"No, I don't buy it. You see what this means, Dex? It's in you somewhere. You just needed me to help you get it out."

It was a generous assessment. Everyone knew I took after my mother: the beige and blotchy coloring, the stick up the ass. But if Lacey saw him in me, there must have been something to see.

"Dex? That supposed to be you, kid?" My father examined me, looking for evidence of her.

"No offense, Mr. Dexter, but Hannah's a shit name," Lacey said.

"Call me Jimmy. And no offense taken. It was her mother's idea. I always thought it sounded like a little old lady."

Lacey laughed. "Exactly."

That my father never liked my name: This was another thing I hadn't known. I'd thought he called me kid because he wanted to claim a piece of me no one else could.

"But Dex? Yeah, I like that," he said.

Dex was supposed to be our secret, a code name for the thing that was growing between us and the person she was shaping me to be. But if Lacey was ready to introduce her to the world, I thought, she must have her reasons.

"That's right," I said. "Dex. Spread the word."

"Your mother's going to love this," he murmured, and it was clear the thought of it pleased him as much as the name itself.

"So, Jimmy, maybe you'd like to hear some real music," Lacey said. "Dex has a copy of Bleach around here somewhere. At least she'd better."

He looked at me, clearly trying to read the stay or go in my face, but I couldn't send a message I didn't have.

"Another time," he said finally, slipping his sunglasses back on. "The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid is calling my name." He paused on his way up the stairs. "Oh, and Dex, you might want to wash out that glass before your mother comes home."

So he had noticed, after all. And he was still on my side.

"You didn't tell me your dad was cool," Lacey said once he was gone. It was like a benediction, and most of me was proud.

AFTERNOONS AT MY PLACE BECAME, at Lacey's instigation, a regular thing, and it was only a matter of time before my mother insisted we have "this Lacey" over for dinner, so she could see for herself this miracle worker who had her husband digging through the attic for his guitar and her daughter into what appeared to be a trucker's castoff wardrobe.

"Mom's going to be all weird, isn't she?" I said, as my father and I sorted through the stack of Publishers Clearing House stickers. My father was the family's designated dreamer, the buyer of lottery tickets and keeper of an ever-growing list of inventions he'd never build. It was, he always said, why he'd never taken what my mother called a real job. Only make-your-own-hours employment-like his current gig managing Battle Creek's only movie theater-afforded him the free time he needed to fulfill his yen for get-rich-quick scheming.

This particular scheme had been our shared private ritual for years, since the days when I thought carefully licking those stamps and sealing the envelope with a lucky kiss might actually summon the oversized million-dollar check to our doorstep. I'd long since lost the slip of paper carefully inscribed with all the treasures I'd buy when I was rich, but I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream that came along with the tradition, and the way my mother wasn't part of it. There was music playing now, which wasn't part of it, either, but my father said that the Cure was a universal cure for what ailed us. Wait till Lacey gets here, he said. She gets it.

She was due in an hour. My mother had made lasagna, the one thing she knew how to cook.

"Go easy on your mother, kid. I think one thing we can agree she's not is weird."

He was right: Normal was her religion. She'd never implied that she wanted me to be popular-the impossibility of that probably spoke for itself-but she encouraged me, at every turn, to fit in, to be careful, to save my mistakes for later. "You'll have more to lose when you're older, but at least then you'll have something left when you lose it," she told me once while we were flipping through photo albums, old ones that showed her awkwardly jutting into adolescence, bulging in all the wrong places, only a single page turn between apple-cheeked college freshman and bleary-eyed mother with an infant on her caftanned hip, as if all the pages that should have been between had fallen out, and maybe that was how she felt about her life, that something had gone missing. "The younger you are, the easier it is to give everything away."

Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey's mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother's job and her stepfather's church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough-but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother's face when I volunteered that I'd also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, "Stop showing off."

I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.

