any things changed the year Chassie turned 11, but the pictures of naked women were still in the bathroom cabinet. Playboy: the magazine that ushers American youth through puberty.

Chassie had learned that there were informative articles along with the fascinating pictures. She had also discovered the lock to the bathroom and began her Sex-Ed in earnest.

All of this required some doing. She had to convince her step-mother that she needed to shower alone, a privilege not accorded anyone but adults in the house. Chassie accomplished this by sitting morosely quiet for hours one evening when her father worked late until her step-mother, Kim, was forced to ask what was the matter.

While Chassie's mother had been exquisitely tuned to Chassie's emotional states, Kim was a bit obtuse. She also had no real affection for Chassie and was a coarse sort of person, just as likely to miss the point altogether as to notice and ridicule the specific raw and overworked spot you were trying to hide.

"What's your beef, Chassie? You look like death warmed over."

Chassie shook her head and looked down. Then when the others looked away, she pointed to her stomach and mouthed, "Cramps."

"I didn't know-" Kim started to say, then, after Chassie gave her a look of conspiratorial sisterhood, Kim clapped her hand over her mouth, leaped up, and walked toward the bathroom, motioning for Chassie to come along.

One thing Kim couldn't resist was a secret, especially a girl-secret of this magnitude.

In the bathroom, she pointed to the box of maxi pads on the top shelf.

"So, you know where everything is?" For some reason, she was whispering.

"Yeah," said Chassie. "It's actually my second one."

She held her belly gently and shifted foot to foot.

"Do you want some ginger ale to settle your stomach?" Kim asked.

"No thanks."

Chassie waited until Kim started to feel really useless, and then told her the one thing she could do. "I just want to take my shower alone, okay?"

Kim grabbed Chassie's shoulder and gave her a serious look that said the deed was done. She closed the bathroom door behind her quietly as if it were fragile. Then Chassie heard her in the living room.

"Okay, guys, listen up. Chassie has become a young lady. From now on she will be taking her showers alone."

Chassie heard Kate's surprised "Hey!" This meant Kate would shower with their new step-sister, Tricia, a girl of such utter stupidity that the only thing they liked about her was the tricks they could play. She knew Kate was wondering how she'd managed this feat, and she had no intention of telling. Mainly because she hadn't really started her period yet and Kate knew it. Also because she needed something she could treasure and privacy was it. She wouldn't threaten this gem, even in the name of her friendship with Kate.

Dr. Doolittle, the guy who could talk to the animals, had a creature called a Pushme-Pullyou. Looking much like a llama, it had heads on both ends of its body that, in talking to Dr. Doolittle, seemed to be in continual disagreement. Chassie understood this experience. With one of her heads, she spoke to her mother in low, secretive tones about how her brother was adapting to his new home, the secrets she'd gleaned from emptying her step-mother's pockets doing laundry, the various sins of the middle class she observed now that she inhabited the suburbs. The food they threw away! The lies they told!

With her other head, she talked to Kim in low, conspiratorial tones about the best colors of lipstick, the varying degrees to which their neighbors were failing with their hairstyles, and the overall inferiority of men, her father in particular.

It felt as if there were two characters inside her, and somewhere in the middle with no mouth for talking was the Chassie she vaguely remembered from before the divorce. Every once in a while she looked at that old self, picked at the spot like a scab until it bled, andthen left it alone again.

Chassie's mother had moved to the Cass Corridor in Detroit where she worked for halfway houses, civil rights action groups, and runaway hotlines. She lived in a house full of people, mostly black people, and she marched in rallies, screamed at fat cats, and dyed her hair pure blond.

Chassie liked the black people. They spoke slowly and seemed relaxed about everything. When she spent weekends there, Chassie noticed that hours over breakfast and coffee stretched into lunch, which became dinner preparation, then dinner, then more coffee and smoking. The people varied, but she could sit there all day if she wanted in the kitchen with the smells of coffee and smoke, the low murmur of conversation, loud guffaws and shrieks of laughter. It was the most untroubled she felt that whole year, sitting on a step stool next to the fridge, peeling or chopping whatever was given to her and otherwise just watching and listening.

Kim began attending school that year, The Skin Deep School of Beauty. She had to memorize the bones and muscles of the hand, face, and neck, the colors of dye and the stages they went through on your head. Chassie thought for sure they made them learn the hand bones just to give them something to test on. Kim made flashcards out of old recipe note cards and made Chassie quiz her as she filed her nails, removed her cuticles, and pumiced the rough spots off her feet and elbows.

