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was out, working at Dad’s store all day.
    One day after the mono and the ho-hum report card reaction, I drank a ten-ounce glass of mixed rum and whiskey. Not yet a drinker, I vomited all over the turquoise-blue nylon pile carpeting in my parents’ room. Alane found me there, passed out in a puddle of puke. She helped me clean it all up, being very motherly. We finished up just as Mom pulled into the driveway. I didn’t know whether she suspected anything, nor did I care.
    Every Saturday I would dress up and then would have to wait for Dad to drive to open the store—and it wasn’t even my store. There I worked as a salesgirl and ran the cash register for $1.65 an hour. At lunch, Dad would give me money to go across the street to the Hickory Tree deli and buy sandwiches. Once I caught someone stealing a record album, hiding it under his coat, stealing from Dad. When I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” he dropped the loot and ran out.
    By then, though, I wasn’t an angel either. Before this, one Saturday night Nancy and I were nabbed by store security for shoplifting in the Two Guys department store while my parents were in the store shopping. After a verbal lashing, including threats of having my parents paged and being turned over to the police and charged with a crime—and the resulting explosion of tears and pleading—we were let go. After being on both sides of the crime, I vowed to myself, no more shoplifting.
    In early March of 1973, our family finally moved to our newly built home in New Vernon, part of Harding Township. Nancy and I were tearful about the move but vowed to stay best friends. Dad’s business was doing all right, he said, but on Saturdays I noticed the traffic into the store had started dwindling. The receipt of my little pay envelope became erratic. I didn’t think about it too much, since I was absorbed in adjusting to a new school in the middle of the tenth grade.
    The first time I noticed Dave was on the abbreviated school bus, the short one, I took to Morristown High School. Harding Township didn’t have a high school, so I had to be bused to Morristown. After about a week of riding the bus I noticed the mirror above the bus driver Mabel’s head, which she used to monitor the activities of the rowdy horde of pimply teenagers on the way to and from school. I could see this guy with long, straight, thick brown hair staring at me in the mirror while chatting with Mabel like they knew each other. Who, I wondered, was this guy sitting behind the driver, leaning over the round silver bar, practically hanging off of her—the woman I thought looked like a witch. I immediately looked away, but occasionally my eyes drifted back, only to see the same eyes staring at me. This guy was creepy; in my head I called him Witch Boy.
    I had already set my sights on Cuffy Coutts, the cute blond guy that played the trumpet in the band. (I was still just a piccolo player.) It was just a matter of time before he would ask me out, since we had spent the whole bus ride home sitting together in our Morristown Colonial uniforms after marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City. We talked and laughed. He touched my arm. He asked for my phone number.
    At school the next week, while thinking about Cuffy, I noticed “Witch Boy” casually leaning on the wall next to my locker between classes. Thank God, he didn’t say anything. The next day I was excited because Cuffy and I had band class together. Then I noticed Witch Boy waiting for me outside the band room. This is crazy, I thought, does he know my whole schedule? Meanwhile, Cuffy never called.
    It eventually registered that the guy who seemed to be the son of a witch was at least six feet tall. His long, thick hair parted down the middle. He had turquoise-blue eyes with long eyelashes. He had a cleft in his chin and big arm muscles, and he wore biker boots. Still, he was definitely not my type. It was easy to dismiss him without even one word