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but it feels so good, and everybody else is already doing it, and if we’re careful, nothing will happen, and if I don’t do this, he won’t like me anymore, but if I do it with him, he’ll be my boyfriend and he’ll love me, and I won’t be a weirdo anymore
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    “And what do you and this Nick person propose to do about it?” Her parents were taking turns interrogating her, but neither offered up even a modicum of sympathy or understanding. They weren’t doing the good cop/bad cop thing; they were both bad cops.
    “I haven’t told him yet. I thought he was away for the summer, but he’s here. I’m going to tell him tomorrow. I wanted to tell you first. I don’t know what to do next.” That was the truth, and that was why she had wanted to tell her parents. They would know how to handle this. They would make it all right again — that was what parents were supposed to do. “I want you to help me figure out what to do. Please?”
    Her father grunted, and Grace could just barely make out his face in the dim light of the candles flickering on the glass-topped table next to his chair. His lips were clamped tight shut, almost disappearing inside his mouth, and his fists were clenched in his lap. Turning to her mother, he said in a monotone, “Betsy, I’m done. Take care of this. I don’t want to hear another word about it.” Saying nothing to Grace, avoiding her eyes, brushing past her hand as she reached out to touch him, he stormed back into the house, his shoes crunching on the pieces of broken pottery. The door slammed behind him, and the glass panes rattled.
    “Mom, I’m sorry. I know it was stupid. I made a terrible mistake. Please forgive me,” Grace whimpered as she crawled across the floor, not caring that pieces of the broken cup were cutting her palms, to where her mother sat on the old wicker settee.
    Craving some sign that although she may not be forgiven — Grace knew that would probably take years — she was still loved, Grace reached for her mother’s hand, tried to rest her head on her mother’s lap. But Betsy pulled her hand away, crossed her legs, and stared out into the dark yard.
    “Mommy, please, I need you.” Grace was begging for what she felt in her heart was her right, in spite of what she’d done, but it was no use. A wall had been erected between them, and no amount of pleading would be enough to tear it down, or carve even a tiny doorway. Although her mother was less than a foot away from her, Grace had never felt more alone.
    “You should have thought of that before. After all we’ve sacrificed for you, you behave like a common piece of trash. What will people think of us when they find out what you’ve done? Your father and I have a spotless reputation in this town, and with one careless act, you’ve managed to destroy that, you selfish ingrate. If I’d known this was how it was going to turn out, I never would’ve had a child in the first place.”
    Betsy’s voice was stiff and distant, as if she were speaking to a stranger who had bumped into her on the subway. The words burned Grace like acid. She had expected her parents to be angry, but she hadn’t anticipated total rejection, a total denunciation of her entire life up to this point. When she looked up at Betsy, it was not disappointment that she saw in her eyes, but stone-cold hate. Jennifer had been right all along about not telling them, but there was no way to unring this bell. Now her mother regretted Grace’s very existence. As furious as Betsy was, Grace didn’t want to believe that their relationship was really that fragile.
    “Is he that good-looking boy with the hair and the eyes you went out with a couple of times at the beginning of the summer?” asked Betsy as she rubbed at her throbbing temples in vain.
    She looked down on her friends who talked about how much they needed their evening glass of wine, grape-flavored grownup medicine for women who needed to dull the aches and pains of having it