Once, during that year, Kim took her aside to inform her that it wasn't a threat, but Chassie needed to remember that her father was married to Kim and if Chassie thought she could seduce him away, she just ought to think twice. Chassie nodded mutely. Did she really have that kind of power?

For two weeks at a time, Chassie lived in the suburbs as Kim's best friend and confidante. She cooked pot pies and wrapped crescent dough around hot dogs embedded with American cheese. Pushme. She sat on the couch with Kim and curled her legs under her, watched As the World Turns and The Guiding Light, gossiped about the neighbors, lied freely, did bust exercises.

Then she spent a weekend in Detroit with her mother and the black people learning about all these overwhelming problems in the world that she could do nothing about. She listened to The Spinners, Stevie Wonder, and The Isley Brothers. She learned how to dance and forget completely about everything else.

In the car, on the way home, Chassie's mother took her hand when the Billy Joel song "I love you just the way you are" came on the radio. She sang meaningfully to Chassie, squeezed her hand and made her sit in the driveway until the song ended. Chassie felt like she couldn't breathe. How could her mother not see that Chassie was a fraud? She didn't know about this other Chassie she could be with Kim. Pullyou. She'd told Kim about the cockroaches and the shared bathrooms at her mother's house. She'd laughed. She'd even made fun of the black people.

Chassie grabbed her stomach, burst into tears, and nearly fell out of her mother's old Toyota before running up the porch steps to the tri-level, aluminum-sided, landscaped place she now called home.

They watched a lot of TV in that house. Chassie had a crush on Randolph Mantooth, the paramedic on Emergency, a program on in reruns every night when Kim was preparing dinner. After Emergency, if Kim was really late in getting dinner ready, there was an hour of The Brady Bunch. With Kim's two sons and one daughter, their combined family was embarrassingly similar to the Brady's. Three girls and three boys. There was a boy Kate's age and then Kim had twins, a boy and girl, a little younger. The only ones who stood out were Chassie as the oldest and her brother, the baby, as the youngest.

Chassie knew she was supposed to be pretty like Marcia, but instead she wore glasses like Jan, was awkward like Peter and had the sex appeal of Alice. It was a humiliating hour of television.

Mr. and Mrs. Brady were having an anniversary. The Brady kids, in true Brady spirit, pooled their various monies and arranged to have a portrait taken. Before Jan ruined it by running into it with her bicycle (if only she'd worn her glasses!), it was the perfect anniversary gift.

Suddenly, Kate and her age-matched step brother, Kurt, were hatching plans of their own.

"When did Dad and Kim get married?" Kate asked.

"Mom and Steve got married in April," Kurt answered. "Remember? It was right around the Easter."

"Of course," Chassie said. "That's the only way they got a 3-day honeymoon."

"Okay," Kate whispered, "that means it's coming up." She paused and got dramatic. "Let's do something really special."

"Really special," Chassie muttered.

"Yes, Miss Negative," Kate hissed.

"Breakfast in bed!" Kurt said, as if he'd discovered the cure for the common cold.

They all cheered. Chassie closed her eyes. She knew it was a Brady Bunch solution. The TV show made them think they could rally together and make their lives as normal as their classmates, as normal as television. Any problem could be solved in a half hour. An hour if it was a big thing or they were on vacation.

Together, Kate and Kurt stabbed at a weekend on the calendar and decided that must have been the time. Okay, they had a date. Next weekend. They looked at Chassie.

"What?"

"Well, you're the only one who knows how to cook," Kate said.

From the kitchen, Kim yelled, "Grub's on!"

All five of her siblings stared at her and the baby worked his lips like he wanted a bottle. The twins did the slow blink that never failed.

"All right already," Chassie said. "I'll make breakfast for them. Geez."

"Something good," Kate said, and then they all lined up for Hamburger Helper.

Silently, Chassie settled the latch hook through the eye-ring, then pushed in the button on the doorknob so that the door was doubly locked. The sense of impenetrability intoxicated. She smiled and jumped up and down, landing silently. She sashayed across the bathroom, sliding on the rug, and began removing her clothes as if dancing to sexy music.

She withdrew a towel from under the sink and placed it on the cold toilet seat to sit on. Then the magazine. She took the top one, the same issue that she'd seen last time, but that didn't matter.