Lacey said yes and no and please and thanks so much for the delicious and not at all overcooked and underseasoned food. Lacey said that small towns bred small-minded people and she was waging a one-woman war against shrinkage-two-woman now that she'd rallied me to her side. Lacey said she never accompanied her stepfather to church because religion was a destructive influence on impressionable masses and she refused to support any institution with a commitment to intellectual oppression, and when my mother, semiapostate granddaughter of a minister, suggested that it was the arrogant moral cowardice of youth that led us to dismiss things we didn't understand, Lacey said, And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are, then said that accusing your enemies of ignorance was the coward's way out of honest argument, which made my father laugh, at which point I began to seriously doubt whether any of us would make it out alive.

"So how did you two crazy kids meet?" Lacey asked. "You seem like the type to have a good story." Which was how I knew that Lacey, too, sensed things were running off the rails, because if there was anything my mother didn't seem like, it was the type with a good story.

Except that, of course, she did have one-and it was this one. Love at first sight, a story I'd always loved to hear, less because of the details than because of the way they liked to tell it together, and the way they looked at each other when they did, as if they were suddenly remembering that this was a life they'd chosen.

My mother smiled. "It was shortly after college, and I was filling in, temporarily, at a subsidiary of my employer, an auto repair facility in town."

This was Julia Dexterspeak for dropping out of college when the financial aid ran dry and taking a crap paper-shuffling job that was supposed to last a summer, not a lifetime. My mother applied the same cardinal rule to autobiography she did to interior design: Accentuate the positive and hang a curtain over everything else.

"It had been, to say the least, an unpleasant afternoon. I was looking forward to locking the doors and finishing my book in peace, when in strolls a gang of hooligans, smelling like an ashtray and dressed like they thought they were Bruce Springsteen." She said it fondly, as she always did. "Your father was wearing this silly grin . . ."

Here, always, she paused, so my father could jump in to say he was wasted, and she would then clarify that he wasn't driving drunk, of course, his friend Todd was at the wheel, a teetotaler Christian they'd only befriended because he was always willing to drive. This time, though, my father said nothing.

She finished the story herself, more quickly than usual. "They'd gotten a flat tire on their way to a party, and as you can imagine, they were in quite a mood. All of them making stupid jokes, showing off for me, not even because they cared but because I was the only girl in sight and this, apparently, was their biological imperative."

Let that be a lesson to you, kid, my father usually said, but mercifully not this time.

"All of them but Hannah's father. He was the quiet one, that's what I noticed first. That he wasn't a fool, or at least hadn't proven himself one yet. Then he noticed I was reading Vonnegut, and he pulled a folded paperback out of his coat pocket. Would you believe what it was?"

"Same book?" Lacey asked.

"Same exact book."

This was the part of the story I loved best, the part I wanted Lacey to hear: That their meeting had been fated. That there was something special about them after all and, by extension, about me.

"Well, his friends went off to their party, but Jimmy stayed where he was, somehow talked me into closing early. We spent the night on the roof, talking about Vonnegut and showing each other the constellations, neither of us wanting to admit we were just making them up as we went along. And then, at the perfect moment, sun rising over Battle Creek . . ."

"He kissed you?" Lacey guessed.

"You'd think! And, I'll admit, so did I. But instead he only walked me home, shook my hand, and that was it. I waited two days for him to call. When he didn't, I took myself over to the bookstore where he worked, and said, 'You forgot something.' Then I kissed him."

"Nice," Lacey said, then shot me a look saying, Possible your mom is cool, too?

"That was when he started calling me Hot Lips," she added, a detail I found gruesomely embarrassing, but also perfect. "It took me years to train him out of it."

"Of course, you can guess why I didn't call," my father said, and my ears perked up. This was a coda I'd never heard before.

My mother lost the dreamy smile. "James."

"I was so drunk that by morning I'd forgotten the whole thing," my father said. "Imagine my surprise when some girl shows up claiming to know me, then kisses me before I can tell her any different. I only called her Hot Lips because I'd forgotten her name!"

