfather’s thick black briefcase against her chest, she walked up the street toward the bus stop. On an elevated track above her head, the monorail thundered past, making the ground quake.

All the way home, she told herself it was really an opportunity; now she’d be able to prove her worth in college and get an even better job.

But no matter how she tried to recast it, the sense of having failed wouldn’t release its hold. When she got home she felt smaller somehow, her shoulders weighted down.

She unlocked the front door and went inside, tossing the briefcase on the kitchen table.

Gran was in the living room, sitting on the tattered old sofa, with her stockinged feet on the crushed velvet ottoman and an unfinished sampler in her lap. Asleep, she snored lightly.

At the sight of her grandmother, Tully had to force a smile. “Hey, Gran,” she said softly, moving into the living room, bending down to touch her grandmother’s knobby hand. She sat down beside her.

Gran came awake slowly. Behind the thick old-fashioned glasses, her confused gaze cleared. “How did it go?”

“The assistant news director thought I was too qualified, can you believe it? He said the position was a dead end for someone with my skills.”

Gran squeezed her hand. “You’re too young, huh?”

The tears she’d been holding back stung her eyes. Embarrassed, she brushed them away. “I know they’ll offer me a job as soon as I get into college. You’ll see. I’ll make you proud.”

Gran gave her the poor-Tully look. “I’m already proud. It’s Dorothy’s attention you want.”

Tully leaned against her gran’s slim shoulder and let herself be held. In a few moments, she knew this pain would fade again; like a sunburn, it would heal itself and leave her slightly more protected from the glare. “I’ve got you, Gran, so she doesn’t matter.”

Gran sighed tiredly. “Why don’t you call your friend Katie now? But don’t stay on too long. It’s expensive.”

Just the thought of that, talking to Kate, lifted Tully’s spirits. With the long-distance charges what they were, they rarely got to call each other. “Thanks, Gran. I will.”

The next week Tully got a job at the Queen Anne Bee, her neighborhood weekly newspaper. Her duties pretty much matched the measly per-hour wage they paid her, but she didn’t care. She was in the business. She spent almost every waking hour of the summer of ‘77 in the small, cramped offices, soaking up every bit of knowledge she could. When she wasn’t bird-dogging the reporters or making copies or delivering coffee, she was at home, playing gin rummy⁸⁸ with Gran for matchsticks. Every Sunday night, like clockwork, she wrote to Kate and shared the minute details of her week.

Now she sat at her little-girl’s desk in her bedroom and reread this week’s eight-page letter, then signed it Best Friends Forever, Tully, and carefully folded it into thirds.

On her desk was the most recent postcard from Kate, who was away on the Mularkey family’s yearly camping trip. Kate called it Hell Week with Bugs, but Tully was jealous of each perfect-sounding moment. She wished that she’d been able to go on the vacation with them; turning down the invitation had been one of the most difficult things she’d done. But between her all-important summer job and Gran’s declining health, she’d had no real choice.

She glanced down at her friend’s note, rereading the words she’d already memorized. Playing hearts⁸⁹ at night and roasting marshmallows, swimming in the freezing lake…

She forced herself to look away. It didn’t do any good in life to pine for what you couldn’t have. Cloud had certainly taught her that lesson.

She put her own letter in an envelope, addressed it, then went downstairs to check on Gran, who was already asleep.

Alone, Tully watched her favorite Sunday night television programs—All in the Family, Alice, and Kojak—and then closed up the house and went to bed. Her last thought as she drifted lazily toward sleep was to wonder what the Mularkeys were doing.

The next morning she woke at her usual time, six o’clock, and dressed for work. Sometimes, if she arrived early enough at the office, one of the reporters would let her help with the day’s stories.

She hurried down the hall and tapped on the last door. Though she hated to wake her grandmother, it was the house rule. No leaving without a goodbye. “Gran?”

She tapped again and pushed the door open slowly, calling out, “Gran… I’m leaving for work.”

Cool lavender shadows lay along the windowsills. The samplers that decorated the walls were boxes without form or substance in the gloom.

Gran lay in bed. Even from here, Tully could see the shape of her, the coil of her white hair, the ruffle of her nightdress… and the stillness of her chest.

“Gran?”

She moved forward, touched her grandmother’s velvet, wrinkled cheek. The skin was cold as ice. No breath came from her slack lips.

Tully’s whole world seemed to tilt, slide off its foundation. It took all her strength to stand there, staring down at her grandmother’s lifeless face.

Her tears were slow in forming; it was as if each one were made of blood and too thick to pass through her tear ducts. Memories came at her like a kaleidoscope: Gran braiding her hair for her seventh birthday party, telling her that her mommy might show up if she prayed hard enough, and then years later admitting that sometimes God didn’t answer a little girl’s prayers, or a grown woman’s, either; or playing cards last week, laughing as Tully swept up the discard pile – again – saying, “Tully, you don’t have to have every card, all the time…”; or kissing her goodnight so gently.

She had no idea how long she stood there, but by the time she leaned over and kissed Gran’s papery cheek, sunlight had eased through the sheer curtains, lighting the room. It surprised Tully, that brightness. Without Gran, it seemed this room should be dark.

“Come on, Tully,” she said.

There were things she was supposed to do now; she knew that. She and Gran had talked about this, done things to prepare. Tully knew, though, that no words could have really prepared her for this.

She went over to Gran’s nightstand, where a pretty rosewood box sat beneath the photo of Grandpa and alongside the battalion of medications.

She lifted the lid, feeling vaguely like a thief, but Gran expected this of her. When I go Home, Gran always said, I’ll leave you something in the box Grandpa bought me.

Inside, laying atop the cluster of inexpensive jewelry that Tully could rarely remember her Grandmother wearing, was a folded piece of pink paper with Tully’s name written on it.

Slowly, she reached out, took the letter, and opened it.

My dearest Tully – I am so sorry. I know how afraid you are of being alone, of being left behind, but God has His plan for all of us. I would have stayed with you longer if I could have. Your grandfather and I will always be watching out for you from Heaven. You will never be alone if you believe in that. You were the greatest joy of my life.

Love, Gran

Were.

Gran was gone.

Tully stood outside the church, watching the crowd of elderly people stream past her. A few of Gran’s friends recognized her and came over to offer their condolences⁹⁰.

I’m so sorry dear…

…but she’s in a better place…

…with her beloved Winston.

…wouldn’t want you to cry.

She took as much of it as she could because she knew Gran would have wanted that, but by eleven o’clock, she was ready to scream. Didn’t any of the well-wishers see, didn’t they realize that Tully was a seventeen-year-old girl, dressed in black and all alone in the world?

If only Katie and the Mularkeys were here, but she had no idea how to reach them in Canada, and since they wouldn’t be home for two days, she had to endure this alone. With them beside her, a pretend family, maybe she would have made it through the service.

Without them, she simply couldn’t do it. Instead of sitting through the terrible, heart-wrenching memories of Gran, she got up in the middle of the funeral and walked out.

Outside, in the hot August sunlight, she could breathe again, even though the tears were always near to the surface, as was the pointless query, How could you leave me like this?

Surrounded by dusty old-model land yachts⁹¹, she tried not to cry. Mostly, she tried not to remember, or to worry about what would happen to her.

Nearby, a twig snapped and Tully looked up. At first all she saw were the haphazardly parked cars.

Then she saw her.

Over by the property’s edge, where a row of towering maple trees delineated the start of the city park, Cloud stood in the shade, smoking a long slim cigarette. Dressed in tattered corduroy bell-bottoms and a dirty peasant blouse, parenthesized by a wall of frizzy brown hair, she looked rail-thin.

Tully couldn’t help the tiny leap of joy her heart took. Finally, she wasn’t alone. Cloud might be a little nuts⁹², but when the chips were down, she came back. Tully ran toward her, smiling. She would forgive her mother for all the missing years, all the abandonments. What mattered was that she was here now, when Tully needed her most. “Thank God you’re here,” she said, coming to a breathless stop. “You knew I’d need you.”

