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house?” Olivia said. “If you haven’t taken anything, then why the hell did you break in? People don’t break into other people’s houses.”
    “I was just so hot.” She shrugged, keeping her young arms—also covered with freckles—held out in surrender.
    Olivia had to call the police. The phone, nestled against the far wall, seemed miles away. She could hear herself telling them, We have a B and E here. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud. But a pregnant teenager, she thought, how dangerous could she be? And she heard her own teenage self crying, Get me out of here. She had saved herself with Melanie records and cheap incense and rock concerts at the hockey rink that doubled as an auditorium. This girl had found sex. Still. Olivia considered everything. When she licked her lips, she almost tasted the black cherry lip gloss she used to wear, almost smelled the Love’s lemon scent that she used to spray on herself after a bath.
    “I found the extra key. Under the rock by the door.” The girl let her arms drop, and she giggled, the way Olivia knew she could. “It’s probably not a good idea to keep it there,” she said. “That’s the first place a burglar would look. My aunt, her name is Dolly—I swear that’s her real name, not even a nickname or anything. She used to keep her money in her freezer because she thought a robber would never look there, but then she read in a magazine—I think it was You! —that the freezer is the first place a robber would look.”
    Olivia’s eyes drifted toward her freezer, where she had twenties rolled into neat bundles, hidden behind the ice-cube trays.
    “You have to go,” Olivia said. The air between her and the girl seemed almost electrically charged.
    “I’m not a robber or anything,” the girl said, insulted. “Jeez. I just wanted to cool off. I think it’s like a hormone thing or something.” On the girl’s arm, in the spot where children of Olivia’s generation got their smallpox vaccination, was a tattoo of a butterfly.
    “Cool, huh?” the girl said, grinning. “It hurt like hell, though. I’d never get another one. I hate pain.”
    Olivia nodded. This close, she saw that the girl’s shorts were unzipped to allow room for the baby. Under her too-small T-shirt, they gaped open. This broke Olivia’s heart.
    “I guess,” the girl said, “that having a baby hurts a lot.” Her eyes were that odd yellow-brown that some redheads have. “Right?” she asked Olivia.
    She looked like a child herself, Olivia thought.
    “Oh,” Olivia said, “I don’t think it’s really that bad.”
    “You don’t have any kids?” the girl said, lazily scratching a mosquito bite on her arm.
    Olivia got the feeling that the girl was sizing her up, taking some kind of measure of her.
    “No kids yet,” Olivia said with false cheeriness.
    Then she had another, frightening thought. She had seen movies about teenaged girls who were ruthless killers. It was their youth, their seeming innocence that got them into the places they needed to be.
    She swallowed hard, then forced herself to say, “My husband and I are working on it.” She hoped the girl hadn’t heard the way her voice caught on the word husband,
    The girl narrowed her eyes. “No luck yet, though, huh?”
    Olivia shook her head. “Not yet.”
    “I’m pregnant you know,” the girl said. Then she laughed that adolescent laugh. “No shit, Sherlock, huh?” Her face clouded as quickly as it had cleared. “It sucks,” she says. “It sucks big-time.”
    There was a moment of silence, less like the awkwardness between strangers and more like a settling in.
    Olivia said, “Where’s the father?”
    She looked at Olivia blank-faced, then giggled. “Oh,” she said, “ the father. Ben. The asshole. He goes to college here and he was supposed to stick around all summer so I go there, to the college, to his fraternity house—which, I just want to say, is something I don’t believe in. I mean, they’re so