She opened quickly to the middle for another perusal of the centerfold and the little story about Rachel, Miss March, 1976. "Welle, Welle, Welle!" the headline said, because her name was Rachel Welle, and they always did something clever like that. She wanted to be a model (they all did), but she also worked at a snack stand on the beach and this was where they'd set her pictorial.

There were pictures of Rachel draped with strands of licorice, smothered in popcorn, licking a cotton candy. There was even one picture inside the snack stand, shot from behind where you could see that she had no pants on, but you could also see the faces of the people on the other side of the counter as she gave them their popsicles. How did they do that?

Rachel was a Sagittarius, just like Chassie. She was born December 13, 1957. She liked moonlight, holding hands, and strawberry malts. She disliked bad breath, losing, and people with bad attitudes.

Chassie stroked the glossy centerfold. The way her body curved so smoothly, no sharp edges, and her nipples deep brown and thick. Her dark brown pubic hair was a dense tangle at the top, but thin enough farther down that in certain pictures, like the one in the snack wagon, you could see the, what was that? Pink like a tongue, smooth, a bit shiny.

Chassie held the picture closer to her face. Then heard Kim yell from the other room, "Chassie, turn on the water! You can't wash in air!" Her father laughed.

Chassie closed the magazine, slipped it back between the bottom two towels with the others and the Triple-A travel magazine, stood and turned toward the shower. In the act of turning she felt, then saw, the white goo. Between her legs, a thick white substance made its way down her thighs, stretched between the two legs as she stepped.

She couldn't help it. Before she could think it through, she heard herself give a short scream, then smothered the sound with her hand over her mouth.

"Chassie?"

She gulped. "Nothing," she said, just loud enough for them to hear. "I just found a spider." She turned on the water, sitting on the side of the tub to look at this, what? Goo. In fact, it looked a little like Elmer's glue.

She scooped some up on her index finger and smelled it. It smelled like nothing. Like air. Wait! She smelled again. It smelled a little bit like her sweat when she'd been walking in the sun. Maybe a little like sheets.

She bent over closer. It was definitely coming out between her legs. It was too impossible to see down there. Chassie turned the shower part on and then rummaged through the brush drawer to find the hand mirror Kim used to see the back of hairdos. She steadied it between her legs. There it was, a murky, nearly opaque film covering her vagina.

What was she going to do now? She'd told Kim she had her period and certainly wasn't going to let on to having lied. Obviously she couldn't tell her father. It was a week and a half until she saw her mother again.

Chassie did not play a stringed instrument. Neither did she play a woodwind, horn, or drum. As a result, she took shop class, mostly with boys, and the girls whose parents couldn't afford them a flute. Metal shop for half a year, then wood shop for the other half.

In metal shop, Mr. Sydlowski was showing them how to turn an ordinary piece of metal into a hole punch that they could give to their fathers, or, if they were boys, save until they were men and had their own tool benches. Using long metal tongs, Mr. Sydlowski took a stem of metal and held it in the forge. Heat blasted their hair to their foreheads. It was dangerous, so they all paid exquisite attention. Algebra was never dangerous.

Mr. Sydlowski gently pulled the tongs out of the heat and told everyone to move back. Then he swung around slowly and rested the metal on the work table. He took up a large mallet and began to pound on the red-hot end. Sparks flew off it, and, miraculously, the metal began to flatten.

Chassie moved closer to see. You could tell Mr. Sydlowski was feeling pretty macho in his goggles, swinging that mallet and letting the sparks fly all around him. She leaned a little closer.

When a sort of a shock went through her, Chassie realized that she was standing at a corner of the work table, and that it's height perfectly reached her crotch. When she leaned forward and Mr. Sydlowski let loose with the mallet, the table vibrated and Chassie felt the most incredibly strange feeling run down her legs, then back up to gather in her pelvis.

Interesting. She stepped forward and rested her pelvis on the table. Almost like sitting on it, but not quite. Mr. Sydlowski hammered and hammered. Chassie wondered where this feeling would go. Then Mr. Sydlowski took off his goggles, stepped back, held up the piece of metal, and looked directly at Chassie so that she blushed and stood back from the table.

"This is the beginning of the process," he said. "It will take you a few weeks to first flatten it, then form it into a point so that it can be used properly as a hole punch."

The class lined up to receive their alloted stick of metal. When Chassie got the the front of the line, Mr. Sydlowski handed her a piece of metal, put a check next to her name in the grade book, set down his pencil and looked at her.

