after school, and study in the truck while Steven walked around the main street, checked out the parks and playgrounds, picked up the local paper to read the real estate ads. Sometimes he’d see a house in an ad that looked promising and he’d drive over and sit at the curb, saying things like “I just want you to picture that painted white, with green shutters. That real dark green, kind of a classy color. Like, country club, you know what I’m talking about?”
“Hunter green?” And he’d look at me like I’d invented fire, and kiss me, first a smacking kind of kiss, then a long kiss that made me go all soft. “That’s why I need you to help me with this,” he’d say. “You understand this. You’re on the same wavelength.” At the end of the day, if it wasn’t cold or raining, or even sometimes when it was, we would drive to some gravel road off the main drag, where the trees closed in, and he would put a sleeping bag on the bed of the truck. We would take off our clothes as fast as we could and jump on each other like crazy people. It’s been a long time, and I know more now than I did then, a lot more, but I’m not sugarcoating anything when I say that the charm didn’t fail him there, or in the twin bed in the room he rented from an elderly man the other side of town from the valley. Maybe that’s why I kept up with my schoolwork. A long line of correct equations, a physics test with the number 100 at the top in red ink: they made me feel more like my old self. My old self believed all the stories about how boys had to talk you into it, about how you had to just smack them down or put up with it. I’d never heard anyone talk about putting up with dinner and a movie just so you could get to the part where the warped wooden door was closed and locked and your boyfriend had to put his hand over your mouth so you would stop making so much noise.
“Dear Mimi,” said the postcard I’d just gotten from Donald. “I’m here. Hope I will do okay. Donald.” On the front was a picture of what looked like an apartment building with palm trees and the ocean behind it. It was in Santa Barbara, but it looked like the Garden of Eden only with tennis courts. “California,” Steven said when he took it out of my purse. “That’s an idea.” The next time he saw LaRhonda he said, “Who’s Donald?” LaRhonda rolled her eyes. “Loser,” she said. “That’s mean,” I said. “But true,” LaRhonda said, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t say anything after that. I told myself that he was just a boy I’d known when we were kids, who I hadn’t seen in years.
It was funny—LaRhonda’s interest in me had revived. It didn’t hurt that her boyfriend knew Steven from construction. His name was Fred, and he had red hair and freckles and bright green eyes, so depending on your taste he was either good-looking or just plain weird. He and Steven liked each other, maybe because, unlike the other guys on the jobs they worked together, Steven didn’t mock the little inspirational palm cards Fred liked to hand out. Sometimes I would find a card in Steven’s pocket with a picture of a bird or a flower or something, and then some verse: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field” or “All we like sheep have gone astray,” something like that.
LaRhonda was still part of the God Squad, and so was Fred, but the numbers had gotten smaller and smaller since LaRhonda had first taken Jesus as her personal savior, or what her father sometimes called “lost her tiny mind.” One of the girls had gone the other way and become part of the new hippie group, kids who had moved from skirts and sweaters to bell-bottom jeans and Indian print blouses. “All of them smoking that pot in Lizanne’s basement!” LaRhonda said, and Fred frowned and tapped her on the knee, as though I was the only one in Miller’s Valley who hadn’t heard that my brother was the man to see for marijuana.
LaRhonda’s mother loved Fred, and I could tell why. He was so agreeable that it sometimes seemed like