"James," she said again, over his laughter. Then, just like she'd said to me, but in a very different voice, "Stop showing off."

It wasn't until she said it that I understood it was true.

My father grinned like he'd gotten away with something, and my mother stood, saying she'd forgotten she had to take a work call. "It was very nice to meet you, Lacey."

I waited for my father to follow her out; he didn't.

"What about your parents, Lacey?" he said, like he hadn't noticed the door to the torture chamber had been unlocked and we were all free to slip loose our chains and get the hell out.

"Don't you think we've had enough interrogation for one day?" I said.

"Chill out, Dex." Lacey tapped her nails on the side of her glass, then skimmed a finger around the rim until it whined.

She never talked to me about her parents, or anything else from the time before we'd met. I didn't mind. I liked imagining the past, the before-us, as a void, as if there had been no Lacey-before-Dex as much as there'd been no Dex-before-Lacey. I knew she'd grown up in New Jersey, nearish the ocean but not near enough; I knew she had a stepfather she called the Bastard and a father she'd liked better who was, in some vague but permanent way, gone; I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.

"My dad took off when I was a kid," she said. "I haven't seen him since."

"I'm sorry," my father said. I said nothing, because what could I? "That's an asshole move."

Lacey raised her eyebrows at his word choice, then shrugged. "I'm thinking he's a pirate. Or a bank robber. Or maybe one of those sixties hippie terrorists who had to go on the run. I could get behind that. Or, you know, he's your typical deadbeat who chose his dick over his daughter and started up a new family on the other side of town." She laughed, hard and insistently, and I tried not to wither and die just because she'd said the word dick with my father in the room. "Jesus, your faces! It's no big deal. My mom's got herself a shiny new husband and a baby to match. Fresh start, she says-best thing that ever happened to her. Of course, a real fresh start would slice me out of the picture, too, but life's a compromise, right?"

I'd figured on the absent father. I knew about the Bastard. But not the baby. She'd never said anything about that.

"I'm sorry," my father said again.

"She just told you it's no big deal," I said, because I had to say something.

"I heard what she said." He stood up. "How about some hot chocolate? A Jimmy Dexter Special."

That was our thing, his and mine, hot chocolate on winter nights with a fingerful of pepper stirred in just for the sake of having a secret ingredient.

"I'm full." I hated how much I sounded like my mother, her diet always absenting her from the room whenever chocolate entered the discussion, leaving my father and me another thing to call our own.

"And I should go," Lacey said.

As soon as she did, I wanted to take it back, say yes enthusiastically-Yes, let's drown ourselves in hot chocolate and gorge ourselves on cookies, whatever you want, whatever will make you stay-partly because she didn't have a father and I felt evil for even momentarily refusing to share mine, but mostly because she was Lacey, and every time she slipped out of my sight I was worried she'd never reappear.

My father hugged her good-bye. It was a precise copy of the hugs he gave me, solid and all-consuming. I loved him then, for loving her on my behalf. For being not just the kind of dad who would want to hug Lacey but the kind she would deign to hug back. Still, the next day after school, I suggested we go to the lake instead of back to my place, and the day after that her favorite record store, and that weekend, when she asked about sleeping over, I said, knowing she'd hate it but suspecting she'd be too proud to say so, "Let's do it at your place instead."

THERE ARE THINGS YOU NEED to know," Lacey said.

We'd been sitting in the Buick for twenty minutes, engine off, music silenced, house looming at the end of the driveway. I could say something to let her out of this gracefully, but I wanted to see inside.

She cleared her throat. "The Bastard is . . ."

"A bastard? Got it."

Lacey uncomfortable was a strange sight. I didn't like it, or at least didn't want to.

"I just want to be clear on the fact that I consider everyone in that house an accident of birth and circumstance. Nothing to do with me. Clear?"

