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Sun-In streaks an inch or so down. These overlapped an experiment with Jolen Creme Bleach and cherry Kool-Aid, which Carol had described to me in horrified detail over the phone, and which had grown down to about cheek level. Finally, the ends of Siobhan’s once thick and healthy hair split and frizzed around her shoulders, permanent victims of over-the-counter overprocessing.
    Siobhan drove along the winding Marshbury coastal roads. I kept myself from air-braking obviously on the curves. When she took one hand off the steering wheel to pull at an earring, I tried to will it back on. Looking straight ahead, for which I was grateful, she asked, “So, you have any boyfriends yet?”
    “Hundreds. You?”
    “About the same.”
    We drove for a while, past manicured lawns with water views. I glanced casually at the speedometer. “I’m pretty sure the speed limit’s thirty-five here.”
    “My father goes fifty,” Siobhan said as she slowed down. “So why did Kevin leave you, anyway?”
    “Leave me?”
    “Yeah. I mean, like, wasn’t the sex any good?”
    “Sex?”
    “Yeah. I mean, like, my parents are still disgusting. You’d think they’d be sick of doing it by now.” We stopped abruptly at a yellow light, then drove through. “And Maeve could be mine practically. That’s my mother, though. Just keep having babies and then ignoring them when they’re not kittens anymore.”
    I hoped she wasn’t expecting me to say anything. I reminded myself never to teach kids older than preschool. About a mile from her house, Siobhan turned on her blinker like a pro, then pulled to the side of the road. She put the minivan into park. Leaning back, she worked a pack of cigarettes loose from her waistband, offered me one. I shook my head no.
    “Well,” she said. “At least you and Kevin didn’t have any kids.”
    *
    Of course, Siobhan couldn’t really drive me home because she only had a learner’s permit, and wouldn’t be able to get back to her house legally without an adult in the car. This was the kind of little detail my family tended to overlook when I was involved. So, we drove to Carol and Dennis’s house, and Carol came out and took over for Siobhan. And now, after what seemed like an awful lot of riding around just to get home, Carol was sitting on my couch. Her feet were on my coffee table, her shoes under it, and she was sipping a glass of the Australian Chardonnay she’d brought. “Thanks again for daring to drive with Evel Knievel. Did I tell you that Dennis calls her Karate Mouth? As in her mouth should be registered as a lethal weapon?”
    “She’s a good kid.”
    “Thanks for remembering. God, was I that bad at her age?”
    “I think you just hid it better so Mom wouldn’t wash your mouth out with soap. Remember when she did that to Billy after he called her queer? I never did get if that was about disrespect or alleged sexual preference.”
    “I’m pretty sure ‘queer’ was still just odd then. Mom certainly wouldn’t have known if it was more than that. Anyway, Siobhan would call Social Services if we tried something like that. Or hire a lawyer.”
    I took a sip of my wine and asked Carol, because she knew everything, if Marlene was June’s mother’s best friend’s neighbor.
    “No, no, no,” Carol answered, swirling the wine around in her glass. “Marlene is the ex-wife of Jonas Swift. Huge trust fund money. Generous patron of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra. Rumor has it that Marlene slept her way through an entire section of the CSO.”
    I tried to reconcile this with my image of Marlene, hat removed to reveal a crisp gray French braid, snuggled up to Dad. “Which section?” I asked finally.
    “I think it was the horn section.”
    I thought some more. “Maybe that explains the shoes. Her predisposition to brass.”
    Carol put her feet on the floor and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Yeah, maybe she has a trophy collection. You know, shoes with saxophone buckles. Tuba