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“Does he know?” she asked gently. “Have you told him?”

“You mean did I make a complete fool of myself?” She sounded angry, and that seemed to be helping her get herself under control. “Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with him.”

“What do you mean? Believe me, whoever he is, and whatever you think of him, he’s in this with you, fiftyfifty.”

Laurel shot her a hard look that cut Annie to the bone. “You don’t know anything about it,” she said. “It’s not Joe” she started to say. But again, Laurel held back.

“Well, of course I don’t … you’re not telling me anything. Like, for instance, who is this guy? And if you love him so much, why can’t you tell him?”

Laurel just shook her head, staring down at the carpet.

Annie felt both hurt and exasperated. “Stop acting as if I’m out to get you. For God’s sake, Laurey, I just want to help you.”

“Well, then maybe you should talk to him.” Laurel’s eyes flashed.

“Who?”

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Even before Laurel answered, Annie sensed she was about to hear something she didn’t want to. In the space that stretched between her sister and her, Annie felt an invisible tunnel form, a tunnel down which Laurel’s voice seemed to whistle toward her like the coldest of winds.

“Joe,” she heard her sister say.

Laurel couldn’t face Annie. She stared down at the cabbage-rose carpet, faded in spots and worn away in others, so that it looked sadly frayed, a garden whose insects had nibbled away most of the roses and half the leaves too. In her mind, she could still see vividly Annie’s shocked, horrified expression. But it wasn’t shame that made her look away from her sister, it was something worse. She had a terrible mean urge to smile.

That was what was making her feel ashamed. What rotten part of her soul could it have come from? How could she want Annie to suffer? How could she have led Annie to believe that it was Joe who’d gotten her pregnant?

At first Laurel hadn’t meant for Annie to think that … but then, once she realized what she was saying, what it was leading to, she hadn’t pulled back or tried in any way to correct her sister’s mistaken belief. Now she realized that in a way-a sick way-she even liked the idea. Well; suppose it had been true? It wasn’t impossible. Suppose Joe had slept with her? Maybe he didn’t love her, but he had wanted her … she’d felt it that night she’d kissed him, when he was kissing her back. And since then there had been times when she’d catch him looking at her a certain way. …

Dammit, why did he love Annie more than her? And

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why should Annie have any more right to him than she did?

I saw them at Dolly’s party. I saw the way he was looking at Annie. … .

After she, Laurel, that night after fee gallery opening, had practically thrown herself at Joe^It was insulting, humiliating. She found herself reliving the awful moment when she’d followed them into the dining room, seeing them slip off into the butler’s pantry-Annie’s hand in Joe’s, her dark eyes fixed on him like those of a drowning woman on her rescuer. And worse, the tender way Joe was looking at Annie. They hadn’t noticed her standing nearby; they probably wouldn’t have seen her if she’d been standing right in front of them. She had felt so small then, as if she’d shrunk to the size of a thimble. And so shocked-a letting-go feeling-all her muscles sagging like worn-out elastic.

He loves her. It’s Annie he wants. Annie, Annie, Annie …

Come on, hadn’t some part of her always known that? Way down where her worst thoughts were stored like dirty socks at the bottom of a hamper, sure, she had known about Joe and Annie. She just hadn’t wanted to look. She couldn’t look.

And now it was staring her right in the face.

She remembered once reading in the Post about a man who had eaten an automobile. So he could be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. He’d done it a little at a time, of course … hubcaps for breakfast, over easy, and some ground-up tire on the side. But the hardest thing to imagine … what had made her throat squeeze shut and her stomach actually hurt … was the glass. All that glass. Even ground up really fine, what must it have felt like, all those sharp splinters inside you?

Well, now she knew.

/ thought there was hope. I thought I could make Joe love me somehow … someday.

But now there was no hope. No hope at all.

It’s not fair. Why is it always Annie who ends up first? The smartest and boldest. She says I’m the prettiest, but I

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see how men look at Annie, how they want her. Look at Joe … he wants her … he’d rather have her than me.

“Joe?” she heard her sister repeat, exhaling sharply, as if the air had been forced out by a hard punch to her stomach. “Joe?”

