[continued from page 2]

In the secondary school, there is a boy named Kate who is staying too. Sometimes Evil and Kate go out to the fire trails and drink Jolly Roger and put their tongues in places where tongues shouldn’t even be. Late at night, Evil calls Kate up and says, Want to hear what Marnie and me did? He acts impressed. Evil tells Marnie that she hopes maybe they will get married and drive away in Kate’s Datsun, and for the rest of their lives they’ll always eat dessert first.

When their breathing is the same pattern, Evil takes a deep breath all her own. She says, What o’clock is it?

Don’t got my watch, Marnie says. Gotta go by the moon.

Moon looks sickle, Evil says. They can only see it through a broken window at the top of the staircase in the steeple full of swallows. It is a coffee stain in the sky.

They don’t know it, but this will be their last summer here. They will walk through the back roads of Massachusetts, down Switchtrack Alley, down the main street of their town. They will watch television in the window of the furniture store. The screens will show the face of the senator, thirteen of him, talking about treaties and things, but his voice will be muted. They will eat ice cream cones wrapped in flimsy cardboard from the truck parked by Marnie’s house with the cobwebbed windows. The ice cream man is old and mean.

I slept with Kate, Evil says. She doesn’t mean intercourse, yet. She only means sleeping, on a bed of maple leaves out on the fire trails, but this is a higher form of treason.

Marnie asks, Was it pretty?

I think our dreams connected, Evil says, stretching her spidery legs out in front of herself. Her toenails are jagged and creaturely, sticking out of her suede sandals. Her legs, like Marnie’s, are unshaven, and have been since Evil read that article on feminism that her mother brought back from a radical bookstore in New York City, where she went to a conference last year.

Marnie shivers. Peanut smuggling again, she says, touching her nipples through the thin fabric of her tee shirt. Sometimes she puts Band-Aids over them in the wintertime. It should be warmer than this by now. She lights another cigarette, the flame from the match waltzing across her cheekbone. She drags deeply, forcing herself to look up at the moon.

Evil wraps her arms around Marnie’s waist. She says, Your waist is so tiny, Marnie. How did it get so tiny as this? How did it get so beautiful as this?

Marnie knows that this means Evil wants it for herself, not that she wants to touch it. She supposes that’s the closest she can get.

Marnie doesn’t really like eating—she prefers smoking. She doesn’t like tables, either. She prefers the rocks out by the dun-colored, shivering river that runs through her backyard.

You could sleep with someone, too, Evil says, breathing into Marnie’s clavicles. You could sleep with anyone you want, everybody knows it’s true.

Marnie shakes her head. When she imagines herself older, she is living in Alphabet City, which she has read about in books. Her hair is short and severe-looking, and she has beta fish living in her coffee pot and bookshelves built into the walls. Evil is there, too. They are lying together on a naked mattress, drinking loose-leaf tea and sharing a picture book. Marnie lets Evil turn the pages.

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