Her mother lurched toward her, laughing when she almost fell. “You’re a beautiful spirit, Tully. All you need is air and to be free.”

Tully’s stomach seemed to drop. “Not again,” she said, pleading for help with her eyes. “Please…”

“Always.” There was an edge to Cloud’s voice now, a sharpness that belied the glassy look in her eyes.

“I’m your flesh and blood and I need you now. Otherwise I’ll be alone.” Tully knew she was whispering, but she couldn’t seem to find any volume for her voice.

Cloud took a stumbling step forward. The sadness in her eyes was unmistakable, but Tully didn’t care. Her mother’s pseudo-emotions came and went like the sun in Seattle. “Look at me, Tully.”

“I’m looking.”

“No. Look. I can’t help you.”

“But I need you.”

“That’s the fucking tragedy of it,” her mother said, taking a long drag on the cigarette and blowing smoke out a few seconds later.

“Why?” Tully asked. She was going to add, Don’t you love me? but before she could form the pain into words, the funeral let out and black-clad people swarmed into the parking lot. Tully glanced sideways, just long enough to dry her tears. When she turned back, her mother was gone.

The woman from social services was as dry as a twig. She tried to say the right things, but Tully noticed that she kept glancing at her watch as she stood in the hallway outside Tully’s bedroom.

“I still don’t see why I need to pack my stuff. I’m almost eighteen. Gran has no mortgage on this house – I know ‘cause I paid the bills this year. I’m old enough to live alone.”

“The lawyer is expecting us,” was the woman’s only answer. “Are you nearly ready?”

She placed the stack of Kate’s letters in her suitcase, closed the lid, and snapped it shut. Since she couldn’t actually form the words I’m ready, she simply grabbed the suitcase, then slung her macramé purse over her shoulder. “I guess so.”

“Good,” the woman said, spinning briskly around and heading for the stairs.

Tully took one last, lingering look around her bedroom, noticing as if for the first time things she’d overlooked for years: the lavender ruffled bed linens and white twin bed, the row of plastic horses – dusty now – that lined the windowsill, the Mrs. Beasley doll on the top of the dresser, and the Miss America jewelry box with the pink ballerina on top.

Gran had decorated this room for the little girl who’d been dumped here all those years ago. Every item had been chosen with care, but now they’d all be boxed up and stored in the dark, along with the memories they elicited. Tully wondered how long it would be before she could think of Gran without crying.

She closed the door behind her and followed the woman through the now-quiet house, down the steps outside, to the street in front of house, where a battered yellow Ford Pinto was parked.

“Put your suitcase in the back.”

Tully did as she was told and got into the passenger seat.

When the lady started up the car, the stereo came on at an ear-shattering level. It was David Soul’s “Don’t Give Up on Us.” She immediately turned it down, mumbling, “Sorry about that.”

Tully figured it was as good a song to apologize for as any, so she just shrugged and looked out the window.

“I’m sorry about your grandmother, if I haven’t said that already.”

Tully stared at her weird reflection in the window. It was like looking at a negative version of her face, colorless and insubstantial. The way she felt inside, actually.

“By all accounts she was an exceptional woman.”

Tully didn’t answer that. She couldn’t have found much of a voice anyway. Ever since the encounter with her mother, she’d been dry inside. Empty.

“Well. Here we are.”

They parked in front of a well-kept Victorian home in downtown Ballard. A hand-painted sign out front read: BAKER AND MONTGOMERY, ATTORNEYS AT LAW.

It took Tully a moment to get out of the car. By the time she did, the woman was giving her a soft, understanding smile.

“You don’t need to bring your suitcase.”

“I’d like to, thanks.” If there was one thing Tully understood, it was the importance of a packed bag.

The woman nodded and led the way up the grass-veined concrete walkway to the white front door. Inside the overly quaint space, Tully took a seat in the lobby, close to the empty receptionist’s desk. Cutesy drawings of big-eyed kids lined the ornately papered walls. At precisely four o’clock, a pudgy man with a balding head and horn-rimmed glasses came to get them.

“Hello, Tallulah. I’m Elmer Baker, your Grandmother Hart’s attorney.”

Tully followed him to a small upstairs room with two overstuffed chairs and an antique mahogany desk littered with yellow legal pads⁹³. In the corner, a standing fan buzzed and thumped and sent warm air spinning toward the door. The social worker took a seat by the window.

“Here. Here. Sit down, please,” he said, moving to his own chair behind the elegant desk.

“Now, Tallulah—”

“Tully,” she said quietly.

“Quite right. I recall Ima saying you preferred Tully.” He put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. His buglike eyes blinked behind the thick magnifying lenses of his glasses. “As you know, your mother has refused to take custody of you.”

It took all her strength to nod, even though last night she’d practiced a whole monologue about how she should be allowed to live alone. Now, here, she felt small and much too young.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a gentle voice, and Tully actually flinched at the words. She’d come to truly loathe the stupid, useless sentiment.

“Yeah,” she said, fisting her hands at her sides.

“Ms. Gulligan here has found a lovely family for you. You’ll be one of several displaced teens in their care. The excellent news is that you’ll be able to continue in your current school placement. I’m sure that makes you happy.”

“Ecstatic.”

Mr. Baker looked momentarily nonplussed by her response. “Of course. Now. As to your inheritance. Ima left all her assets – both homes, the car, the bank accounts, and stocks – to you. She has left instructions for you to continue with the monthly payments to her daughter, Dorothy. Your grandmother believed it was the best and only way to keep track of her. Dorothy has proven to be very reliable at keeping in touch when there’s money coming.” He cleared his throat. “Now… if we sell both homes, you won’t have to worry about finances for quite some time. We can take care—”

“But then I won’t have a home at all.”

“I’m sorry about that, but Ima was very specific in her request. She wanted you to be able to go to any college.” He looked up. “You’re going to win the Pulitzer⁹⁴ someday. Or that’s what she told me.”

Tully couldn’t believe she was going to cry again, and in front of these people. She popped to her feet. “I need to go to the restroom.”

A frown pleated Mr. Baker’s pale forehead. “Oh. Certainly. Downstairs. First door to the left of the front door.”

Tully got up from her chair, grabbed her suitcase, and made her halting way to the door. Once in the hallway, she shut the door behind her and leaned against the wall, trying not to cry.

Foster care⁹⁵ could not be her future.

She glanced down at the date on her Bicentennial wristwatch.

The Mularkeys would be home tomorrow.

Chapter seven

The drive home from British Columbia seemed to take forever. The air conditioner in the station wagon was broken, so warm air tumbled from the useless vents. Everyone was hot and tired and dirty. And still Mom and Dad wanted to sing songs. They kept bugging the kids to sing along.

Kate couldn’t stand how lame it was. “Mom, will you please tell Sean to quit touching my shoulder?”

Her brother burped and started laughing. The dog barked wildly.

In the front seat, Dad leaned forward and turned on the radio. John Denver’s voice floated through the speakers with “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

“That’s all I’m singing, Margie. If they don’t want to join in… fine.”

Kate returned to her book. The car bounced so much the words danced on the page, but that didn’t matter; not with as many times as she’d read The Lord of the Rings.

I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things.⁹⁶

“Katie. Kathleen.”

She looked up. “Yeah?”

“We’re home,” her dad said. “Put that dang book down and help us unload the car.”

“Can I call Tully first?”

“No. You’ll unpack first.”

Kate slapped her book shut. For seven days she’d been waiting to make that call. But unloading the car was more important. “Fine. But Sean better help.”

Her mother sighed. “You just worry about yourself, Kathleen.”

They piled out of the smelly station wagon and began the end-of-vacation ritual. By the time they finished, it was dark. Kate put the last of her clothes into the pile on the laundry room floor, started the first load, then went to find her Mom, who was sitting on the sofa with Dad. They were leaning against each other, looking dazed.

“Can I call Tully now?”

Dad consulted his watch. “At nine-thirty? I’m sure her grandmother would really appreciate that.”