"Clear. As far as I'm concerned, we're basically orphans, raising ourselves in the wild."

She snorted. "If only." And then, "Let's do this."

But we didn't, quite, not until she turned the cassette player on again and we listened to one more track, Lacey's eyes closed and her head tipped back as she disappeared into that place only Kurt could take her. When his screams died out, she pressed stop. "Follow me."

Lacey's split-level was a mirror image of mine, right down to the shitty aluminum siding and single-car garage, two and a half bedrooms and bathroom down the hall, all of it reversed, like the parallel-dimension version of home.

The house was schizophrenic. Outside was Bastard territory, everything straight lines and sterile surfaces. Precisely trimmed grass, gleaming gutters, an economical distribution of hedges and evenly spaced potted plants. Inside, Loretta land, was wall-to-wall sixties tack, as if an alien had tried to piece together the American homestead by mainlining Nick at Nite. Flowered upholstery was zipped into clear plastic slipcovers; heavy gilt frames showed off motel art of lighthouses and dour livestock; a menagerie of china figurines grinned at me from behind beveled glass. There were lace doilies. Lots of doilies. A heavy wooden cross hung over the fireplace, and a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer was propped up on the mantel. Which made it slightly surprising when Lacey's mother wandered into the room, breath stinking of what, by that point in our friendship, I could recognize as gin.

Lacey looked like she wanted to unlock the glass cabinet and take a sledgehammer to a few porcelain cats. "God, Mom, did you take a bath in it?"

Lacey's mother had long black hair, longer than a mother's was supposed to be, girlishly flippable and ratted at the ends. She was loaded down with clumpy mascara and cheap gold chains that disappeared into her red camisoled cleavage, and bleary-eyed in a way I would have read as new-baby exhaustion, were it not for the smell.

"And can you cover that up?" Lacey flicked a hand at the sodden circles around her mother's nipples. "It's disgusting."

Lacey's mother pressed a palm to each of the wet spots. It was always unsettling when parents of a certain age produced a new offspring, its existence undeniable evidence of copulation. But Lacey's mother didn't need a baby to broadcast her message: This was a woman who had sex.

"Never get pregnant, girls," she said. "Motherhood turns you into a freaking cow."

"I love you, too," Lacey said dryly. Then, to me, "Upstairs."

"Girls," her mother said. "Girls! Girls!" It was like the word compelled her as much as we did. "Stay." The couch squeaked as she settled her weight. "Sit. Keep an old cow company. Tell her what it is to be young and free."

"No one forced you to procreate at your age," Lacey said.

"The stack of abortion pamphlets you left for me made your position on that very clear, darling." Then Lacey's mother threw back her head and laughed, a laugh so uncannily like Lacey's it was impossible to pretend they weren't related. "But if it weren't for little Jamie, I wouldn't have all this." Her hands flopped to her sides, lazily taking in the house, maybe the town, the life.

"You wouldn't have Big Jamie, either," Lacey said. "The horror."

A boozy stage whisper: "Lacey's a little jealous of her baby brother."

Lacey whispered back, loud. "Lacey can hear you."

"That's the problem with only children," her mother said. "No matter what you do, they end up as spoiled little bitches."

"That's right, Mom, you spoiled me. That's my problem."

"See?"

"Upstairs, Dex," Lacey said. "Now."

"Dex?" Her mother's voice flew to a heavenly register. "You're the famous Dex?"

That she had heard of me; that I was known. That I mattered, this was proof. When she told me again to sit, I obeyed.

Lacey, disgusted; Lacey, reconciled. She sat, too.

"So, what's she told you about me?" her mother asked.

I said nothing, which was true enough.

"Don't worry, I won't be offended. I know how it is with you girls. You think it's your job to hate your mothers."

"Nice work if you can get it," Lacey said.

"Didn't used to be that way, did it, Lace? Kid never wanted to leave my side. Would cry and hang onto my leg if I didn't take her out with me. So what did I do?"