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mother’s old yearbooks and looked at pictures of her as a teenager. Then Stephanie got it: the bright blond hair, the delighted smile, the little nose and teddy-bear eyes. Her mother was a dream. Looking at those photos, Stephanie felt cheated. What happened to that buoyant girl? And at the same time she wanted nothing to do with that kind of femininity. It was no coincidence that Stephanie had decided to dye her hair after looking at those yearbooks, and no coincidence that she began to distance herself from her best friend, Bethany, who was on the junior varsity cheer squad and wore silk ruffled shirts and Red Door by Elizabeth Arden perfume and whose goal in high school—if not explicitly stated—was to like and be liked by absolutely everyone.
    Her father, Sam, was in those photos, too. He seemed like a nice person. And also exactly the kind of guy she had grown weary of. She and Mitchell had a love-hate relationship with the football players at their school. They were so banal and clueless, so spoiled and doted upon, and yet physically, they were rather outstanding. There was one player in particular, Brett Albright, who was so attractive that Stephanie had to look away when she saw him in the hallway. He was always tanned, no matter what the season, and he wore his sandy-brown hair cut very short, almost a crew cut, which highlighted his sharp, grown-man’s jaw. According to her father,Brett was small for a football player, but Stephanie thought his body was perfect: his torso a classic inverted triangle, and his arms and legs thick with muscle—but not too thick. His only flaw was the oily patches of acne on his forehead and sideburn area, but even this seemed a piece of his masculinity. Once last spring he came to her house for dinner, and Stephanie spent the whole meal thinking of what it would be like to run her fingers along the stubble at the back of his neck. When she told Mitchell that later, he said he would have thought of running his fingers along something else.
    Stephanie wondered if Mitchell had ever fooled around with any of the boys at her school. She thought not, because he would have told her, but then again, maybe he wouldn’t have.
    The one person she thought she knew best in the world, her own mother, had it within her to shorten a rope, fashion a slipknot, and climb a wooden stepladder. But Stephanie could not actually imagine that moment in her mother’s life. And when Stephanie looked back on her childhood, she sometimes felt as if her mother had not really lived with their family at all, but instead had wandered in and out of their lives, like a visitor. It was as if they were on the road, and her mother was walking in a field beside the road, a wide field of tall grasses, or maybe corn, so that sometimes you got a glimpse of her, but mostly you did not see her, you could only sense her presence behind the screen of wild growth.
    And yet even from this distance her mother was perceptive. It was her mother who had first noticed Mitchell’s proclivities. “Well, he’s different, isn’t he?” was how she put it, after his first visit to their house. “Different how?” Stephanie asked. And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the piecescame together and she saw it, too: he liked boys, not girls. In that instant all of Stephanie’s fantasies were blown away. She had thought she was in love. She had thought being in love was easy, like having a best friend.
    Now it was funny to remember that she had ever thought Mitchell was straight. She had been so naive when she started high school, a lamb of a girl who believed her football-coach father was beyond reproach and that her mother’s blue moods were normal, the price of motherhood. It was Mitchell who taught her to examine her family, to see them as an outsider might. The two of them had formed their own little unit of judgment. They practiced being smart together, training their