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concerned. I asked her questions as she conjured a plaid car blanket out of the darkness and draped it over me —Where’s Mama? Does she know you’ve come?— but she only smiled and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, just like Mama used to.
    In the driver’s seat, my grandfather was smoking a cigarette. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and we looked at each other, but he didn’t greet me. He sighed out a stream of smoke, flicked the cigarette into the street, and rolled up the window.
    We drove in silence through the empty town, the street lamps washing the darkened Caddy with hazy orange light at steady intervals. I slid sideways and laid my head on the cold leather seat, and when I woke up I was back in the empty car, damp and shivering.
    *   *   *
    Sometimes out of the blue I’d have that taste in my mouth—the taste of things no honest person knows the taste of—and I would stumble into the bathroom for the Listerine. I’d gargle and gargle some more, letting it linger in my mouth until it stung, but as soon as I’d spat I could taste it again, the bad taste after the bad thing. At school other girls would come into the bathroom and catch me in the middle of rinsing. Through the mirror they would stare at me as I spit, screwed the cap back on a bottle of Listerine, and stuffed it in my backpack. Maybe that was why I never made friends with girls.
    In sixth grade we had to do our first research papers, with footnotes and a bibliography and everything. I was used to looking things up in books, so I would have enjoyed choosing my own topic, but everyone had to write their papers on termites. Our English class went to the library every day for a week.
    On Thursday morning somebody wandered over to my table, and I looked up. It was Stuart, the smart kid. I felt him leaning over my shoulder to see what I was reading, I felt his nearness and smelled the tuna fish on his breath, but he didn’t make me feel funny. He was one of those boys who never thought of girls in that way, or at least he wouldn’t for a long time yet. Finally I asked, “Do you need this book or something?”
    â€œNo. I finished my report at home last night. What are you looking at?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œWe’re supposed to be looking up termites,” he said.
    â€œWho’s going to tell?”
    I felt him shrug behind me. “Anyway, you’re right. Australian redback spiders are much more interesting.” He kept reading over my shoulder. “This entry is incomplete. The entomological encyclopedia I have at home is better. Do you know why they’re called black widows?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause their mates all die. Because she eats him.” Stuart sat down across from me as he spoke. “She eats him right after they copulate, sometimes even while they’re still doing it. He lets her eat him because she needs the protein for her young, and anyway, his reproductive destiny has been fulfilled.”
    His reproductive destiny has been fulfilled? I would have laughed at him for memorizing whole lines from the encyclopedia, but all of a sudden I was too nervous to say anything. My heart was thumping like it was trying to get out.
    â€œIt’s called sexual cannibalism,” he was saying. “It’s the most important thing to know about the Australian redback spider, and it’s not in there at all.”
    â€œIt’s a kids’ encyclopedia,” I said. “They can’t put the word ‘sex’ in it.” I paused. “Stuart?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œDo other species do that?”
    â€œDo what? Eat each other?”
    I nodded.
    â€œThe black widows, like I said. And there are a couple more kinds of spiders that would die after copulation anyway—the males, I mean—so even though the female doesn’t attack during copulation”—he was using the word