“But—”

“Goodnight, Katie,” her dad said firmly, looping his arm around Mom and pulling her close.

“This is so not fair.”

Mom laughed. “Whoever told you life would be fair? Now go to bed.”

For almost four hours Tully stood at the corner of her house, watching the Mularkeys unload their car. She’d thought about running up the hill a dozen times, just showing up, but she wasn’t ready for the boisterousness of the whole family just yet. She wanted to be alone with Kate, someplace quiet where they could talk.

So she waited until the lights went out and then crossed the street. In the grass beneath Kate’s window, she waited another thirty minutes, just to be sure.

Off to her left somewhere, she could hear Sweetpea nickering at her and pawing at the ground. No doubt the old mare was looking for company, too. During the camping trip a neighbor had fed the horse, but that wasn’t the same as being loved.

“I know, girl,” Tully said, sitting down. She wrapped her arms around her bent legs, hugging herself. Maybe she should have called instead of stalking them like this. But Mrs. Mularkey might have told her to come by tomorrow, that they were tired from their long drive, and Tully couldn’t wait anymore. This loneliness was more than she could handle by herself.

Finally, at eleven o’clock, she stood up, brushed the grass off her jeans, and threw a piece of gravel at Kate’s window.

It took four tosses before her friend stuck her head out the window. “Tully!” Kate ducked back into her room and slammed the window shut. It took less than a minute for her to appear at the side of the house. Wearing a Bionic Woman⁹⁷ nightshirt, her old black-rimmed glasses, and her retainer, Kate ran for Tully, arms outstretched.

Tully felt Kate’s arms wrap around her and for the first time in days, she felt safe.

“I missed you so much,” Kate said, tightening her hold.

Tully couldn’t answer. It was all she could do not to cry. She wondered if Kate knew, really knew, how important their friendship was to her. “I got our bikes,” she said, stepping back, looking away so Kate wouldn’t see her moist eyes.

“Cool.”

Within minutes they were on their way, flying down Summer Hill, their hands outstretched to catch the wind. At the bottom of the hill, they ditched their bikes in the trees and walked down the long and winding road to the river. All around them trees chattered among themselves; the wind sighed, and leaves fluttered down from branches in an early sign of the coming autumn.

Kate flopped down in their old spot, her back rested against the mossy log, her feet stretched out in the grass that had grown tall in their absence.

Tully felt an unexpected pinch of nostalgia for their youth. They’d spent most of one summer here, taking their separate, lonely lives and braiding them into a rope of friendship. She lay down beside Kate, scooting close enough that their shoulders were touching. After the last few days, she needed to know that her best friend was finally beside her. She positioned her transistor radio nearby and turned up the volume.

“Hell Week with Bugs was even worse than usual,” Kate said. “I did talk Sean into eating a slug, though. It was worth the week’s allowance I lost.” She giggled. “You should have seen his face when I started laughing. Aunt Georgia tried to talk to me about birth control⁹⁸. Can you believe it? She said I should—”

“Do you even know how lucky you are?” The words were out before Tully could stop them, spilling like jelly beans from a machine.

Kate shifted her weight and turned, until she was lying sideways in the grass, looking at Tully. “You usually want to hear everything about the camping trip.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve had a bad week.”

“Did you get fired?”

“That’s your idea of a bad week? I want your perfect life, just for a day.”

Kate drew back, frowning. “You sound pissed at me.”

“Not at you.” Tully sighed. “You’re my best friend.”

“So, who are you mad at?”

“Cloud. Gran. God. Take your pick.” She took a deep breath and said, “Gran died while you were gone.”

“Oh, Tully.”

And there it was, what Tully had been waiting for all week. Someone who loved her and was truly sorry for her. Tears stung her eyes; before she knew it, she was crying. Big, gulping sobs that wracked her body and made it impossible to breathe, and all the while, Kate held her, letting her cry, saying nothing.

When there were no tears left inside, Tully smiled shakily. “Thanks for not saying you felt sorry for me.”

“I am, though.”

“I know.” Tully lay back against the log and stared up at the night sky. She wanted to admit that she was scared and that as alone as she’d sometimes felt in life, she knew now what real loneliness was, but she couldn’t say the words, not even to Kate. Thoughts – even fears – were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice, and once given that weight, they could crush you.

Kate waited a moment, then said, “So what will happen?”

Tully wiped her eyes and reached into her pocket, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Lighting one up, she took a drag and coughed. It had been years since she’d smoked. “I have to go into foster care. It’s only for a while, though. When I’m eighteen I can live alone.”

“You’re not going to live with strangers,” Kate said fiercely. “I’ll find Cloud and make her do the right thing.”

Tully didn’t bother answering. She loved her friend for saying it, but they lived in two different worlds, she and Kate. In Tully’s world, moms weren’t there to help you out. What mattered was making your own way.

What mattered was not caring.

And the best way not to care was to surround yourself with noise and people. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago. She didn’t have long here in Snohomish. In no time at all, the authorities would find her and drag her back to her lovely new family, full of displaced teens and the people paid to house them. “We should go to that party tomorrow night. The one you wrote about in your last letter.”

“At Karen’s house? The summer’s-end bash-o-rama⁹⁹?”

“Exactly.”

Kate frowned. “My folks would have a cow¹⁰⁰ if they found out I went to a kegger.”

“We’ll tell them you’re staying at my house across the street. Your mom will believe Cloud is back for a day.”

“If I get caught—”

“You won’t.” Tully saw how worried her friend was, and she knew she should stop this plan right now. It was reckless, maybe even dangerous. But she couldn’t stop the train. If she didn’t do something drastic, she’d sink into the gooey darkness of her own fears. She’d think about the mother who’d so often and so repeatedly abandoned her, and the strangers with whom she’d soon live, and the grandmother who was gone. “We won’t get caught. I promise.” She turned to Kate. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Kate said slowly.

“Great. Then we’re going to the party.”

“Kids! Breakfast is ready.”

Kate was the first one to sit down.

Mom had just put a plate of pancakes down on the table when there was a knock at the door.

Kate jumped up. “I’ll get it.” She ran for the door and yanked it open, feigning surprise. “Mom, look. It’s Tully. Gosh, I haven’t seen you in forever.”

Mom stood near the table, wearing her zip-up, floor-length red velour robe and pink fuzzy slippers. “Hey, Tully, it’s good to see you again. We missed you on the camping trip this year, but I know how important your job is.”

Tully lurched forward. Looking up, she started to say something, but no sound came out of her mouth. She just stood there, staring at Kate’s mom.

“What is it?” her mother said, moving toward Tully. “What’s going on?”

“My gran died,” Tully said softly.

“Oh, honey…” Mom pulled Tully into a fierce hug, holding her for a long time. Finally, Mom drew back, put an arm around Tully, and led her to the sofa in the living room.

“Turn off the griddle, Katie,” Mom said without even looking back.

Kate turned off the griddle and then followed them to the living room. She hung back, standing in the curl of the archway that separated the two rooms. Neither of them seemed to care that she was there.

“Did we miss the funeral?” Mom asked gently, holding Tully’s hand.

Tully nodded. “Everyone said they were sorry. I officially hate those words now.”

“People don’t know what to say, that’s all.”

“My favorite part was the ever popular ‘she’s in a better place.’ As if dead is better than being with me.”

“And your mom?”

“Let’s just say she doesn’t call herself Cloud for nothing. She came and went.” Tully glanced at Kate and added quickly, “But she’s here for now. We’re staying across the street.”

“Of course she is,” Mom said. “She knows you need her.”

“Can I spend the night there tonight, Mom?” Kate asked; her heart was beating so hard and fast, she was sure her mom could hear it. She tried to look completely trustworthy, but since she was lying, she expected her mother to see through it.

Mom didn’t even look at Kate. “Of course. You girls need to be together. And you remember this, Tully Hart: You’re the next Jessica Savitch¹⁰¹. You will survive this. I promise.”

