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tonight. And it’s a terrific movie. Everybody says so. The critics even say so. Even Mrs. Audette says so, and she thinks movies are an insult to the book. Come on.”
    I gave up trying to think of excuses. Miserably, I said, “My father won’t let me go.”
    “Then we’ll go tomorrow when you aren’t busy with your father,” said Lydia.
    “She means her father the minister thinks there’s too much sex and violence in the film, and she can’t see that one at all,” said Kate. Kate heaved a sigh. She knows my father almost as well as I do. Maybe better; she still goes to the youth group meetings and I dropped out the day I turned sixteen. I always hated church activities, but my parents said I had to go till I was sixteen, and then I could make up my own mind. They probably figured by the mature age of sixteen I’d love it so much I’d want to run it myself. They were pretty upset when I said, “Well, that’s it for church.” But it was a promise, and they keep their promises, so they let me drop out. Not, I might add, without daily reminders that the church group still existed should I deign to appear.
    Lydia said, “How’s he going to know? Just tell your father we’re going to play Monopoly at my house and how’s he going to know we really went to the movies? Come on, Holly, that’s no excuse. You’ll love the flick, I know you will.”
    I thought about promises. I had not promised not to see the movie. But then, my father hadn’t thought extracting a promise was necessary. He said not to go, therefore his daughter would not go.
    “Don’t be such a sheep, Holly,” said Lydia. “Honestly, in some ways I feel so much older than you. Still scurrying around doing exactly what Mummie and Daddy say. Making eyes at sixteen-year-old boys, for heaven’s sake. Playing with a dollhouse!”
    She made me sound about twelve. I winced at the description.
    “The movie isn’t bad,” said Kate. “My sister saw it. She said it was really funny and most of the violence was offstage and the sex was kind of sweet and tender. Not raunchy.”
    “Just don’t tell your father,” said Lydia. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
    Everything hurts my father. Starving children in Africa, imprisoned people in America, young mothers dying of cancer, teenagers on drugs, and other people’s marriages breaking up. My father is bruised and battered by the entire world.
    Lydia was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes. She has slightly slanting eyes, as if mixed in with all her French and German and Scottish ancestry is one lone Oriental, and nobody can look more superior and more bored than Lydia. Not even Hope.
    Lydia’s writing me off, I thought. All my mother’s predictions are going to come true. If I don’t do this, I will be the one left out. The girl nobody invites to skating parties and never thinks of for gossip on the phone.
    “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at Kate’s around six-thirty.”
    “Good,” said Lydia. She patted me. Then I really felt about twelve years old and part of the dollhouse set. Being patted .
    All through the school day I stewed over my decision. First I’d feel guilty. Then I’d be mad at all my parents’ archaic, unfair demands. Then I’d think, at least I ought to argue with my father first, tell him what I want, be up front about it instead of lying. Then I’d think, how can I be old enough to graduate from high school if I can’t even choose my own entertainment?
    I worried so much I forgot I had a bus to catch after school and by the time I remembered it, the bus was long gone. I was stranded three miles from home, and there were six inches of snow on the ground. Of course the sidewalks—where there were sidewalks—were salted and scraped, so that if I was lucky I’d hit only a few hundred patches of ice on which to slip. I am the sort of girl whose ankles automatically bend at the sight of ice and whose rear end can always find the deepest, wettest