Laurel kept her eyes fixed on the carpet’s balding swirls. She felt hot, wrapped in heat like steamy water up to her neck.

Should I tell her? The truth?

She felt rocked by a sudden swell of shame and love. How could she hurt Annie? She loved her sister. If it weren’t for Annie …

… you’d be at Bel Jardin right now eating grapefruit still warm from the tree and looking out your window at green grass and trees instead of concrete and garbage.

No, not true, she told herself. Val had been planning to sell Bel Jardin all along, her sister had told her. And anyway, Annie had just wanted to protect her from him.

Are you so sure? Or had Annie somehow known that Val was going to die, and that’s why she’d been so anxious to get away?

Laurel glanced up at the shiny gold statuette atop a chest of drawers in the corner. Dearie’s Oscar. She remembered wiping blood off it, getting her old blanket all bloody, then having to throw it away …

Did Annie know that Val was dead? Could she have found out, and been keeping it from her, just as Annie had kept her feelings for Joe a secret?

All these years, I thought I was helping her by keeping my promise to Uncle Rudy, not telling her about Val, but maybe I was just being stupid.

Even more stupid, now she’d gotten herself pregnant.

But how could that be Annie’s fault?

No, she had to tell Annie about Jess.

Laurel let the memory come. She recalled exactly how it had happened, every tiny detail, even the dog with the red bandana and the morning glories growing up out of the trunk of the old Ford rusting in the backyard.

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She wanted to bring it all back so she could explain it to Annie. …

T<

A hat first time, walking up the front jpath of the ramshackle house where Jess lived with five roommates, Laurel noticed its grayish-white paint peeling away in long flakes like dead skin, and the porch propped up at one end by an untidy stack of bricks like a boat listing to one side. A tangle of bikes was pushed up against an old ripped easy chair with the stuffing spilling out in big dirty tufts. And in front of the door, where the porch paint had been scuffed off in an area roughly the shape of continental Africa, panting in the heat of that June day, lay a big golden retriever with a dusty red bandana tied about its neck. The dog lifted his head as she mounted the sagging steps and thumped his tail in halfhearted greeting.

She wondered if Jess remembered he’d invited her over to talk about doing those posters for the Helping Hands project. With him, you never knew for sure—nailing him down was like trying to predict whether it was going to be raining on a certain day a month from now.

He was different… older-seeming than other guys his age Laurel hung out with on campus. He’d ridden freight trains, he’d told her. And picked peaches with fruit tramps. And last year he’d spent the whole summer out in California, helping organize migrant farmworkers. If he didn’t get drafted first, he’d told her, he was going to join the Peace Corps.

Since that day in Life Drawing, they’d seen each other a few times. Once, she’d bumped into him in the student center and they’d sat and talked for a half hour or so. Another time, they’d had coffee, and when he heard about the tutoring she did in town, he invited her to join a group giving free tutoring to high school dropouts trying for their GEDs. No big deal. He’d never tried to kiss her or even hold her hand. With Jess, you were always just a part of the group.

In that sense, Jess was like Joe, not seeming to want anything from her. But Jess had an edge that made her

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blood pump faster… a hard edge like fingernails scraping on a blackboard or a police siren wailing up a dark street. He kept it pretty much under wraps … but it was there. In sixth grade he’d been throwing spitballs at the back of her head, but now he was organizing protest rallies and writing scathing editorials for the Daily Orange.

Laurel bent down to give the dog’s head a pat before knocking on the door. She waited, but no one came. Funny, when she’d called only a little while ago the girl who answered had said Jess was “around somewhere.” The door, thank goodness, had a thick glass pane through which she had a wavery view of a corner of the living room, where a bunch of people were sitting around. She didn’t spot Jess, but at least somebody was here. She knocked again, harder this time.

Finally, a barefoot girl in long braids, wearing jeans and a skimpy midriff top that barely reached her navel, shuffled over to the door. She gave Laurel an odd look.

“Jeez, you’d think it was locked or something,” she said. “Why didn’t you just come in?”

“Sorry, I didn’t know,” Laurel said.

“Well, nobody here ever locks the door,” the girl said, as if Laurel had committed a major social blunder. “We’re not into that kind of thing.”

