In 1967 Shelley’s mother explained the whole system of female sins. She illustrated them on Shelley’s little brother’s blackboard, just as she had with the planets and the different branches of our government. That had been hard to listen to. Shelley’s attention had drifted, much like it did at school.

Sitting on their lap was a form of petting, egging them on. Letting them touch you or put their tongues in different places, your ears or arms, say, was also dangerous.

Kimmie was invited to a party at a house way out in the boonies, where there were going to be boys.

Their mother got a ragged laugh when she said, “Oh, they’ll try, all right.”

“Why don’t you talk to them two?” Kim asked, nodding toward the room where Butch and Tim shared bunk beds. “Tell them the sins.”

“They’re boys.” Her mother shrugged. “Plus they know.”

Shelley had been in the room all the time, sitting on her bed holding her hands in her lap like two big leather mitts.

She was already taller than both of them, and strong. Recently, she’d lifted a nine-foot hickory limb felled by lightning.

“What about her?” Kim pointed.

Their mother’s mouth pulled down. Maybe she was thinking of it for the first time. “Don’t you let anyone fool with you, Shelley,” she said quietly, but stern.
“Some boy may try, but it’ll only be to laugh at you for it later.”

Shelley saw herself considered with a new consternation—a tooth mismatched with a lower tooth, making her mother’s whole face look broken.

Shelley knew she wasn’t pretty. Not from looking in the mirror; she stared at her reflection in the bathroom medicine chest door many minutes of those days, but—to herself—she looked just about like everybody else. No, she understood from how boys at school were with her and her sister. Here at home, on Keck Road, it was easier. But in school, Shelley had to do more to get their attention. She had to rush hard to be in the right place; she had to say something; she could not let up. Kimmie, she just got it all coming from different directions. Kimmie was the center of a star.

But her mother was still looking at Shelley, worried now.

So there was sex for the pretty and the unpretty, too. You weren’t entirely spared either way.

Shelley could tell it would be different for her than for Kimmie or for June across the street and her daughter, Peggy, whose clothes were clean and sugary as molded Easter eggs with paper scenery inside them. With them, she thought, it would be quaint like a valentine. Precise touches, trembling, hummingbirds eating from flowers.

For Shelley, though, it would be something else, a way of catching her, getting her down to hurt her, dust in her mouth and dry heat, a rubbing.

She had seen it with animals. Once it was started, they couldn’t stop. Even if people shouted, even if everyone was looking.

She’d seen dogs like that in George’s yard, the one on the bottom looking out at you with big eyes when you clapped or called, hanging helpless because it needed that hit hit hit.

It was hard for Shelley to be around people her own age. Those occasions made her excited and sad, sometimes alternating, sometimes all at once.

Most of the time, she kept quiet in school and on the playground. But when she said something, it could come out wrong—a rectangular bar that stayed in the air and made people look at her acutely. That was her experience: people not looking at her at all and then full on, suddenly sharp, as if she was in danger.

It was a little better out Keck Road in her old clothes. The kids ran together down to the railroad tracks. Sometimes they shot skeets. Shelley was a straight shot, but she never got her own gun, like her brothers. And later on, different as she was, she sided, the way the other girls and women did, with the birds, that they should have a finished life, complete, just like a person, dying when they were already old, for them, in their years. Let the birds be, she said.

On that dead-end street, what the children spoke of, fought over, taunted one another with all the time was money. Funny to think of on a road with eight houses, none of them worth much, off the highway running east-west, almost out of town. The first house as you turned in was the Keck house, a small box of cream color. Then there were empty wooded lots until Dave Janson, who lived with his fat wife and two boys. At the end was the biggest yard, first cleared by Phil Umberhum, who had worked for years as a guard in the tower of the penitentiary. Now his widow lived there alone.

Once, at a picnic, his grandson Petey brought a jar of olives. People talked about those olives for years. That kind of money was what made George’s family different.

The kids climbed over creeks on rocks and cement drainpipes; they built forts in trees—and all these things Shelley could do. She knew to just be quiet and wait for them to notice the work she’d done. Her grandmother had told her a long time ago, when she was a kid and came running inside because the neighbor children and her brothers and sister, too, were playing Polio and wanted to make her be it.

“Don’t let ‘em see that it bothers you. Go right back and say, ‘Okay, I’m it.’ Say that like you don’t give a hoot. If they see they can get you riled up, they’ll just keep piling on more.” So for years she’d played Polio. She was it.