“You really think so?” Tully asked.

“I know so. You have a rare gift, Tully. And you can be certain that your gran is in Heaven watching out for you.”

Kate felt a sudden urge to butt in, to step forward and ask her mother if she believed she could change the world. She even went so far as to move forward and open her mouth, but before she could form the question, she heard Tully say,

“I’ll make you proud, Mrs. M. I promise I will.”

Kate paused. She had no idea how she could make her mother proud; she wasn’t like Tully. Kate had no rare gift.

The thing was, though, her own mother should think she did and should point it out. Instead, her mother – like everyone else – was caught in the gravitational pull of Tully’s sun.

“We’re both going to be reporters,” Kate said, more harshly than she intended. At their startled looks, she felt like an idiot. “Come on,” she said, forcing a smile this time. “We should eat before everything is ruined.”

The party was a bad idea. Taunting-Carrie-at-the-prom bad.

Tully knew it but couldn’t turn back. In the days since Gran’s funeral and Cloud’s encore abandonment, her grief had been slowly replaced by anger. It darted through her blood like a predator, puffing her up with emotions that couldn’t be tamped down or contained. She knew she was being reckless, but she couldn’t change her course. If she slowed down, even for a moment, her fear would catch up with her and the plan was in motion now. They were in her mother’s old bedroom, supposedly getting ready.

“Ohmigod¹⁰²,” Kate said in an awed voice. “You gotta read this.”

Tully marched over to the poorly decoupaged water bed, grabbed the paperback novel out of Kate’s hands, and threw it across the room. “I can’t believe you brought a book.”

“Hey!” Kate tried to sit up; waves rolled around her. “Wulfgar was tying her to the end of the bed. I have to find out—”

“We’re going to a party, Kate. Enough with the romance novels. And just for the record, tying a woman to a bed is S-I–C-K.”

“Yeah,” Kate said slowly, frowning. “I know, but—”

“No buts. Get dressed.”

“Okay, okay.” She shuffled over to the pile of clothes Tully had laid out for her earlier – a pair of Jordache¹⁰³ jeans and a clingy bronze halter top. “My mom would die if she knew I was going out in this.”

Tully didn’t respond. Truthfully she wished she hadn’t heard. Mrs. M. was the last person she wanted to think about right now. She focused instead on getting dressed: jeans, pink tube top, and navy platform lace-up sandals. Bending over, she brushed her hair for maximum Farrah volume, then sprayed it with enough Aqua Net to stop a bug in flight. When she was sure she looked perfect, she turned to Kate. “Are you—”

Kate was dressed for the party and back on the bed reading again.

“You are so pathetic.”

Kate rolled onto her back and smiled. “It’s romantic, Tully. I’m not kidding.”

Tully grabbed the book again. She wasn’t sure why, but this really pissed her off. Maybe it was Kate’s glossy idealism; how could she see Tully’s life and still believe in fairy-tale endings? “Let’s go.”

Without waiting to see if Kate was following, Tully went out to the garage and opened the doors and then slid into the cracked black driver’s seat of her grandmother’s Queen Victoria¹⁰⁴, ignoring the way the stuffing poked into her back. She slammed the door shut.

“You have her car?” Kate said, opening the passenger door and poking her head in.

“Technically it’s my car now.”

Kate slid onto the seat and closed the door.

Tully popped a Kiss¹⁰⁵ tape into the eight-track player and cranked up the volume. Then she put the car in reverse and eased her foot onto the gas.

They sang at the top of their lungs all the way to Karen Abner’s house, where at least five cars were already parked. Several of them were tucked into the trees and out of sight. When someone’s parents left town, word spread fast; parties sprouted like mushrooms.

Inside, it was a smoke-fest. The sweet smell of pot and incense was almost overpowering. The music was so loud it hurt Tully’s ears. She grabbed Kate’s hand and led her down the stairs to the rec room¹⁰⁶ in the basement.

The huge room had fake-wood-paneled walls and lime-green indoor-outdoor carpeting. In the center was a cone fireplace surrounded by an orange half-moon-shaped sofa and several brown beanbag chairs. Over to the left, some boys were playing foosball and screaming at every turn of the handle. Kids were dancing wildly, singing to the music. A couple of boys were on the sofa, getting high, and a girl was over by the door, shotgunning a beer beneath a huge painting of a Spanish matador.

“Tully!”

Before she could respond, her old friends surrounded her, pulled her away from Kate. She went to the keg first and let one of the boys give her a plastic cup full of foamy gold Rainier beer. She stared down at it, jolted by the memory that came with it: Pat, pushing her to the ground…

She looked around for Kate, but couldn’t see her friend in the crowd.

Then everyone began chanting her name. “Tu-lly. Tu-lly.”

No one was going to hurt her. Not here; tomorrow, maybe, when the authorities caught up with her, but not now. She chugged the beer and held the cup out for another, yelling out Kate’s name as she did.

Kate appeared instantly, as if she’d been just out of view, waiting to be called for.

Tully shoved the beer toward her. “Here.”

Kate shook her head. It was a slight there-and-gone¹⁰⁷ motion, but Tully saw it and felt ashamed that she’d offered the beer, and then angry that her friend was so innocent. Tully had never been innocent; not that she could remember anyway.

“Ka-tie, Ka-tie,” Tully yelled, getting the crowd to chant with her. “Come on, Katie,” she said quietly. “We’re best friends, aren’t we?”

Kate glanced nervously at the crowd around her.

Tully felt that shame again and the jealousy. She could stop this right now, protect Katie—

Kate took the beer and chugged it.

More than half of it spilled down her chin and onto her halter top, making the shimmery fabric cling to her breasts, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Then the music changed. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” blared through the speakers. You can dance, you can jive…

“I love this song,” Kate said.

Tully grabbed Kate’s hand and dragged her over to where the kids were dancing. There, Tully let loose and fell into the music and the movement.

By the time the music changed and slowed down, she was breathing hard and laughing easily.

But it was Kate who was the more changed. Maybe it was the one beer, or the pulsing beat of the music; Tully wasn’t sure. All she knew was that Kate looked gorgeous, with her blond hair shining in the light from an overhead fixture and her pale, delicate face flushed with exertion.

When Neal Stewart came up to them and asked Kate to dance, Kate was the only one surprised. She turned to Tully. “Neal wants to dance with me,” she yelled during a lull in the song. “He must be drunk.” Putting her hands in the air, she danced away with Neal, leaving Tully standing alone in the crowd.

Kate pressed her cheek against Neal’s soft T-shirt.

It felt so good, the way he had his arms around her, his hands just above her butt. She felt his hips moving against hers. It made her heartbeat speed up, made her breathing quicken. A new feeling overtook her; it was a kind of breathless anticipation. She wanted… what?

“Kate?”

She heard the hesitant way he said her name and it struck her suddenly: Did he feel all these things, too?

Slowly, she looked up.

Neal smiled down at her; he was only a little unsteady on his feet. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and then he kissed her, right there in the middle of the dance floor. Kate drew in a sharp breath and stiffened in his arms. It was so unexpected that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

His tongue slid into her mouth, forcing her lips to open a little.

“Wow,” he said softly when he finally drew back.

Wow what? Wow, you’re a spaz? or Wow, what a kiss!

Behind her, someone yelled, “Cops!”

In an instant, Neal was gone and Tully was beside her again, taking her hand. They made their lurching, desperate way out of the house, up the hill and through the scrub brush, and back down to the trees. By the time they got to the car, Kate was terrified and her stomach was in open revolt. “I’m gonna puke.”

“No, you aren’t.” Tully yanked open the passenger door and shoved Kate inside. “We are not gonna get busted.”

Tully ran around the front of the car and opened her door. Sliding into the driver’s seat, she stabbed the key into the ignition, yanked the gearshift into reverse, and stomped on the gas. They rocketed backward and slammed into something hard. Kate flew forward like a rag doll, cracking her forehead on the dashboard and then slumping back into her seat. Dazed, she opened her eyes, tried to focus.

