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makes me feel good about myself .
    Behind Stephen’s door, the marital fighting had stopped. Pip very quietly moved closer to it, away from the sound of basketball downstairs, and listened. Before long, there came a creak of a bedspring, and then an unmistakable whimpering sigh, and she understood that Annagret was right, that Stephen was weak, he was weak; and yet there was nothing wrong with a husband and a wife having sex. Hearing it and picturing it and being excluded from it filled Pip with a desolation that she had only one means of assuaging.
    She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, as if shaving five seconds off her ascent could make up for half an hour’s absence. Outside her door, she composed her face into an expression of sheepish apology. It was a face she’d used a thousand times on her mother, to reliably good effect. She opened the door and peeked in, wearing the look.
    The lights were on and Jason was in his clothes again, sitting on the edge of the bed, texting intently.
    â€œPsst,” Pip said. “Are you horribly mad at me?”
    He shook his head. “It’s just I told my sister I’d be home by eleven.”
    The word sister dispelled much of the apology from Pip’s face, but Jason wasn’t looking at her anyway. She went in and sat down by him and touched him. “It’s not eleven yet, is it?”
    â€œIt’s eleven twenty.”
    She put her head on his shoulder and her hands around his arm. She could feel his muscles working as he texted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t explain what happened. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”
    â€œYou don’t have to explain. I kind of knew it anyway.”
    â€œKnew what?”
    â€œNothing. Never mind.”
    â€œNo, what, though? What did you know?”
    He stopped texting and stared at the floor. “It’s not like I’m so normal myself. But relatively speaking—”
    â€œI want to make normal love with you. Can’t we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you’ll be home a little late.”
    â€œListen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”
    â€œIt’s what I call myself.”
    â€œSomehow it doesn’t seem like I’m talking to you when I use it. I don’t know … ‘Pip.’ ‘Pip.’ It doesn’t sound … I don’t know…”
    The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn’t resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.
    â€œOK,” she said. “So you don’t like my name. What else don’t you like about me?”
    â€œOh, come on. You’re the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”
    â€œRight. While your sister was waiting for you.”
    Speaking the word sister again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of whoosh inside her head.
    â€œSeriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don’t like about me, since we’re obviously never going to fuck, since I’m not normal enough, although what’s so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”
    â€œHey, come on,” Jason said. “I could have just left.”
    The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while