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of chalk and disinfectant, my own pounding heart. Finally Amanda smoothed her hair and pulled her sweater sleeve down. She smiled at me—a thin smile—and kissed me on the lips. For an instant I felt her weight against me, the solidness of her, then she was gone.
    Alone in the bathroom, I noticed her blood on my fingers. It was reddish orange, sticky and thin like the residue of some sweet. A wave of despair made me shut my eyes and lean against the sink. Slowly I washed my hands and my goat pin, which I stuck in my pocket. Then I stood for a while and stared at the radiator, trying to remember each thing, the order of it all. But already it had faded.
    From that day on, when I looked at Amanda a warm feeling rose from my stomach to my throat. When I walked into class, the first place I looked was her desk, and if she was talking to somebody else, I felt almost sick. I knew each detail of Amanda: her soiled-lookinghands with their bitten nails, the deep and fragile cleft at the base of her neck. Her skin was dry and white around the kneecaps, and this got worse as fall wore on. I adored these imperfections—each weakness made Amanda seem more tender, more desperate for my help. I was haunted by the thought that I had seen her blood, and would search her distracted eyes for some evidence of that encounter, some hint of our closeness. But her look was always vague, as if I were a girl she had met once, a long time ago, and couldn’t quite place.
    At that time I lived in a tall apartment building with my mother and Julius, her husband of several months. Julius was a furrier. The previous Christmas he had given me a short fox-fur coat that still draped a padded hanger in my closet. I hadn’t worn it. Now that it was almost winter, I worried that my mother would make me put it on, saying Julius’s feelings would be hurt. His lips seemed unnaturally wet, as though he’d forgotten to swallow for too long. He urged me to call him “Dad,” which I avoided by referring to him always as “you” and looking directly at him when I spoke. I would search our apartment until I found him, rather than have to call out. Once, when I was phoning my mother from school, Julius answered. I said “Hello …” and then panicked over what to call him. I hung up and prayed he hadn’t recognized my voice. He never mentioned it.
    It was getting near Christmas. Along the wind-beaten streets of downtown the windows were filled with cotton-bearded Santas and sleighs heaped high with gifts. It grew darker inside the Sacred Heart chapel, and candles on thin gold saucers made halos of light on its stone walls. During Mass I would close my eyes and imagine the infant Christ on his bale of straw, the barn animals with burrs and bits of hay caught in their soft fur. I would gaze at our thin Jesus perched above the altar and think of what violence he had suffered since his day of birth, what pity he deserved. And I found, to my confusion, that I was jealous of him.
    Amanda grew thinner as winter wore on. Her long kneesocks slipped and pooled in folds around her ankles. Her face was drawn to a point and sometimes feverish, so her eyes looked glossy as white marbles against its flush. Our homeroom teacher, Sister Wolf, let her wear a turquoise sweater studded with yellow spots after Amanda explained that neither one of her parents was home and she had shrunk her uniform sweater by accident. That same day her nose began to bleed in science class, and I watched Sister Donovan stand for fifteen minutes behind her desk, cupping Amanda’s head in her palm while another girl caught the dark flow of her blood in a towel. Amanda’s eyes were closed, the lids faintly moist. As I stared at her frail hands, the blue chill marbling the skin of her calves, I knew that nothing mattered more to me than she did. My mouth filled with a salty taste I couldn’t swallow, and my head began to ache. I would do anything for her. So much love felt dangerous, and even amid