Tully was beside her, rolling down the driver’s-side window.

There, in the darkness, was good old Officer Dan, the man who’d driven Tully away from Snohomish three years ago. “I knew you Firefly Lane girls would be a pain in my ass.”

“Fuck,” Tully said.

“Nice language, Tallulah. Now, will you please step out of the car?” He bent down, looked at Kate. “You, too, Kate Mularkey. The party’s over.”

The first thing that happened at the police station was the girls were separated.

“Someone will come talk to you,” Officer Dan said, guiding Tully into a room at the end of the hall.

A gunmetal-gray desk and two chairs sat forlornly beneath a bright hanging lightbulb. The walls were a gross green color and the floor was plain bumpy cement. There was a sad, faded stink to the place, a combination of sweat and piss, and old spilled coffee.

The entire left wall was a mirror.

All it took was one episode of Starsky and Hutch to know that it was really a window.

She wondered if the social worker was on the other side of it yet, shaking her head in disappointment, saying, That fine family won’t want her now, or the lawyer, who wouldn’t know what to say.

Or the Mularkeys.

At that, she made a little sound of horror. How could she have been so stupid? The Mularkeys had liked her until tonight, and now she’d gone and thrown that all away, and for what? Because she’d been depressed by her mom’s rejection? By now she ought to be used to that. When had it ever been any other way?

“I won’t be stupid again,” she said, looking right at the mirror. “If someone would give me another chance, I’d be good.”

After that, she waited for someone to burst in for her, maybe holding handcuffs, but the minutes just ticked by in smelly silence. She moved the black plastic chair to one corner and sat down.

I knew better.

She closed her eyes, thinking the same thing over and over again. Along with that thought, running alongside it like some shadow forming in the twilight was its twin: Will you be a good friend to Katie?

“How could I be so stupid?” This time Tully didn’t even glance at the mirror. There was no one behind there. Who would be looking at her anyway, the kid no one wanted?

Across the room, the doorknob twisted, turned.

Tully tensed. Her fingers bit into her thighs.

Be good, Tully. Agree with everything they say. Foster care is better than juvenile hall¹⁰⁸.

The door opened and Mrs. Mularkey walked into the room. In a washed-out floral dress and worn white Keds, she looked tired and poorly put together, as if she’d been wakened in the middle of the night and dressed in whatever she could find in the dark.

Which, of course, was exactly what had happened.

Mrs. Mularkey reached into her dress pocket for her cigarettes. Finding one, she lit up. Through the swirling smoke, she studied Tully. Sadness and disappointment emanated from her, as visible as the smoke.

Shame overwhelmed Tully. Here was one of the very few people who had ever believed in her, and she’d let Mrs. M. down. “How’s Kate?”

Mrs. Mularkey exhaled smoke. “Bud took her home. I don’t expect she’ll leave the house again for a good long while.”

“Oh.” Tully squirmed uncomfortably. Her every blemish was on view, she was sure of it, from the lies she’d told to the secrets she’d kept to the tears she’d cried. Mrs. M. saw it all.

And she didn’t like what she saw.

Tully could hardly blame her. “I know I let you down.”

“Yes, you did.” Mrs. Mularkey pulled a chair away from the table and sat down in front of Tully. “They want to send you to juvenile hall.”

Tully looked down at her own hands, unable to stand the disappointment she saw on Mrs. M.’s face. “The foster family won’t want me now.”

“I understand your mother refused to take custody of you.”

“Big surprise there.” Tully heard the way her voice cracked on that. She knew it revealed how hurt she’d been, but there was no way to hide it. Not from Mrs. M.

“Katie thinks they can find another family for you to live with.”

“Yeah, well, Katie lives in a different world than I do.”

Mrs. Mularkey leaned back in her chair. Taking a drag on her cigarette, she exhaled smoke and said quietly, “She wants you to live with us.”

Just hearing it was like a blow to the heart. She knew she’d spend a long time trying to forget it. “Yeah, right.”

It was a moment before Mrs. Mularkey said, “A girl who lived in our house would have to do chores and follow the rules. Mr. Mularkey and I wouldn’t stand for any funny business¹⁰⁹.”

Tully looked up sharply. “What are you saying?” She couldn’t even put this sudden hope into words.

“And there would definitely be no smoking.”

Tully stared at her, feeling tears sting her eyes, but that pain was nothing compared to what was going on deep inside her. It felt suddenly as if she were about to fall. “Are you saying I can live with you?”

Mrs. M. leaned forward and touched Tully’s jawline. “I know how hard your life has been up to now, Tully, and I can’t stand for you to go back to that.”

The falling turned into flying, and suddenly Tully was crying for all of it – Gran, the foster family, Cloud. Her relief was the biggest emotion she’d ever felt. With shaking hands, she pulled the crumpled, half-empty pack of cigarettes out of her purse and handed them over.

“Welcome to our family, Tully,” Mrs. M. finally said into the silence, pulling Tully into her arms and letting her cry.

Through all the decades of Tully’s life, she would remember that moment as the beginning of something new for her; the becoming of someone new. While she lived with the loud, crazy, loving Mularkey family, she found a whole new person inside her. She didn’t keep secrets or tell lies or pretend that she was someone else, and never once did they act as if she were unwanted or not good enough. No matter where she went in her later years, or what she did or whom she was with, she would always remember this moment and those words: Welcome to our family, Tully. Always and forever, she would think of that senior year of high school, when she was inseparable from Kate and a part of the family, as the single best year of her life.

Chapter eight

“Girls! Quit lollygagging¹¹⁰. We’re going to hit traffic if we don’t leave now.”

In the creaky attic bedroom, Kate stood at the edge of her twin bed, staring down at the open suitcase that contained all of her prized belongings. A framed picture of her grandparents lay on top, wedged between her ribbon-wrapped packet of long-ago letters from Tully and a photo of her and Tully taken at graduation.

Although she’d been looking forward to this moment for months (she and Tully had spun endless late-night dreams, all of which began with the words when we’re in college), now that it was here, she felt reluctant to leave home.

Over the course of their senior year in high school, they’d become a pair. “Tully-and-Kate”. Everyone at school said their two names as one. When Tully became editor of the school paper, Kate was right beside her, helping her to edit the stories. She lived vicariously through her friend’s achievements, rode the wave of her popularity, but all of that had taken place in a world she knew, in a place where she felt safe.

“What if I forgot something?”

Tully crossed the room and came up beside Kate. She closed the suitcase and clamped it shut. “You’re ready.”

“No. You’re ready. You’re always ready,” Kate said, trying not to sound as afraid as she was. It occurred to her suddenly, sharply, how much she’d miss her parents and even her little brother.

Tully stared at her. “We’re a team, aren’t we? The Firefly Lane girls.”

“We have been, but—”

“No buts. We’re going to college together, we’re pledging the same sorority¹¹¹, and we’ll be hired by the same TV station. Period. That’s it. We can do it.”

Kate knew what was expected of her, by Tully and everyone else: she was supposed to be strong and courageous. If only she felt it more deeply. But since she didn’t feel it, she did what she often did lately around Tully. She smiled and faked it. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

The drive from Snohomish to downtown Seattle, which usually took about thirty-five minutes, seemed to pass in a blink. Kate barely spoke, couldn’t seem to find her voice, even as Tully and her mom chattered on about the upcoming Rush Week¹¹² at the sororities. Her mother, it seemed, was more excited about their college adventure than Kate was.

In the towering high-rise of Haggett Hall, they made their way through the loud, crowded corridors to a small, dingy dorm room on the tenth floor. Here was where they’d stay during Rush. When it was over, they’d move into their sorority.

“Well. This is it,” Mr. Mularkey said.

Kate went to her parents and threw her arms around them, forming the famous Mularkey family hug.

Tully stood back, looking oddly left out.

“Geez¹¹³, Tully, get over here,” Mom called out.

Tully rushed forward and let them all embrace her.

