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about it,” she said, “I can see what a terrible person I am.”
    “I don’t think you’re a terrible person,” I said.
    “But you would, Jesse, if you really knew me.”
    After that she was quiet and I could hear the hot wind in the leaves.
    “Sonny took me to the grocery store and let me buy whatever I wanted.”
    She didn’t know what she would do if he didn’t help with the rent and the car payments. No way could she ask her family for money. Her parents had five teeth between them and the house she grew up in, if you could even call it a house, didn’t have indoor plumbing.
    “I’d rather gnaw my own arm off than go back there.”
    The sun beat down. Tree leaves singed around the edges, curled forward like burnt paper, and my skin was dry and stiff no matter how much baby oil I spread over myself. The weeds looked brown and miserable. Sandy’s radio said we were in the dog days of summer,then a buzzer rang over the airwaves and the DJ told us it was time to turn or burn. The sun made a slow lava lamp under my closed eyelids, and I felt my head getting swimmy and realized how thirsty I was. I asked if I could go inside her duplex and get myself a drink.
    Inside Sandy’s unit it was dark and cool. All the furniture looked like it was underwater and covered with algae. It was true I was thirsty, and I drank down a jelly glass filled with water and then another, but I also wanted to be inside Sandy’s house. I thought about going upstairs into her bedroom and lying across her water bed, and while I liked the idea of my bare skin against her fuzzy bedspread, I knew I would leave grease stains. What if I just quickly held one of her bras against my bathing suit top? She kept several hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Once I thought of this, the urge to do it was magnetic. It would be like holding Wonder Woman’s bodice against my chest. Who knew what superpowers would spark from the material into me? I started toward the stairs, but then I saw Eddie and Phillip through the back window, making their way through the trees down the side of the mountain. All afternoon they’d been in the hooch, a tree fort made of particleboard with a skull drawn in Magic Marker on the door. The one time I’d been allowed inside, Eddie told a story about how his father had to unload a helicopter filled with body parts.
    I walked out the back door and handed Sandy a beer; Phillip and Eddie ran down the raw edge of reddirt, toilet-paper rolls of ammunition taped to their T-shirts.
    Their tennis shoes sent up a cloud of pink dust.
    “Why are you running?” Sandy said.
    “The gooks are after us!” Eddie yelled.
    “You’re not supposed to call them that!” Sandy said, but by the time she finished talking they had disappeared back up into the trees.

    That night, while we waited for my dad to get home from work, my mom browned hamburger in the Teflon skillet and I stood over the trash can and peeled potatoes. The wet strips curled off the blade and landed in the garbage in artistic configurations.
    Mom was talking about rich people again, her voice growing lively and familiar. Mrs. Vanhoff was pencil thin and always wore her hair up, highlighting her long and elegant neck. The Vanhoffs had been in last night’s newspaper eating lobster thermidor at the Hotel Roanoke.
    “Carolyn Vanhoff is head of the mayor’s art council, and I heard she takes tennis lessons with the pro at the club.”
    She sprinkled the Hamburger Helper flavor packet over the ground beef.
    “Every January she goes off to a spa in North Carolina to lose the few pounds she gains over Christmas.”
    “You and Dad should go away,” I said. “I could watch Phillip.”
    “Your father? Take me on a vacation? Like that’s ever going to happen.”
    A peel flew off the blade and stuck to the wall. I wanted to defend my dad, but what could I really say? That he read a lot, that he had a great vocabulary, that he helped people. These would only