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    Michelle saw B.B. driving around town all the time. She drove a BMW 528i. She had dark red hair, like an Irish setter’s, hanging down to her shoulders. Her skin was very white and she was tall and thin and Michelle wondered if maybe she was anorexic, like Katie Adriano, this girl in her class who always vomiting. Probably B.B. wasn’t because she ate out a lot and anorexics don’t like restaurants.
    B.B. had a slight overbite, but on her it looked good. Michelle knew about teeth because her father was a dentist. Frederic Sampson, D.D.S.—a Professional Corporation. Michelle liked the idea of her father being a professional corporation. It made her feel secure, as if her father owned General Motors or something.
    But she hated her father for having insisted that she spend another summer at Camp Mindowaskin. “You have to keep in touch with your own kind,” he had told her. “You can’t grow up thinking everyone is like . . .”
    “Like what?” Michelle had asked.
    “Like the people in Boulder.”
    “What’s wrong with the people in Boulder?”
    “Nothing is wrong with them, exactly . . . but there’s more to life than . . .”
    “Than what?”
    Her father had sighed heavily.
    Her experience as a camp waitress had been a disaster. This was her last summer there, no matter what. She was going to be seventeen, for God’s sake. She was old enough to make her own decisions about how to spend her summer. And she was sick of those little bitches calling her The Pioneer just because she lived in Colorado. She might have turned out like them if her parents hadn’t been divorced and her mother hadn’t moved her away.
    And it wasn’t any better after camp, when she went out to Bridgehampton to spend two weeks with her father and Aliza. Two weeks of being talked at by her father, when all she wanted was for him to love her the way she was. At dinner the conversations centered around tennis and why, after nine years at camp, Michelle still couldn’t serve. Oh, love me, Daddy . . . please love me . . . never mind my serve. Tell me that you’re proud that I’m your daughter. That I’m just right . . . that no matter what you’ll always love me . . .
    But that was not the way it was. He loved Aliza now. He was interested in Stuart and his college applications, but not in Michelle. She was nothing to him. Nothing but a pain in the ass. She reminded him of Margo. She heard him say so to his friend, Dr. Fritz. “Every time I look at her,” he’d said, “I see Margo.”
    “You’ve got to fight those feelings, Freddy,” Dr. Fritz had told him.
    “I’m trying,” her father had said. “But it’s not easy.”
    Michelle had been eleven when her parents were divorced. At the time she had wanted to die. But she got over it. Then, less than two years later, her mother had told her they were moving away.
    “Moving where?” Michelle asked.
    “To Colorado,” her mother answered.
    “Colorado?”
    “Yes . . . to Boulder.”
    “Boulder . . . you mean where Mork and Mindy live?”
    “Mork and Mindy who?” her mother said.
    Michelle had laughed. Her mother was so out of it.
    All her friends in New York thought she was really lucky to be moving to the town where Mork and Mindy lived. They said maybe she’d get a job working on their show. They said maybe she’d even get to be a regular and then they’d be able to see her on TV every week. She promised to get Mork’s and Mindy’s autographs for every one of them.
    But when they got to Boulder, Michelle found out that Mork and Mindy hardly ever came to town. They filmed most of their shows in California. She didn’t blame them. Boulder was a big zero. It was just this little college town in the middle of nowhere. It couldn’t compare to New York City. And Michelle hated her mother for ruining her life. But she got over that too. And now she even liked it here, especially in winter, when the mountains were covered with snow.
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