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impatience—I was desperate. I wanted to shake him and cry out, “Are you going to kiss me or what?” In the moonlight I could see that he no longer looked sexy or confident. He looked cold and his forehead was strained in concentration. I looked away as he slugged the last of the beer, thinking that in a second I’d get up and walk back to the fire. I looked back and he lunged at me. Our lips met, though his didn’t feel like lips so much as two fat slugs pressed together. He tried turning his head back and forth, and I did it too, but we were going in totally different directions. I tried to think back to what I’d imagined all day, but eventually it was just me with my shirt shoved up to my neck, my back sticking to the cold sand, my cheeks and chin covered in slobber, and Mark on top of me, clamped around my leg, rubbing up and down so fast I could hear a whizzing noise from the zipper of his jeans.
    â€œOh,” he moaned into my cheek, “unhh.” The cute boy had transformed into a strange ugly thing that was smothering me. I thrust against him, trying to get him off, but he only moaned louder.He seemed to like it, so I did it some more, trying to quicken things so it would be over.
    â€œGrace,” he whispered, and for an instant I was alone in my bedroom listening to the sounds of Stephen making love to my mother.
    â€œAh! Ah!” Mark blurted out then, squeezing his eyes shut, a look of painful disappointment contorting his face. I’d learned, from being with other boys, that this expression was actually ecstasy.
    â€œShhh!” I hissed, suddenly mortified that we could be heard at the bonfire. He stopped moving, paralyzed on top of me. I heard a giggle in the distance. I pushed at Mark’s shoulder and he rolled away.
    â€œSorry,” he muttered when his breathing was normal.
    I wouldn’t let him walk me home. I ran most of the way, disgusted and terrified, the sand squealing and singing beneath my rubber soles. When I got to the cottage, a faint blue light was coming up over the water. No one was waiting up for me. I entered the house silently, went into my green-and-yellow room, and peeled off smoky clothes that dropped to the floor with a whish of trapped sand and pebbles. I crawled under the nubby blankets that smelled like mothballs, and the sun rose higher and glowed orange like fire through the white curtain. No one knocked on my door or crawled into bed with me to nap for the rest of the morning.

CHAPTER 6
Gráinne
    By July, I hardly saw my mother anymore, though her hair was in the bathroom wastebasket in clumps, like rusty birds’ nests. Sometimes I snuck toward her closed bedroom door and listened for coughing or movement. Once, Stephen caught me and said, “You can go in, she’s awake.” But I backed off. I wasn’t going to catch her off guard, without the straw hat that she wore when Stephen walked her down to the water. I imagined the bald spots on her head were infected, puckered like her missing breast.
    â€œIf she wanted me in there, she’d have left the door open,” I said. Which was stupid, because Stephen told her. After that the door was always ajar and I had to tiptoe by to keep it from swinging open.
    She wandered the cottage at night. I could hear her pacing, and sometimes she stomped, rattled things, which is what she used to dowhen she was mad and wanted me to come out of my room and face something I’d done—like being a wiseass or not loading the dishwasher. That pissy act hadn’t worked on me since I was ten. It always worked on her boyfriends, though, and at the cottage, Stephen would eventually come out and whisper, “What’s the matter, babe?” and she would follow him back to bed.
    Once a week, Stephen drove her into town for chemotherapy. He tried to give me updates: how much she’d thrown up afterwards, that the doctors were debating more