For the next hour they unpacked and talked and took pictures. Then, finally, Dad said, “Well, Margie, it’s time. We don’t want to get caught in traffic.” There was one last round of hugs.

Kate clung to her mom, battling tears.

“It’s going to be okay,” Mom said. “Trust in all the dreams you’ve made. You and Tully are going to become the best reporters this state has ever seen. Your dad and I are so proud of you.”

Kate nodded and looked up at her mom through hot tears. “I love you, Mom.”

Much too soon, it was over.

“We’ll call every Sunday,” Tully said behind them. “Right after you get home from church.”

And then, suddenly, they were gone.

Tully flopped on the bed. “I wonder what Rush will be like. I bet every house will want us. How could they not?”

“They’ll want you,” Kate said softly, and for the first time in months she felt like the girl they’d called Kootie all those years ago, the girl in the Coke-bottle glasses and high-water Sears jeans. It didn’t matter that she’d gotten contacts and lost her braces and learned how to put on makeup to enhance her features. The sorority girls would see through all that.

Tully sat up. “You know I won’t join a sorority unless we’re in it together, right?”

“That’s not fair to you, though.” Kate went to the bed and sat down beside her.

“Remember Firefly Lane?” Tully said, lowering her voice. Over the years those words had become a catchall phrase, a kind of shorthand for their memories. It was their way of saying that a friendship begun at fourteen, back when David Cassidy¹¹⁴ was groovy and a song could make you cry, would last forever.

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“But you don’t get it,” Tully said.

“Get what?”

“When my mom dumped me, who was there for me? When my gran died, who held my hand and took me in?” She turned to Kate. “You. That’s the answer. We’re a team, Kate. Forever friends, no matter what. Okay?” She bumped Kate, made her smile.

“You always get your way.”

Tully laughed. “Of course I do. It’s one of my more endearing traits. Now let’s figure out what we’re going to wear for the first day…”

The University of Washington was everything Tully had hoped it would be and more. Spread out over several miles and comprised of hundreds of gothic buildings, it was a world unto itself. The size daunted Kate, but not Tully; she figured if she could triumph here, she could triumph anywhere. From the moment they moved into their sorority, she began preparing for a reporting job at the networks. In addition to taking the core classes in communications, she made time to read at least four newspapers a day and watch as many newscasts as possible. When her big break came, she was going to be ready.

It had taken her most of the first few weeks of school to get her bearings and figure out what Phase One of the academic plan should be. She’d met with her School of Communications advisor so often that he sometimes avoided her in the hall when he saw her coming, but she didn’t care. When she had questions, she wanted answers.

The problem, once again, was her youth. She couldn’t get into the upper-level broadcasting or journalism classes; no amount of cajoling or prodding could move the behemoth bureaucracy¹¹⁵ of this huge state school. She simply had to wait her turn.

Not something she was good at.

She leaned sideways and whispered to Kate, “Why is there a science requirement? I won’t need geology to be a reporter.”

“Shhh.”

Tully frowned and sat back in her chair. They were in Kane Hall, one of the biggest auditoriums on campus. From her chair in the nosebleed section¹¹⁶, crammed in among almost five hundred other students, she could barely see the professor, who’d turned out not to be a professor at all, but rather his teaching assistant.

“We can buy lecture notes. Let’s go. The newspaper office opens at ten.”

Kate didn’t even glance at her, just kept scribbling notes on her paper.

Tully groaned and sat back, crossing her arms in disgust, waiting minute by minute for class to end. The second the bell rang, she shot to her feet. “Thank God. Let’s go.”

Kate finished with her notes and collected her pages, methodically organizing everything in her notebook.

“Are you making paper? Come on. I want to meet the editor.”

Kate stood up and slung her backpack over one shoulder. “We are not going to get a job at the newspaper, Tully.”

“Your mom told you not to be so negative, remember?”

They went downstairs, merging into the loud crowd of students.

Outside, the sun shone brightly on the brick-covered courtyard known as Red Square. Over by Suzzallo Library, a group of long-haired students were gathered beneath a CLEAN UP HANFORD sign.

“Quit complaining to my mom when you don’t get your way,” Kate said as they headed for the Quad. “We can’t even get into journalism classes until we’re juniors.”

Tully stopped. “Are you really not going to come with me?”

Kate smiled and kept walking. “We aren’t going to get the job.”

“But you’ll come with me, right? We’re a team.”

“Of course I’m coming.”

“I knew it. You were just messing with me.”

They kept talking as they walked through the Quad, where the cherry trees were lush and green, as was the grass. Dozens of students in brightly colored shorts and T-shirts played Frisbee and hacky sack.

At the newspaper office, Tully stopped. “I’ll do the talking.”

“I’m shocked, really.”

Laughing, they went into the building, announced themselves to a shaggy-looking kid at the front desk, and were directed to the editor’s office.

The entire meeting lasted less than ten minutes.

“Told you we were too young,” Kate said as they walked back to the sorority.

“Bite me. Sometimes I think you don’t even want to be a reporter with me.”

“That’s a complete lie: you hardly ever think.”

“Bitch.”

“Hag.”

Kate put an arm around her. “Come on, Barbara Walters¹¹⁷, I’ll walk you home.”

Tully was so depressed over the meeting at the newspaper that Kate spent the rest of the day cajoling her into a good mood.

“Come on,” she finally said, hours later, when they were back in their minuscule room in the sorority house. “Let’s get ready. You want to look your best for the exchange.”

“What do I care about a stupid exchange? Frat boys are hardly my ideal.”

Kate struggled not to smile. Everything about Tully was big – she had such high highs and low lows¹¹⁸. Their time at UW had only increased her tendencies. The funny thing was that while this huge crowded campus had somehow released Tully’s extravagances, it had had an opposite and calming effect on Kate. She felt stronger every day here, more and more ready to become an adult. “You’re such a drama queen. I’ll let you do my makeup.”

Tully looked up. “Really?”

“It’s a time-limited offer. You better move your ass.”

Tully jumped up, grabbed her hand, and dragged her down the hall to the bathroom, where dozens of girls were already showering and drying off and blowing their hair out.

They waited their turns, took their showers, and went back to the room. Thankfully, their other two roommates weren’t there. The tiny space, filled mostly with dressers and desks and a set of bunk beds for the upperclassmen, barely gave the two of them room enough to turn around. Their own twin beds were in the large sleeping porch down the hall.

Tully spent almost an hour on their hair and makeup, then pulled out the fabric they’d bought for their togas – gold for Tully, silver for Kate – and created a pair of magical garments held in place by tight belts and rhinestone pins.

Kate studied her reflection when they were done. The sparkling silver fabric complemented her pale skin and golden hair and brought out the green in her eyes. After all the nerd years, she was still sometimes surprised that she could look good. “You’re a genius,” she said.

Tully twirled for inspection. “How do I look?”

The gold toga showed off her big boobs and tiny waist, and a riot of curled, teased, sprayed mahogany hair spilled down over her shoulder, à la Jane Fonda in Barbarella¹¹⁹. Blue eye shadow and heavy liner made her look exotic.

“You look gorgeous,” Kate said. “The guys’ll be falling all over themselves.”

“You care too much about love; must be all those romance novels you read. This is our night. Screw the boys.”

“I don’t want to screw them, but a date would be nice.”

Tully grabbed Kate’s arm and led her out into the hallway, which was crowded with laughing, talking girls in various stages of dress, running down the busy corridors with curling irons, hair dryers, and bedsheets.

Downstairs in the formal living room, one of the girls was teaching the others to Hustle¹²⁰.

Outside, Kate and Tully merged into the crowd walking down the street. There were people everywhere on this balmy late September night. Most of the fraternities were having an exchange. There were girls in costume, in ordinary clothes, in almost nothing at all, walking in sorority groups toward their various destinations.

The Phi Delt house was big and square, a fairly modern mixture of glass and metal and brick, that was set on a corner. Inside, the walls were worn, the furniture was broken and ripped and ugly, and the décor was prison-era 1950. Not that most of this could be seen through the crowd.

