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By Root 795 0

stared at me before she began her explanation. “How do we live in this world, Howard?” She waited a beat, perhaps expecting an answer. “How do we do it? You try to be a decent person, try to rise above the savage and ugly things, but not so far above that everything seems distasteful. Maybe it’s just not possible. Most of the kids at school are good and sweet, but the ones who aren’t, the minority, ruin it for everybody. Last fall, last year, I walked into the girl’s bathroom because I heard hooting. I told you this. Josie Marone was standing at the sink, Josie Marone, a very smart, very developed sixth-grade girl, the one who wore the off-the-shoulder prom dress for the chorus concert. It turned out—I’m sure I told you about this. I must have. It turned out the girl in the stall was having her first period and Josie was trying to talk her through using a tampon. I told Josie a tampon wasn’t appropriate under the circumstances and I bought a sanitary pad from the dispenser. The poor girl was mortified. As I was leaving, Josie said to me, ‘So, when you use a tampon, do you get it on?’ Sixth grade. What do I say to that? She was sniggering, thinking she was going to get a rise out of me. ‘Josie,’ I said, ‘sexuality is about intimacy, about closeness, about giving and receiving,’ you know, that line. Sometimes I just don’t want to live in this world. Maybe the sex in advertising and the movies is triggering children’s neurons and they’re going through puberty earlier than ever before. Couldn’t that happen? We should go to Ireland, to some poor country where there’s no birth control, no plastic toys, where people drink a lot of beer and grow vegetables.”

She leaned back on her stool to check the wall clock. “Oh, not yet, not yet,” she moaned. “Our time is nearly up. Okay, okay, so Rafferty says it should be simple, that what I told him makes it relatively easy to sink his teeth in and fight the good fight. I’m supposed to have a hearing ten days from my preliminary arraignment, by law, but Rafferty’s delaying so he can study up. His first order of business is to try to get the bail reduced. The state is pushing him to get going and he’s trying to string them along. There’s this whole pecking order with the phone in our pod, and the second time I got to it you were out. And then someone jammed it and they say they’re not going to fix it. I’m not sure I could handle talking to the girls anyway. I’m so far away from them—Are they okay? Where are they this afternoon?”

There was a beep, our warning signal.

“And another thing, tell them the truth, as much as you can. Tell them that once in a rare while people blame the wrong person for their own troubles. Tell them I hope I’ll be home in ninety days, that I’ll be out by September. And Howard,” she said. She came close to the glass again. She was like a dolphin brushing by in an aquarium. We looked at each other. She didn’t say anything more. I think we were both remembering the night before she was arrested. The last time we’d touched one another, and exchanged a few words, had been that night. I hadn’t understood what was going through her mind, why she had struggled and crashed up, making the floorboards shake, the dresser tip. The next morning I hadn’t known how we would mend the rift. It almost seemed for a moment, as we watched each other, that her imprisonment was the result of that night. The implications had been serious, terrible. The phones went dead. She was waving at me, backing away with a crooked smile on her face. Her hideous togs hung on her. They had been made for a tall, fat person. They were orange, like reflectors, something you can see in the night when you shine a light at it.

I stood in the entry of the jail for a while, thinking, I guess, that something might happen. That the older deputy who was sitting at his computer terminal behind the glass might get up, might ask me if I was Howard Goodwin. He might glance back at his screen and tell me that something had flashed across to indicate that I could take Alice home. I had gotten out of the habit, on the