"What are your future plans?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"You ought to be thinking about these things," Mr. Sydlowski told her. "You're a smart girl. You could consider a career in the industrial arts."

Chassie set her alarm for 3:00 a.m. the morning of the weekend that had been declared her father and Kim's anniversary. She figured that she would make the breakfast when everyone would be too asleep to notice and then keep it warm in a low oven until morning. She scrambled eggs, toasted bread and muffins, poured water in the Mr. Coffee maker and added a couple scoops of ground beans. Snapping the top off a TV tray, Chassie arranged two plates of eggs and toast, two mugs of coffee, napkins and silverware, and the card they'd all signed the night before. Juice could wait until morning. She set the oven at 200 degrees, the lowest setting, and settled the tray on the oven shelf.

Back in the bedroom, Chassie crawled in next to Kate and slept fitfully waiting for the alarm to ring again. She dreamed that when she opened her lowest dresser drawer she found her step-mother smashed in there, a deformed baby with gigantic blue eyes, mascara-coated lashes, red lips, and bright nails. She tried to close the drawer pretending she hadn't noticed, but then Kim's voice came out of the baby's mouth. "Don't think you can get away," it said.

Chassie stared at the baby's face, daring it to go to sleep, wishing it were dead.

"Don't you ever look at me like that in real life," Kim said and licked her glistening lips.

Chassie woke up and stayed awake. It was nearly 7:00 anyway.

"Kate!" She nudged her sister. "Get up!" She pushed her again, admittedly a little harder than she'd intended, and Kate nearly rolled out of the bed, grabbing the bedspread just before going over.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Kate said. She'd been experimenting with new ways to take the Lord's name in vain, now that their mother wasn't there to make her stop. "Give me a break will you?"

Tricia rolled over on her little princess bed with the ruffled canopy, arranged her stuffed animals behind her and stepped into her fluffy pink slippers. God, she was obnoxious. Kate and Chassie pulled on thick socks and sweatshirts while Tricia tied the belt of her pink velour bathrobe. To make it worse, she had shiny, blond hair and blue eyes. It was a good thing she was stupid.

The three girls filed quietly downstairs, Brady fashion, to the kitchen where they met Kurt and Tricia's twin brother, Tommy. They'd left the baby in his crib.

"Did you do it?" Kurt asked, as if all Chassie ever did was lie and break promises.

"Of course I did."

"Where is it?"

"I put it in the oven to stay warm, Doofus."

Chassie silently opened the oven and reached in. It was far warmer than when she'd put the tray in there. She drew her hand back in surprise, scorching the back of her hand against the oven door.

"Shit!" she jumped back and held her hand against her mouth.

Tricia looked at her smugly, preparing just how and when to tell that Chassie swore.

"Shit, shit, shit" Chassie hissed at her.

"Hold it under water," Kate said. "Here." She took Chassie's arm and led her away from Tricia, whom Chassie wanted to smack, and to the faucet.

"Who's out there?" they heard their father yell down the hallway.

"Just us!" Tricia trilled.

"Don't get up," Kurt said officially. "We have a surprise."

Chassie went back over to the oven and tried to pull out the TV tray. It was stuck. She looked up at the faces around her, gleaming in the early dawn.

"Um..."

Chassie had forgotten about the plastic grips on the bottom of the TV tray that attached it to the metal tray legs. They were melted around the oven rack and holding the tray in place.

The next weekend, Chassie told her mother about the white goo, and her mother immediately made an appointment at the health clinic on the East side. It was free on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

"But I'm covered under Daddy's insurance."

"Not when you're with me you're not."

That Tuesday, her mother came to get her, just her, and they drove off in the dark toward Detroit. Chassie held a sandwich in one hand but couldn't eat.

"It's really no big deal," she said to her mother. "I mean it hasn't happened again or anything."

"Well, I've never heard of anything like that, it coming all the way down your legs, and you only 11 and not having a period. Do you have hair yet?" Her mother merged onto the highway and immediately over to the far left lane where she sped up to 70.

"A little."

"Huh?"

"I have a little hair. Not too much. Not like you."

"What do you think poor people do?" her mother asked.

It wasn't a real question and Chassie didn't answer.

"Or people like me, students and workers, mothers with kids, anyone not privileged enough to be a part of an insurance program? I'll tell you what they do. They get sick. They get sicker and sicker and either they finally end up in the emergency room, or they just get better somehow. That's why clinics like this are so important."