People were packed in like sardines, chugging beer from plastic cups and swaying to the music. “Shout!” blared through the speakers and everyone was singing along, jumping up in time to the music.

A little bit softer now…

The crowd crouched, stilled, then raised their hands and rose up again, chanting along.

As always, the minute Tully stepped into a party, she was “on.” Gone was the edge of depression, the hesitant smile, the irritation at losing the job. Kate watched in awe; her friend instantly grabbed everyone’s attention.

“Shout!” Tully yelled out, laughing. Boys moved in close, drawn to her like moths to a flame, but Tully barely seemed to notice. She surged onto the dance floor, dragging Kate along with her.

It was the most fun Kate had had in years.

By the time she’d group danced to “Brick House,” “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and “Louie Louie,” she was hot and sweaty.

“I’ll be right back,” she yelled to Tully, who nodded, and then she went outside, where she sat on the low brick wall that marked the property’s edge. Cool night air breezed across her sweaty face. She closed her eyes and swayed to the music.

“The party’s inside, you know.”

She looked up.

The guy who’d spoken was tall and broad-shouldered, with wheat-colored hair that fell across the bluest eyes. “Can I sit with you?”

“Sure.”

“I’m Brandt Hanover.”

“Kate Mularkey.”

“Is this your first frat party¹²¹?”

“Does it show?”

He smiled and went from good looking to gorgeous. “Just a little. I remember my first year here. It was like being on Mars. I’m from Moses Lake,” he said, as if that should explain everything.

“Small town?”

“Speck on the map.”

“It is kind of overwhelming.”

The conversation moved easily on from there. He talked about things she could relate to. He’d grown up on a farm, feeding cows before dawn and driving his dad’s hay truck when he was thirteen. He knew about feeling both lost and found in a place as big and sprawling as UW.

Inside, the music changed. Someone turned the volume way up. It was ABBA’s, “Dancing Queen.”

Tully came running out of the house. “Kate!” she yelled, laughing. “There you are.”

Brandt immediately stood.

Tully frowned at him. “Who’s this?”

“Brandt Hanover.”

Kate knew exactly what was going to happen next. Because of what had happened to Tully in the dark woods by the river all those years ago, she didn’t trust boys, didn’t want anything to do with them, and she was committed to protecting Kate from any kind of harm or heartbreak. Unfortunately, though, Kate wasn’t afraid. She wanted to date and have fun and even maybe fall in love.

But how could she say that, when Tully was only trying to protect her?

Tully grabbed Kate’s arm, pulled her to her feet. “Too bad, Brandt,” she said, laughing a little too loudly as she dragged Kate away. “This is our song.”

“I saw Brandt at the HUB today. He smiled at me.”

Tully fought the urge to roll her eyes. In the six months since that first toga party at the Phi Delts, Kate had found a way to mention Brandt Hanover at least once a day. You’d think they were dating, as often as his name came up. “Let me guess: you pretended not to notice.”

“I smiled back.”

“Wow. A red-letter day.”

“I thought I’d invite him to the spring dance. We could double date.”

“I have to write an article on the Ayatollah Khomeini¹²². I figured if I keep sending stuff to the paper, sooner or later they’ll publish something. It wouldn’t hurt you to try a little harder to—”

Kate turned to her friend. “That’s it. I renounce our friendship. I know you have no interest in our social life, but I do. If you don’t go—”

Tully laughed. “Gotcha¹²³.”

Kate couldn’t help laughing. “Bitch.” She slung an arm around Tully. Together they walked along the grass-dotted sidewalk of Twenty-first Street and onto campus.

At the campus security post, Kate said, “I’m headed to Meany. How about you?”

“Drama/TV.”

“That’s right! Your first broadcast journalism class – and with that famous guy you’ve been stalking since we got here.”

“Chad Wiley.”

“How many letters did you have to write to get in?”

“About a thousand. And you should be coming with me. We both need this class.”

“I’ll get in as a junior. You need me to walk you over?”

Tully loved her friend for that. Somehow Kate knew that despite her show of courage, Tully was nervous about this. Everything she wanted could start today. “No, thanks. How can I make my big entrance with someone else?”

She watched Kate walk away from her. Standing there, alone among the crowd of students moving between the buildings, Tully took a deep, relaxing breath, trying to still herself. She needed to appear calm.

She strolled confidently past the fountain of Frosh Pond and went into the Drama/TV Building, where her first stop was the restroom.

There, she paused in front of the mirrors. Her curled, sprayed hair was perfect, as was her makeup. The skintight, flare-legged jeans and shiny white tunic blouse with gold belt and Nehru collar¹²⁴ managed to be both sexy and businesslike at the same time.

When the bell rang, she hurried down the hallway, with her backpack bouncing against her ass as she moved. In the auditorium, she walked boldly down to the first row and took a seat.

In the front of the room, the professor sat slumped in a metal chair. “I’m Chad Wiley,” he said in a sexy, whiskey-rough voice. “Those of you who recognize my name get an A in the class.”

There was a smattering of laughter around the room. Tully’s was the loudest. She knew more than his name. She knew his whole life story. He’d come out of college as a kind of wunderkind in broadcasting. He’d moved up the ranks fast, becoming a network anchor before he was thirty. Then, quite simply, he’d lost it. A pair of DWIs¹²⁵, a car crash that broke both of his legs and injured a child, and his star had fallen. There’d been a couple of years with no mention of him at all, and then, finally, he’d surfaced at UW, teaching.

Wiley stood. He was unkempt, with long dark hair and at least three days’ growth of gray-black beard, but the intelligence in his dark eyes was undiminished. The stamp of greatness was still on him. No wonder he’d made it.

He handed her a syllabus and started to move on.

“Your coverage of the Karen Silkwood¹²⁶ case was inspired,” she said, smiling brightly.

He paused, looked down at her. There was something unsettling about the way he stared – intensely, but only for a second; like a laser beam switched on and off – and then he kept walking past her and on to the next student.

He thought she was just another front-row suck-up who wanted to curry favor.

She’d need to be more careful in the future. Nothing mattered more to her right now than impressing Chad Wiley. She intended to learn everything she could from him.

Part two. The eighties

Love is a battlefield heartache to heartache, we stand¹²⁷

Chapter nine

By the end of her sophomore year, there was no doubt in Tully’s mind that Chad Wiley knew who she was. She’d taken two of his classes: Broadcast Journalism I and II. Whatever he taught, she took; whatever he asked of her, she did. Full-bore. Balls to the wall.

The problem was this: he didn’t seem to recognize her talent. They’d spent all of last week reading the news from a teleprompter. Each time she finished, she immediately looked at him, but he barely glanced up from his notes. Rather, he spooled off a criticism as if he were relaying a recipe to a troublesome neighbor, then called out, “Next.”

Day after day, week after week, class after class, Tully waited for him to respond to her obvious talent, to say, You’re ready for KVTS. Now it was the first week of May. With about six weeks left in her sophomore year, she was still waiting.

Plenty of things had changed in her life the past two years. She’d cut her hair shoulder-length and gone with bangs. Her style icon had gone from Farrah Fawcett-Majors to Jessica Savitch. Nineteen eighty was made for Tully: big hair, bright makeup, glittery fabric, and shoulder pads. No pale colors or sorority-girl styles for her. When she walked into a room these days, people noticed.

Except, of course, for Chad Wiley.

But that was about to change; Tully was sure this time. Last week she’d finally racked enough credits to apply for a summer internship position at KVTS, the local public programming station¹²⁸ that was housed on campus. She’d gotten up at 6 A.M. so that her name appeared first on the sign-up sheet. When she’d been given the audition piece, she’d gone home and practiced it endlessly, trying it at least a dozen different ways until she found the tone of voice that perfectly matched the tone of the story. Yesterday she’d nailed the audition. She was certain of it. Now, finally, it was time to found out what position she’d earned.

“How do I look?”

Kate didn’t look up from The Thorn Birds¹²⁹. “Awesome.”

