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only. I hated this withdrawing and couldn’t understand or deny it. Certainly I never associated it with the deaths of my mother and brother. Especially in the dark, I began to experience Nichole as something separate and other, girl flesh and bone and an enclosing intimacy that was like a straightjacket.
    And then there was Darcy on the loading dock.
    “Are you really eighteen?”
    “Sure,” I said, then realized it wasn’t a lie anymore. October twenty-fifth had come and gone almost unnoticed, and I really had attained the age of majority. If the war hadn’t recently concluded I would have now been eligible to get my guts shot out in Vietnam.
    “I mean I really am,” I said. “Now.”
    Darcy grinned. She had one of those mouths that seemed over-crammed with very white and very even teeth. A Carly Simon mouth, to mention a performer popular at that time. A mouth designed to gobble you right up.
    “When was your birthday?” Darcy asked.
    “A couple of days ago.”
    “We’re both Scorpios!” she said. “I’m a Halloween girl.”
    “Great!”
    “Did you get any good presents?”
    “Not really.” Of course I’d gotten no presents, since no one in my little Bremerton world even knew the day had occurred. Not even Nichole.
    “Do you have a girl, Ellis?”
    “Yeah, sort of.” Even this mild equivocation struck me guiltily as a betrayal of the quasi-mystical bond between Nichole and me. But a battalion of suddenly aroused hormonal soldiers had their own ideas of betrayal and conquest.
    “Oh,” Darcy said. “I guess you wouldn’t want to come over after work for a birthday drink, then?”
    “I don’t know. I mean I guess it couldn’t do any harm.” At this point I wasn’t really in charge of my tongue—or much of anything else.
    Darcy smiled toothily. I remember it didn’t smell very good on that loading dock. The dumpster’s lid was open and fat bags of garbage overfilled it. One of the bags had split. A ripe, wet smell, underlined by the indolent buzz of the flies.
    The apartment was a one bedroom with wall-to-wall carpeting, burnt orange. The drink was rum and Coke. I’d been drunk exactly once in my life, in a tent at Saltwater State Park with a bunch of other fifteen-year-olds. All I retained from the experience was the popping sound of rain on canvas, the smell of human sweat, and the taste of bile in my throat, where it didn’t belong. Oh yeah, and when I’d closed my eyes the spinning sensation had intensified. So in the present situation I planned to take it easy with the rum; the weak self-deception that it was a drink I’d come seeking at Darcy’s apartment had dropped to the wayside even before I left work and got into her Charger for the ride over.
    “China Road” was on the radio in her apartment. Framed travel posters (Hawaii, Bali, Cayman Islands) hung on the walls. In the bathroom a blue macramé thing with wooden beads supported a spider plant in a kiln-fired bowl.
    After splashing my face with cool water, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes failed the trustworthy test. Howdy, wretch. I couldn’t even claim inebriation as an excuse. The rum and Cokes went down like Coke that had never even heard a rumor of Mr. Bacardi. Taking it easy wasn’t an issue. At the time I ascribed this weird resistance to alcohol as “nerves.” But of course my body was processing that rum with preternatural alacrity and efficiency, just like it had the pain killers.
    Back in the living room I said, “I have to call somebody.”
    “Surely. Phone’s in the kitchenette.”
    Darcy had opened a few buttons on her white peasant blouse. She sat on the puffy yellow sofa with her legs crossed and a big tumbler of Bacardi and Coke in her left hand. There was so much rum in the mix that the Coke wasn’t much more than a diluted suggestion of moderation. The curvature of Darcy’s breasts appeared in the loose V of her blouse, swelling from pink bra cups.
    I called Nichole, standing