“Uh … is Jess home?” Laurel asked, now feeling intimidated. And she hadn’t gotten even one foot inside yet!

“Upstairs, I think,” the girl said, waving her hand in the direction of the staircase. She was already drifting back into the living room.

On the way up the creaking, sagging stairs, Laurel wondered if maybe the reason Jess wasn’t hanging out downstairs with his roommates was because he was busy … with a girl. She stopped halfway up, feeling suddenly awkward and unsure. But he had told her to come. And, anyway, if he was with someone, so what? She’d just leave.

At the top of the stairs, a shower was running. And then before she could go any farther, the water stopped and the bathroom door swung open. Jess emerged in a

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cloud of steam that caught the sunlight streaming in through a high window over the landing.

He was naked, except for a towel wrapped around his waist, his wet black hair flattened to his skull, from which rivulets dribbled down his chest and arms.

“Hi,” he said casually, as if it yere every day he found a girl standing outside his bathroom door.

“Hi,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

The old line popped into her head: What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

She started to giggle, then she remembered … the posters.

“You said I should come over so we could talk about the posters,” she reminded him.

“Posters?”

“For the Helping Hands meeting.”

“Oh … those. Sure. Wait here while I throw something on.”

He disappeared into one of the bedrooms, but left the door partway open, wide enough for Laurel to watch a bare leg being scooted into a pair of worn Levi’s. Then he called: “Come on in.”

Jess’ room was small, but neat, the bed made. A few posters were thumbtacked to the walls: Joan Baez, and one of Jerry Rubin wearing his American flag shirt, and a banner with the words FREE THE CHICAGO SEVEN. By the bed, a plastic milk crate served as both nightstand and bookcase, with a small Tensor lamp on top. Shelves along one wall, fashioned out of pine planks and cinderblocks, held books and his neatly folded clothes. Otherwise it was bare … almost monkish. The one lighthearted touch, probably a former tenant’s, was a stainedglass decal stuck up on the window. The light hitting it gave the room a rosy and inviting glow. The window, she saw, looked out over a weed-choked yard and the rusted hulk of an old Ford. Its trunk was permanently open, and growing up through the car’s rusted-out bottom was a riot of morning glories that trailed up over the roof and through the empty windows.

Jess, she then realized, was staring at her, his mouth

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quirked in amusement. He stepped over the wet towel that lay puddled at his feet, and slipped a cool, damp arm about her waist. Then he kissed her.

Laurel had a fleeting sensation of warmth and softness; then, as if she’d been stung, she drew back.

No! She wanted Joe, not Jess. But Joe, she remembered, didn’t want her. He’d sent her away that night after they’d kissed. And hadn’t he told her right to her face that they couldn’t ever be anything more than friends? Friends! She felt the hurt all over again, hurt that made her hollow inside, a great burning shell. For weeks afterwards, she’d hardly been able to think of anything else. She’d be in class, or studying for an exam, or hunched over her easel, and suddenly, floating up into her consciousness like pieces of a wrecked ship, the memories would come-Joe’s mouth on hers, one sharp corner of his eyeglasses lightly pressing into her cheekbone, the faint juniper taste of the gin and tonic he’d drunk at the gallery. Then the gentle firmness with which he pushed her away, the look of sheepish dismay on his face, as if he were saying, Don’t get any ideas from this … you just caught me off guard, is all.

Laurel remembered how stricken she’d felt … and how she’d wanted to run away, as quick and as far as she could. She felt that way now.

But Jess didn’t seem to mind that she wasn’t fainting in ecstasy. His dark, tipped-up eyes regarded her with cool amusement, and once again she was struck by how different he was from boys she’d dated, with their mushy kisses and awkward, clutching embraces.

“It’s not what you’re used to, is it?” he said with a lazy chuckle. “You’re used to frat rats and jocks who put a record on the stereo first, a little Creedence … or some Johnny Winter… and after that maybe smoke some good weed they bought outa the pocket money their folks send ‘em.” He shook his hair out in a rain of droplets that struck her hands and face like a fine mist. “Well, listen, Beanie, I ain’t got no stereo … and I don’t got no time or money for smokin’ dope,” he continued in an exaggerated Latino