I can't remember now how long it went on, me waiting and hoping and looking. Two weeks at least, maybe longer. And then one day I was standing by my locker, concentrating on the numbers, when I heard him say, I've been looking for you.

I froze. My mouth went dry. As slowly as I've ever done anything, I turned around and found him standing too close, towering over me. You looked for me?

And you looked for me. Admit it.

H-how do you know that?

In answer to my question he closed the space between us. The black leather jacket he wore made a crinkling sound as he slowly lifted his arm and used one finger to tuck the hair behind my ear. At his touch, I felt this flare of longing. It was as if, for the first time, someone saw me. Until that second, I didn't know how much my invisibility had hurt. I wanted to be seen. More than that, I wanted his touch, and wanting it terrified me. All I'd known of sex was pain and degradation.

I knew it was bad to feel the way he made me feel, and dangerous to be excited by this boy who was wrong for me. I should have wanted to turn it off, to look away, to mumble something about it being wrong, but when he touched my chin and made me look at him, it was already too late.

His face was all hollows and planes beneath the hallway's harsh light. His hair was too long-greaser long-and almost blue in places, and his skin was too dark, but I didn't care. Before I met Rafe, a suburban-wife future lay open to me.

And then it closed. Just like that. Anyone who says that one second can't change your whole life is a fool. I wanted to break the rules. Anything for him.

He was the picture of cool, standing there smiling cockily down at me, but in him I saw the same emotions that had turned me into someone new.

Dangerous. That's what we would be together. I knew it to my bones. We would push each other every second to feel like this again.

Be with me, he said, reaching out. Don't care about what they think.

"They" were everyone-my parents, the neighbors, the teachers, the doctors who had treated me. None of them would approve of us. It would scare them all, and I was crazy, too.

Dangerous, I thought again.

Can we keep it quiet? I asked.

I could tell my question hurt him, and I hated that. It wasn't until later, when he took me to bed and taught me about love and passion and sex, that I told him all of it, every sordid detail of my barren, ugly life. He held me and let me cry and told me he'd never let anyone hurt me again. He kissed the tiny constellation of starburst scars on my chest and arms. Then he understood.

For months, we kept our relationship quiet and hidden ... until I realized I was pregnant.

CHAPTER Twenty-two

People think high school girls didn't get pregnant in my day, but we did. Some things in this world are givens, and teens having sex is one of them. The difference was that we disappeared. There were always rumors and innuendos. Girls were simply gone one day-off to visit an elderly aunt or an ill cousin-and back sometime later, thinner, usually, and quieter. Where they really went, I never knew or cared.

I loved Rafe; not in the breathless schoolgirl way of our first meeting, but thoroughly, utterly. I didn't yet know that love was fragile and your future could turn on a dime. One night in late May of my junior year, my father came home, uncharacteristically smiling, and informed my mother and me that he'd been promoted and that we were moving to Seattle. He showed us a picture of the house he'd purchased and gave my mother a peck on the cheek. She looked as stunned as I felt.

On a dime.

July first, Dad said. That's the day we will be leaving.

I had to tell Rafe everything. There was no more time to worry or plan. My future-unless Rafe changed it-would be in a place called Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.

As scared as I was to tell him, I was excited, too. Maybe even a little proud. We had made this, created a child out of our love, and wasn't that what I'd been raised to do?

He didn't loosen his hold on me, that night I finally told him. We were seventeen and eighteen, respectively; kids. He had less than a month of high school left. I had more than a year. We lay in "our" place, in a bower we'd made in Old Man Kreske's orange grove. There, we'd left out an old sleeping bag and a pillow. We kept our bed in a garbage bag and tucked it into a hedge when we weren't there. After school, we laid out our sleeping bag and crawled into it. On our backs, always touching, we stared up at the sky. The air smelled of ripening oranges and fertile soil and dirt baked by the sun.

A baby, he said, and suddenly I was imagining you: ten fingers, ten toes, a mop of black hair. In an instant, I fashioned a dream life for the three of us, but then he was quiet and my doubt set in. How could he want me like that, me, who was so damaged?

I can go away, I said into the silence. To ... wherever girls go. When I come back-

No. This is our baby, he said fiercely. We'll be a family.

