I understood.

That night, without even changing clothes, I climbed into my little-girl bed and fell into a deep and troubled sleep.

He woke me up, of course. He must have been waiting all that time. While I was away, his anger had spread out tentacles and wound around everything, growing until I could see how it was strangling him. I had humiliated him with my "lies."

He would teach me a lesson.

I told him I was sorry-a terrible mistake. He burned me with a cigarette and told me to keep my mouth shut. I just stared at him. It made him even angrier, my silence. But it was all I had. I'd learned my lesson, remember. I couldn't stop him from hurting me, but when he looked at me that night, he saw something new, too. I might tell on him again. Girls have babies, you know, I whispered softly. Proof.

He backed away and slammed the door shut. It was the last time he came to my bed, but not the last time he hurt me. All I had to do was look at him and he hit me. And I lay in bed every night now, waiting, worrying, wondering when he would change his mind and go back to his old ways.

School was worse when I got back from the sanatorium, too.

I survived it, though. I kept my head down and ignored the pointing and the snickering. I was damaged goods and everyone knew it. There was an odd comfort in it. I no longer had to pretend.

My mother couldn't stand the new me, with my baggy clothes and untended hair and sleepy eyes. Whenever she saw me, she would purse her lips and mutter, Ach, Dorothy Jean, have you no pride?

But I liked being on the outside, looking in. I saw so much more clearly.

We were poised on the cusp of a new world in California at the end of the plastic decade. The suburbs were opening up; forming a new American dream. Everything was spic-and-span, Mr. Clean, wash-and-wear. We had shopping malls with Tomorrowland-style rooftops, and hamburger drive-ins. As an outsider, I saw things with the clarity that distance provides. It wasn't until I lost my way that I noticed the factions that inhabited our school hallways. There were the "it" kids, the popular ones who dressed in the latest fashion and popped gum bubbles as they talked to one another and drove their parents' shiny new cars along the strip on Saturday night. They gathered in bubbling, laughing pods at Bob's Big Boy and drove up and down the street at night, waving and racing and laughing. They were the kids the teachers loved; boys who threw the winning touchdowns and girls who talked of college and spent their parents' money. They followed the rules, or seemed to, anyway, and to me they seemed golden somehow, as if their skin and hearts were impervious to the pains that assaulted me.

But by the spring of my junior year, I started noticing the other kids, the ones I hadn't seen before, the ones who lived on the wrong side of the tracks. One day they were invisible like me, and the next day they were everywhere, dressing like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, greasing their hair back, rolling packs of cigarettes in their T-shirt sleeves. Black leather jackets moved in alongside the lettermen's sweaters.

Hoods, we called them at first, and then greasers. It was supposed to be an insult, but they only laughed and lit their cigarettes and mocked their "betters." Almost overnight, rumors started swirling of fights and rumbles.

Then a "nice" boy was killed in a drag race and our community erupted with the kind of swirling, ugly anger I hadn't imagined was there before.

It spoke to me, that anger. I didn't realize how angry I'd been until it was in the air, infecting everyone. But as always, I held it inside. While I walked down the hallways-alone in a crowd, my books held close-I listened to the two groups taunting each other, the boys in black leather yelling out, Here, chicky-chicky, to the girls in pleated skirts, who bristled and walked away faster, their gazes hot with superiority.

On the Monday after the accident, I remember being in home ec, listening to Mrs. Peabody drone on about the importance of a stocked cupboard for a young housewife. She positively glowed when she told us how we could impress our drop-in guests with only Vienna sausages and a few other handy ingredients. She promised to show us how to make a white sauce, whatever that was.

I barely listened. I mean, who cared? But the "it" girls-the ones who spent their days draped in lettermen's sweaters and tossing their heads like horses in the starting gate, they were perched on the edges of their seats, taking notes.

When the bell rang, I was the last to leave the classroom. It was always better that way. The popular kids rarely bothered to look behind them.

I made my way cautiously through the minefield that high school hallways could be for the unpopular.

It sounded like traffic buzzing around me, only it wasn't cars making all that racket, it was the popular kids, talking all at once, making fun of everyone else.

I walked woodenly to my locker, hearing their voices raise. Not far away Judy Morgan stood by the water fountain, surrounded as she always was by her bouffant-haired pep-squad friends. A golden virgin pin decorated her Peter Pan collar.

"Hey, Hart, nice to see your hair is growing back in."