They pulled up in the driveway of a house. It was dark outside and when her mother cut the headlights, Chassie saw a couple of people standing in the square of light at the front door. The woman proceeded down the walk to a huge old Ford, and the man in the doorway motioned to Chassie's mother.

"This is it?"

"This man is a hero," her mother said sternly. "He's a doctor and he volunteers his time in the evenings for people in need. This is his house."

They walked into the house. The man greeted her mother as if he knew her. "How's it going, Beth?" he asked and touched her shoulder.

The doctor was wearing jeans, boots, a white shirt tucked in, and a wide leather belt. Chassie was reassured by the white shirt. She didn't see a stethoscope or any of the other things she associated with doctors. The man had a long beard which he wound around his fingers, and brown, shaggy hair. He looked a little like the pictures of Jesus.

"This is my daughter, Chassie," her mother said, gathering Chassie's hair in her hands and stroking her head.

The man escorted them into the kitchen and they sat down. He poured Chassie's mother and himself a cup of coffee.

"So what's going on Chassie? Your mother said you were having an unusual discharge."

Chassie flushed in humiliation. The thought of her mother out in the world talking to strange men about her unusual discharge. She nodded.

Suddenly the doctor produced a note pad and began writing. He asked about when, the color, smell, how much. Chassie answered his questions in a whisper.

"Okay," he said, "let's have a look."

Chassie looked over at her mother in a panic. Her mother nodded grimly.

The doctor pulled a sheet over the kitchen table and set another beside Chassie. "The bathroom is down the hall. Take off all your clothes except your socks, and wrap yourself in the sheet. Then come back into the kitchen."

Except her socks!

The bathroom was the only part of the house that looked like it belonged to a doctor. There was a toothbrush and everything, but also a large container of official-looking soap, some instruments, a box of rubber gloves, and a couple of thermometers floating in solution.

Chassie undressed, folded her clothes neatly and left them in a pile on the toilet seat. Clutching the sheet around her, she went back into the kitchen. Her mother and the doctor were laughing and she saw her mother's hand on the doctor's forearm.

The doctor had assembled the tools for the job. He pulled a pillow off the couch and put it on the table for Chassie to lay on. "It's not the medically-approved set-up," he said, "but it's good enough to get the job done."

"Right on," said Chassie's mother.

Chassie trembled in the cold and the doctor chuckled. "Good thing you've got your socks on, huh?"

Chassie climbed onto the kitchen table holding the sheet tightly in place and sat on the couch cushion. The doctor snapped on rubber gloves.

"Just lie back. Scoot a little toward me. A little more. More. Scoot toward me. Just a little more. Okay, that's good."

The doctor gently opened the bottom of the sheet and piled it up on Chassie's knees. "Okay, now just let your knees fall to the side."

Chassie felt like she couldn't breathe. She closed her eyes.

Her mother came and placed a hand on her forehead. "It's okay, honey. He's a doctor."

Chassie let her knees fall and immediately tears filled her eyes. She squeezed them shut and looked away from her mother. She didn't know why she was crying.

The doctor's cold gloved hands poked around a little bit, then he said, "Okay, let's see what we've got." He handed Chassie's mother a mirror and instructed her to hold it so that Chassie could see what was going on. Chassie looked up. Over her head, the kitchen light fixture was full of dead flies.

"Look this way," her mother said.

In the mirror, with a sheet separating her so completely from her own crotch, she saw that it did indeed look quite a bit like the ones in the pictures. It was pinker than she'd realized, and the hair was thicker than it was up top.

The doctor pulled gently. "This is your outer labia, or outer lips."

Then he held those aside. "This is the inner labia, or inner lips."

It was really quite fascinating.

"Here is the vaginal opening," he pointed, "and you can see the hymen is still intact."

Chassie's mother moved the mirror and stepped in front of Chassie's legs. "Really? Where?"

The doctor pointed and held Chassie's inner lips open. Looking down between her legs and seeing the two heads there studying things, Chassie suddenly felt a rush of anger and humiliation.

"Ahem," she said and scooted back a little.

Chassie's mother repositioned the mirror. The doctor went back to his lesson.

"This is your clitoris," he said and touched it.

Chassie felt her body jump and she drew her knees back together.

"Oh," the doctor said to Chassie's mother, "she didn't like that." They both laughed. "Did you see her jump?" the doctor asked, as if Chassie were a car or a horse.