I had never loved anyone as much as I loved him then.

On that orange-scented afternoon, we started to plan. I knew I couldn't tell my parents. If they could lock me up and give away my child, I knew they'd do it. And I didn't think twice about quitting school, either. I was no scholar and I hadn't even begun to realize how big the world could be or how long a life could last. I was a girl of my time. I wanted to be a wife and mother.

We would leave right after his graduation. He was alone, essentially, too. His mother had died at his birth; he'd come to Southern California with an uncle, after his father deserted the family. They were migrant workers. Rafe wanted something more for himself and we were nave enough to think we could find it together.

On the date we'd chosen for our escape, I was crazy nervous. At dinner, I couldn't get a word out. The last thing I wanted was dessert; I couldn't choke down even a bite of my mother's Ritz-cracker pie.

What's wrong with her, Ma? my dad said, frowning at me through the blue smoke of his cigarette.

Homework, I mumbled, then shot to my feet. I washed and dried the dishes while my father smoked his cigarette in between bites of pie and my mother tended to some needlework sampler with a sentimental saying. I didn't hear them talk to each other, which was hardly unusual. And really, my heart was pounding so loudly I'm not sure I could have heard their voices anyway.

I made sure everything was done perfectly, up to my father's exacting standards, before I hung the gingham dish towel over the stove's metal handle. By then, my parents had moved into the living room. They sat in their respective favorite seats-Dad in the olive-green mohair club chair with a fringe hem, and Mom at one end of the cream-colored sofa. Behind them both, bark cloth drapes in an abstract olive green, white, and red pattern framed the view of the neighbor's house.

I have a lot of homework to do tonight, I said, standing at the edge of the room like a penitent, my hands gripping together, my shoulders hunched. I was trying so hard to be good. I didn't want to anger my father even the slightest bit.

You'd best go then, he said, lighting one cigarette with another.

I rushed out of the room. Behind my closed door, I waited for them to turn off the lights, pacing, my packed suitcase stowed under the bed.

Every second felt like an hour. Through the thin walls, I heard Danny Thomas's voice singing something on the television, and from under the door I smelled my father's cigarette smoke.

At nine-fifteen, I heard them turn off the TV and lock up the house. I waited another twenty minutes, long enough for my mom to slather Noxzema on her face and pin up her hair and cover it in a net.

I was scared when I positioned pillows and stuffed animals in my bed and pulled the covers up over them. I dressed carefully in the dark. It was June, and even in Southern California it could get chilly at night. I put on a boldly colored plaid skirt and a black button-up sweater with three-quarter sleeves. I teased my hair and pulled it back in a ponytail and I opened my door.

The hallway was quiet and dark. No light shone from beneath my parents' bedroom door.

I crept through the hallway, scared by the sound of my own footsteps on the carpeting. I kept expecting to be stopped, grabbed, hit, every step, but no one followed me and no lights came on. At the back door, with its crisscross faux-barn exterior, I paused and looked back at the house.

I swore silently that I would never come back. Then I turned, saw the headlights waiting at the end of the cul-de-sac, and I ran toward my future.

It wasn't until we burned through the first tank of gas that the fear set in. What would we do? How would we live, really? I was seventeen years old and pregnant, with no high school diploma and no job skills. Rafe was eighteen, with no family or money to fall back on. In the end, the money we had took us only as far as Northern California. Rafe did the only thing he knew. He worked on one farm after another, picking whatever was in season. We lived in tents or shacks or cabins. Whatever we could find.

I remember always being tired and broke and dusty and lonely. He wouldn't let me work in my condition, and I didn't mind. Instead, I stayed in whatever hovel we'd found and tried to make it homey. We meant to get married. At first I wasn't old enough, and later, after I'd turned eighteen, the world had begun to change around us, and it swept us into the chaos. We told ourselves that no piece of paper mattered to people in love.

We were happy. I remember that. I loved your father. Even when we both started to change, I hung on.

The day you were born-in a tent in a field in Salinas, by the way-I felt empowered and overwhelmed by love. We named you Tallulah because we knew you would be extraordinary, and Rose because your pink skin was the softest, sweetest thing I'd ever touched.