My cheeks flamed in embarrassment. I put my head down and fumbled with my lock.

I felt someone come up behind me. Suddenly the hallway went quiet. I turned.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with enough curly black hair to set my mother's teeth on edge. He'd slicked it back, but still it wouldn't be controlled. His skin was dark-unacceptably so-and he had strong white teeth and a square jaw. He wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans. A black leather jacket hung negligently from one hand, sleeves draping on the floor.

He reached for the pack of smokes in his rolled-up sleeve. You don't care what a bitch like her thinks, do yah?

He lit his cigarette, right there in the hallway. The glowing tip sent fear slicing through me, but still I couldn't look away.

She's crazy, Judy said. Perfect for you, greaser.

Principal Moro came bustling down the hallway, pushing through the crowd, blowing her silver whistle and telling everyone to get to his or her classroom.

The boy touched my chin, made me look up, and it was like seeing a different guy altogether. He was just a kid with slicked-back black hair, smoking a cigarette in a high school hallway. I'm Rafe Montoya, he said.

Dorothy Jean, was all I could get out.

You don't look crazy to me, Dorothy, he said. Are you?

It was the first time someone had asked, really asked, and my first thought was to lie. Then I saw how he was looking at me and I said, Maybe.

The smile he gave me was sadder than anything I'd seen in a long while and it made this ache start up in my chest. That just means you're paying attention, Dorothy.

Before I could answer, Principal Moro was taking me by the arm, pulling me away from Rafe, dragging me down the hall. I stumbled along beside her.

I didn't know much about life back then, but I knew one thing for sure: good girls from Rancho Flamingo did not talk to boys with dark skin named Montoya.

But from the second I saw him, I couldn't think about anything else.

It sounds cliche, but Rafael Montoya changed the course of my life when he said those words to me. It just means you're paying attention.

I said them over and over in my mind as I walked home from school, studying them from every possible angle. For the first time ever, I wondered if maybe I wasn't crazy or alien. Maybe the world was as unbalanced as it felt to me.

For the whole next week, I moved through my ordinary routine in a daze. I slept, I woke, I dressed and went to school, but all of that was a camouflage. I was always thinking of him, looking for him. I knew it was wrong, dangerous, even, but I didn't care. No. That's not right. I embraced the wrongness of it.

I wanted to be a bad girl, suddenly. The good-girl thing had been such a disaster. I thought that being bad might break me out.

I agonized over my hair, straining to make it look like the popular girls'. I ironed it and curled it and teased it. I plucked my heavy brows until they were perfect arches above my eyes. I wore one pretty Peter Pancollared dress after another, with coordinating sweaters tied casually around my shoulders and belts cinched tight to show off my small waist. I bleached my tennis shoes until they were so white they hurt to look at. Instead of being the first into every classroom and the last out, I did the opposite, not caring that kids stared at me when I rushed into class with the bell. Everyone noticed the change. My father's eyes darkened every time he saw me, but he kept his distance. He was afraid of me now, as afraid of me as I'd once been of him. I was unstable and I let him know it-I was crazy enough to do or say anything.

Boys started following me around, but I barely cared. I didn't want the kind of boy who wanted a girl like me. I hovered in the hallways, looking for him.

I felt myself changing. It was as if, in his absence, I took myself apart and reorganized the pieces in the image of what I imagined he would want. It sounds crazy-hell, I was crazy-but it felt perfectly sane to me. Saner than I'd been in years.

My father watched me closely. I felt his observation and refused to wilt beneath it. Desire had given me a new strength. I remember having dinner one night, sitting at that mustard-flecked green Formica table, eating my mother's tasteless Welsh rarebit with tomato slices and little sausages. My dad smoked through the whole meal-alternating a drag of his cigarette with a reach of the fork. He talked in staccato sentences that sounded like gunfire.

My mother chatted into every silence, as if to prove how happy and normal we were. When she said the wrong thing-asked me about my new hairdo-my dad slammed his fist on the table, rattling the white Corningware plates that were my mother's latest purchase.

Don't encourage her, he hissed. She looks like a tramp.

I almost said, You'd like that, wouldn't you? and the thought of saying it scared me so much I lurched to my feet. I knew that one wrong word could send me back to Loonyville. Just wanting to speak scared me.

I ducked my chin into my neck and began clearing the table. As soon as the dishes were done, I mumbled something about homework and bolted into my room, shutting the door behind me.