Tully felt a flash of irritation that was more and more familiar these days. Sometimes she just looked at Kate and felt her blood pressure skyrocket. It was all she could do not to yell.

The problem was love. Kate had spent all of their freshman year mooning over bad-haircut Brandt. By the time they finally dated, it was a letdown that ended fast. Still, Kate didn’t seem to care. Through most of sophomore year, she’d dated Ted, who supposedly loved her, and then Eric, who most certainly did not. Kate went to one fraternity dance after another, and though she never fell in love with any of the doofuses she dated – and definitely didn’t have sex with them – she talked about them constantly. Every sentence lately seemed to start with some guy’s name. Even worse, she hardly ever mentioned the broadcasting plan. She seemed perfectly happy to take classes in other departments. Whenever one of their sorority sisters got engaged, Kate rushed to be a part of the crowd that swooned over the ring.

In truth, Tully was sick of it. She kept writing news stories that the school paper wouldn’t publish and hanging around the campus TV station, where no one would give her the time of day, and throughout all of this failure, when she could really use her best friend, Kate just kept yammering on about her latest date. “You totally aren’t looking.”

“I don’t have to.”

“You don’t know how important this is to me.”

Kate finally looked up. “You’ve been practicing one news story for two weeks. Even when I got up to pee in the middle of the night, I heard you rehearsing. Believe me, I know how psyched you are.”

“So how come you’re so Joanie about this?”

“I’m no Joanie. I just know you’ll get the anchor job¹³⁰.”

Tully grinned. “I will, won’t I?”

“Of course. You’re wicked good. You’ll be the first junior to actually be on air.”

“Professor Wiley will have to admit it this time.” Tully grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Want to come with me?”

“Can’t. I’m meeting Josh for a study group in Suzzallo.”

“That pretty much falls in the blows-chips category of dating, but to each his own.” Tully snagged her sunglasses off the dresser and headed out.

The campus was bathed in cool sunlight on this mid-May day. Every plant was in bloom and the grass was so thick and lush it looked like patches of green velvet tucked neatly between strips of cement. She strode confidently through campus to the building that housed KVTS. There, she paused just long enough to smooth her sprayed hair, then went into the quiet, utilitarian-looking hallway. To her left was a bulletin board thick with notices. Roommate wanted: pot smoker only was the first one that caught her eye. She noticed that all the phone-number tabs had been ripped off of it, while the ad next to it (Roommate wanted: Born-again Christian¹³¹ preferred) looked sadly intact.

Room 214 was shut. No slice of light ran along the floor beneath the door. Beside it, a piece of paper was tacked to the bulletin board.

SUMMER INTERNSHIP POSITIONS/DEPARTMENT

News/Anchor..............................Steve Landis

Weather...................................Jane Turner

Marketing & Community Relations......Gretchen Lauber

Sports.......................................Dan Bluto

Afternoon Planning........................Eileen Hutton

Research Desk/Fact Checking...........Tully Hart

Tully felt a surge of disappointment, then anger. She yanked open the door and slipped into the dark auditorium where no one could see her, muttering, “Chad Wiley, you sorry-assed loser. You wouldn’t know talent if it grabbed your tiny pecker and squeezed—”

“I imagine you’re talking about me.”

She jumped at the sound of his voice.

He was not twenty feet away from her, standing in the shadows. His dark hair was even messier than usual; it hung in curly disarray to his shoulders.

He moved closer, his fingers trailing on the back of the chair to his right. “Ask me why you aren’t an evening news intern and I’ll tell you.”

“I couldn’t care less why.”

“Really?” He looked at her for another long minute, unsmiling, then walked away from her, down the aisle and up onto the stage.

She could either keep her pride or risk her future. By the time she made her decision and hurried after him, he was backstage.

“Okay…” The word seemed to catch on something in her throat. “Why?”

He stepped toward her. For the first time she noticed the lines on his face, the creases in his cheeks. The dim overhead lighting accentuated every flaw, every hollow and mark on his skin. “Whenever you come to class, I can tell you’ve chosen your clothes carefully and spent a lot of time on your hair and makeup.”

He was looking at her now, seeing her. And she could see him, too. Past the shaggy unkemptness to the sharp bone structure that had once made him so handsome. But it was his eyes that grabbed her; liquid brown and sad, they spoke to the empty places inside of her. “Yeah. So?”

“You know you’re beautiful,” he said.

No stammering, no desperation. He was cool and steady. Unlike the boys she met at frat parties or on campus or in the taverns playing pool, he wasn’t half drunk and desperate for a feel.

“I’m talented, too.”

“Maybe someday.”

The way he said it pissed her off. She was gathering her wits for a scathing comeback when he closed the distance between them. All she had time for was a bewildered, “What are—” before he kissed her.

At the touch of his lips, gentle yet firm, she felt something exquisite and tender blossom inside her; for no reason at all, she started to cry. He must have tasted her tears, because he drew back, frowned at her. “Are you a woman, Tully Hart, or a girl?”

She knew what he was asking. As hard as she’d tried to conceal her innocence, he’d sensed it, tasted it. “Woman,” she lied, with only the barest wobble on the w. She knew now, after just one kiss, that whatever there was to know about sex, her pathetic rape in the woods had taught her none of it. Although she wasn’t a virgin, she was something worse somehow, a reservoir of bad and painful memories, and yet, now, with him, for the first time she wanted more.

That was how she’d felt with Pat that night, too.

No. This was different. She was a long way from that desperate, lonely girl who would have gone into any dark woods to be loved.

He kissed her again, murmuring, “Good.” This time the kiss went on and on, deepening into something that pulled at her insides and made her ache with need. By the time he began pressing his hips against hers, igniting a fire between her legs, she’d forgotten all about being scared.

“You want more?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He swept her into his arms and carried her to a broken-down sofa tucked against the shadowy back wall. There, he laid her down onto the bumpy, scratchy cushions and slowly, gently began to undress her. As if from far away, she felt her bra unsnap, her underpants peel off. And still his kiss went on and on, stoking this fire inside her.

When they were both naked, he lowered himself to the sofa and took her in his arms. The springs sagged beneath their weight, pinged in protest. “No one has taken time with you, have they, Tully?”

She saw her own desire reflected in his eyes, and for the first time she wasn’t afraid in a man’s arms. “Is that what you’re going to do – take your time?”

He brushed the damp hair away from her face. “I’m going to teach you things, Tully. Isn’t that what you wanted from me?”

It took Tully almost two hours to find Kate. She began her search at the study tables in the basement of the sorority. Next, she spun through the TV room and their bedroom; she even checked on the sleeping porch, although at four o’clock on a sunny May day, it was understandably empty. She tried the undergraduate library and Kate’s favorite carrel, then the graduate reading room, where several hippie-looking older students shushed her just for walking through the stacks. She was about ready to give up when she remembered the Annex.

Of course.

She ran through the sprawling campus to the small, two-story, peaked-roof house that they called the Annex. Sixteen lucky upper-class girls got to move out of the main house and into this place every quarter. It was party central¹³². No house mothers, no one to monitor the doors; it was as close to the real world as any of them were likely to get until they left the sorority altogether.

She opened the front door and called out Kate’s name. Someone in another room answered.

“I think she’s on the roof.”

Tully grabbed a pair of TaBs¹³³ from the fridge and went upstairs. In a back bedroom, the window was open. She leaned through the opening and looked out on the roof of the carport.

There was Kate, all by herself, in a skimpy white crocheted bikini, lying on a beach towel, reading a paperback novel.

Tully climbed out onto the ledge and crossed the carport roof, which they all called Black Beach. “Hey,” she said, offering Kate a TaB. “Let me guess: you’re reading a romance novel.”

Kate cocked her head and squinted into the sun, smiling. “The Promise by Danielle Steel¹³⁴. It’s really sad.”

“You want to hear about real romance?”

“Like you would know anything about it. You haven’t gone on a date since we got here.”

“You don’t have to go on a date to have sex.”