say to me at seven thirty this morning, and none of it made the slightest bit of sense. Which is fine, I suppose.” He sang a few lines from a pop song: “Wish I knew what she was thinking, Wish I knew if she was sane, Wish I knew if it was only a game. Do you know it?”
“Never heard of it,” Betsy said.
“What do they teach you kids in school? Are the seminal bands of the 1980s so easily forgotten? The Jones of Ark?” He sang another tune: “A human being, is only really being, when he is being, loved.”
“But why does everyone need to be loved?” Betsy asked. “It’s very unfair if it’s not their fault no one loves them. Why do the people in songs always go all crazy when they can’t have love?”
“Generally speaking, if pop songs are to be believed, love and the lack of it are the primary cause of madness, suicide, and crying all night,” Derek replied.
“Someone’s at your door,” Betsy said.
“What?”
“Your doorbell rang. The front one.”
“You heard it from here? I’m getting old.” Derek got up and headed inside through his open back door. “Should have kept my head out of the speakers at those long-ago rock shows.”
“Shouldn’t smoke,” Betsy yelled after him.
“I don’t smoke with my ears.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER Betsy was playing with a stray golf ball she’d found, rolling it around on her badminton racquet, when Derek reappeared with a friend in tow, exclaiming, “Come meet my new friend Betsy! You’ll like her, she’s ten.”
Betsy climbed up to her deck to get a look at them. Derek spotted her there. “Betsy, look who’s here. A sight for sore taste buds, my old buddy Ken.” Ken nodded to her. He had his long hair tied back in a ponytail, wore a black tee shirt that said Stay Heavy, and was doing arm curls like a weight lifter with a twelve-pack of beer in each hand. “Gimme one of those, I’ll lighten the load,” Derek demanded. “Two dozen beers here—if I’m quick enough, I’ll get eighteen to your six.”
“I have no interest in alcoholic beverages,” Betsy said haughtily. “To me they taste awful.”
“Youth is wasted on the young, so the old get wasted,” Derek said.
“Why do you like it?” Betsy asked.
“You’re too young to understand, unless that homeroom teacher of yours is a drunkard too.”
“No, only a bisexual. But he told us once he had a love-hate relationship with cocaine.”
“Me too, still do,” said Ken. “Love it when I have it, hate it when I run out.”
“You do know too much,” Derek said to Betsy. “Don’t be in a hurry to put away childish things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Stick to lollipops and dollies as long as you can.”
“I’m already past those things,” she said curtly. “I like online chat.”
“Give her a beer, then,” Ken said, ripping open the flimsy cardboard case and handing Derek a cold can.
Derek’s eyebrows lifted mischievously above a rogue’s grin. He held the can out toward Betsy. “Would you like one?”
Just at that moment Meghan came out onto the deck. “She most certainly would not,” she said sharply.
“We’re just joking around,” Derek smiled. In a teasing voice he added, “The young lady has already informed us she has no interest in alcoholic beverages.”
“Hilarious,” Meghan scoffed. “Betsy, time for dinner.”
IT WAS A WARM summer evening. As she ate her meal in the kitchen, Betsy strained her ears to eavesdrop through the open door on the conversation of the men outside, catching only fragments of phrases from the increasingly drunken rhythms of their speech. She ate quickly and got up to head back out, but Meghan stopped her. “I don’t want you going out there.”
“But you always tell me I need more fresh air.”
“It’s not so fresh. They’re smoking like chimneys, the two of them.”
“Outside smoking doesn’t count.”
“You can go use the computer if you want. Chat with your friends for a while, then it’s bath time, then bed.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I need to talk to Derek for a minute.” She felt a need to talk to Thomas, to tell him of Sylvanne’s plot to get a kitchen knife, and reinforce her insistence that Daphne’s bloodletting stop. She’d been researching the antiseptic and antibiotic uses of medieval herbs, and wanted to tell him to apply vinegar and lavender oil to the wound on her arm, and add garlic and onion to the vegetable soups prepared for her. She also wanted to raise the possibility of tuberculosis as