Chassie noticed that there was actually one fly still buzzing up there, in and among the other fly bodies. She wondered what it thought.

Then the doorbell rang and Chassie shrieked. The doctor looked at his watch. "They're early," he said.

He went to the door and Chassie heard him tell the people that they needed to wait in their car. A draft ran under the sheet and, it felt to Chassie, right into the recently labeled vaginal opening.

"Let's get down to business," the doctor said, and brought out the speculum.

Using hot pad mitts up to her elbows, Chassie had extracted the two plates of eggs and the mugs of coffee. They'd set up another TV Tray and while the rest of them presented the big surprise to Kim and her father, Chassie sat with a metal spatula and scraped rubber off the oven rack. The back of her hand still hurt where she'd burned it.

She carried the Mr. Coffee pot into the bedroom with her, the sludge-like remaining coffee giving off a smell like burning leaves. In the doorway she stopped. All five of the other kids sat on the bed in a half-circle around their parents who were forking through the eggs.

"Mmmmm!" Kim said, then looked at Chassie's father and crossed her eyes together. Chassie saw her father start to laugh, then kick Kim under the covers.

"Would you like any more coffee?" Chassie asked.

"Oh, Lord no," Kim answered. "This is plenty for me." She was barely holding in the laugh.

Chassie's father looked at Kim, laughing with his mouth closed, then looked up at Chassie.

"I'll have some more, honey," he said.

Chassie filled his cup and turned to walk back to the kitchen. Her father began coughing and Kim, laughing outright now, smacked him on the back.

"Easy now," she told him. "Spit it out."

Chassie watched her father spit a mouthful of eggs into a paper napkin. He looked up at her apologetically before laughing and wiping his eyes.

The other kids laughed along with them as if they were in on the joke.

Chassie spun around and left the room, climbed back into her own bed which was still warm and fell asleep.

It seemed Chassie had produced an award-winning hole-punch. It was embarrassing. That year in the school yearbook, there were the band pictures with all the girls holding flutes or clarinets at jaunty angles, the boys standing tall with trumpets or holding drumsticks crossed in front of their chests.

And Chassie's only appearance in the yearbook, aside from her school picture, was with a crowd of boys in beer t-shirts, celebrating the industrial arts awards they'd received.

When their projects returned from the county fair and they got to take them home, Chassie looked at the one with her name on it for a long time. It wasn't hers. It was Mr. Sydlowski's demonstration hole-punch. She looked up at him and he winked and wiggled his mustache at her.

The morning after her appointment with the Doctor who had no name, Chassie was grilled over cereal by Kim and her father.

"Where exactly was this?" her father asked.

"I don't remember exactly where."

"Where approximately?" Her father became impatient easily.

"Detroit. East side."

"What was his name?"

"I don't remember."

"You don't remember?"

"No. I don't remember."

"What did he tell you?"

"He said everything was all right."

Kim leaned closer. "If you have anything you want to ask me..."

"No. Everything's fine." Chassie swallowed the last bit of cereal and made for the sink.

"You know, you can always go to Dr. Saunders," her father said. "We do have insurance."

Chassie dropped her bowl in the sink and turned. "Not everyone has insurance," she said. "This man happens to be a hero."

Kim bit her lower lip and Chassie saw that they were communicating under the table with some system of footwork they always used. Chassie's father started to speak, then couldn't help himself and laughed instead.

Chassie felt her face burn.

"Take the trash out," Kim told her. "I hear the truck coming."

"Dr. No-Name Hero," her father whispered and they erupted in laughter.

Outside, Chassie made her way to the two metal cans and began dragging them out to the street, slipping a little on the ice. The truck was next door, so she ran a little, feeling the wind pin her nightgown behind her. Their garbage collector was a black man. Chassie had never spoken to him, but this day he jogged lightly up to her and took one of the cans.

"Let me give you a hand," he said.

"Thanks."

After he'd tossed both cans of garbage up in the air and then set them back down at Chassie's feet, he stopped and looked at her.

Chassie became aware of her body outlined against her nightgown, her nipples in the cold, the way even her pubic bone strained against the fabric.

She kept looking right back at him.

He smiled and wagged his finger at her. "You have a beautiful day," he said, as if he were labeling another part of her mysterious anatomy.

He winked and got back in the truck. Chassie hugged her arms around herself and watched him work all the way down the street.

© Kristy Nielsen