other boys in his fraternity, because I started getting dates all of a sudden. I went ahead and screwed them too. It didn’t feel like much, but I still did it because—” I stopped, swallowed down a bone-deep lash of shame, and made myself go on. “Because I was lonely.” Breathe. Breathe. “I was—I was tired of being numb and alone, and rolling around in a backseat with Tom or Dick or Harry was better than staying in my room weeping and telling myself I could have stopped my brother from killing himself.” I drew another ragged breath. “After a while there got to be quite a few Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. Word got around that Charlie St. Clair was a cheap date. You didn’t need to buy her a milk shake and a movie ticket. All you had to do was show up with a car.”
My throat was thick with unreleased sobs. I put my palm out the window and let the night breeze waft over my fingers, still avoiding Finn’s eyes.
“So there I was, spending all my time either huddled in bed, telephoning refugee bureaus, or screwing boys I didn’t really like. By spring, I had to come home and tell my parents I was knocked up, ringless, and probably flunking out of Bennington. In the middle of all my mother’s screaming, my father asked me who the boy was—almost the only thing he said through the whole thing. I had to tell him, ‘There are six or seven possibilities, Dad.’ He hasn’t really talked to me since.”
He’d have to, once I came home minus the Little Problem. Wouldn’t he?
Finn cleared his throat softly. I waited in brittle misery for condemnation, maybe for an involuntary “Thank God I didn’t touch you.”
“Are you the one who wants to go to Vevey? Or is it your parents?”
I couldn’t have been more surprised, so surprised I turned to face him for the first time. “Do I seem like I’m in any shape to be anybody’s mother?”
“I’m not judging that. I’m just asking if all these arrangements are what you want, or what they want.”
I don’t know what I want. No one had really asked. I was underage; my parents had made the decisions for me and taken it for granted I’d do as I was told. With that nasty little voice in my head telling me I failed at everything, that I’d failed to help James and Rose and now myself, I hadn’t even tried to figure out if I wanted something different. What did it matter what I wanted when I’d just fail if I tried to get it? I wanted Rose back, I wanted my future back, I wanted to save someone I loved for once instead of watching them disappear into grief or war or death, and I didn’t know how to make any of those things happen.
Suddenly I was floundering, Finn’s soft words lighting a flare of anger in me because they got under the brittle protective shell I’d put up. I could bounce insults off that shell all day—tramp, whore, slut, I’d heard them all, and I’d turn those words on myself to save anyone else the trouble. I could pretend all day that I didn’t care, because caring left me thrashing and vulnerable. “Why are you being so nice to me, Finn? Don’t you think I’m a murderer for wanting to get rid of it?”
“I’m an ex-convict,” he replied quietly. “I haven’t got the right to sling names at anybody.”
“You’re so strange,” I said, close to tears, and Finn reached out to pull me against his shoulder. I turned my burning eyes into his shirt, breath hitching. Before the Little Problem I did nothing but cry—since the day I’d told my parents, I hadn’t cried a drop. I couldn’t start again now, or I’d never stop. Finn smelled like smoke and engine grease and a fast wind; I sat with my cheek against his chest and my shoulders heaving, and he smoked his cigarette down to the filter.
Distantly I heard bells chime the hour. Three in the morning. Finn flicked the butt out the window and I sat up, pressing at my eyes with the heel of my hand. They hadn’t quite overflowed, but it had been a near thing.
He lifted his arm, and I slid across the backseat of the Lagonda toward the door. “Charlie lass,” he said, and my name in his deep soft voice arrested me, made me look back over my