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  “Julia,” Sam whispered. He put his hands on her hips, his hands warm against her skin, and steadied her as he moved his mouth over her skin with kisses so gentle, tender, and lingering that Julia realized in a rush of joy that Sam did love her, that he loved her here.

  “Oh, sweet Sam,” she replied. And as he brushed his lips over her curly pubic hair, over the hard rise of her pubis, then down into the intimate hot furrow where her thighs joined her crotch, Julia felt his tenderness, and knew she trusted him completely. She breathed in deeply. Closing her eyes, she relaxed and opened herself up to him. In psychology she’d been taught that the self is centered in the forehead exactly between the eyes, but now she knew that was wrong: her true and most intimate self was centered here, in this hot and secret depth between her legs. How could anyone ever, ever make love with a stranger, she wondered, and then her thoughts blurred, and she was overcome with sensation.

  Sam was kissing her now and repeating her name. Julia felt the hardness of his teeth against her lips. His tongue was like a finger, probing and parting the silky grooves of her skin, pushing a little way into her vagina, pressing against the peak of skin at the top of her vulva. He pinched her nipples, causing lightning bolts of pleasure to pierce deep inside her. A dense cloud of sensation swelled up into her abdomen, then split apart, flooding her. Julia cried out and shuddered helplessly. Immediately, Sam rose up over her and entered her while she was still coming, and there was an almost intolerable moment of pain and rapture and a sense of being forced open past possibility. Then Sam cried out, collapsing against her, burying his moist, musky-smelling face in her hair.

  Julia had never felt such pure joy as she did then, all entwined with Sam, engulfed in his heat and smell.

  “Oh, Sam,” she said, breathless.

  Sliding off, he lay next to her, panting, holding her in his arms.

  “You like that?” The boyish friend of her childhood was in his tone of voice.

  She felt so at home. “I like that. I loved that.”

  “I love you, Julia,” Sam said.

  “Sam. I love you, too,” she replied. She was tearful with happiness.

  He stroked her hair. “Julia,” he whispered.

  They snuggled against each other. “What?” she answered.

  “Just ‘Julia,’ ” he repeated. “Julia.”

  She smiled in the darkness. Within moments they were both asleep, naked, uncovered, warm, and safe.

  In the very early morning they were hungry. Pulling on their clothes, they stumbled upstairs. The house was wrecked. An enormous guy in a football jersey was snoring on the living room floor. Clearing a path through potato chip bags, empty Styrofoam cups, beer bottles, and dishes full of cigarette butts, they pried a package of bagels from the freezer, nuked them in the microwave, and took them back to their locked room to eat with glasses of water.

  Julia sank down onto one of the rugs that had been last night’s mattress. “We’re going to have to clean up before my parents get back.”

  “I wonder if Chase has seen the damage.” Sam sat next to her, close enough to touch.

  “You sure do think about my brother a lot.” She smiled.

  “We’ve been best friends for a long time.”

  “Are you going to worry about what he’ll think about—us?”

  Sam thought. “Yeah, sure.” He chewed in silence. “I’m concerned about what everyone’s going to think. Chase. Your parents. Mine.”

  Julia’s heart became a separate creature, a tiny animal waiting breathlessly to hear whether it would be allowed to live or die.

  “They might think it’s cute that we’re going out, or they might think it’s strange.”

  Her heart relaxed slightly. “So we’re going out,” she said.

  Sam looked at her. Gently he removed a bagel crumb from her lip. “More than that, I’d say.”

  “Oh, Sam, I love you.”

  “I love you, Julia.”

  “You do?”

  Sam laughed and pulled Julia to him. They fell back together on the rugs. “I think I’ve been in love with you for a long time.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot this last week. How I’ve always had fun being around you. How I’ve always been glad when you came over with Chase. Even when we were little kids, I liked it when I touched you. Remember the game we had, touching tongues in the pool when I was trying to teach you to swim underwater with your eyes open? I think even then I was probably in love with you.”

  Julia lay dazed at Sam’s words, happy.

  “We’ve always had a good time together,” Sam continued. “And I always thought you were good-looking. But recently …” He squeezed her hand.

  Julia rolled next to Sam and twined her arms and legs all around his. With her ear next to his chest, she could hear his steadily beating heart.

  After a while she said, “What are you going to do after you graduate?”

  Sam kissed the top of her head. “My parents want me to go to medical school. I’ve got the hours in chemistry. But I want to go into research. I don’t want to be a doctor—I don’t like the blood, the disorder. I’d be much better in a lab. But I don’t know if I can stand to disappoint them. They’ve done so much for me.”

  “They wouldn’t want you to do something you’d hate.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think they believe I’d really hate it. I’ve tried to talk to them about it. ‘Just give it a try.’ That’s what they say, no matter how I approach it. ‘Don’t say no till you try.’ The thing is, I know they’d pay my tuition for medical school, but anything else—I don’t think I’d even feel right taking their money for anything else. I owe them so much already.”

  Julia flashed on Hal and P. J. Weyborn, their discreetly wealthy, determinedly generous lives. The walls, mantels, and side tables of their home held a multitude of photos of Sam: as a grinning baby, a toothy toddler, on his first tricycle, on his first two-wheeler, on ice skates, on a sled, on skis, in a swimming pool, on a pony, on a horse, on a Sunfish, in a scull, in the car they gave him for high school graduation. They had given him everything they could and taken pride in the life they provided. And they’d taken pride in Sam.

  “I know how you feel,” Julia said. “Sometimes I wish my parents would just move to Mars for a few years. Or I wish I could turn them off for a while—you know, disconnect them and put them away in the closet just till I get steady on my own two feet. They’re always knocking me off balance.”

  “Listen,” Sam said, raising himself up on one elbow. “Sounds like people are waking up. We’d better get out there and help clean up.”

  “What will we say if Chase asks us where we were?” Julia asked.

  “We’ll just say we were together,” Sam told her. He put his hand on her wrist. “And later, when I’m alone with him, I’ll tell him the rest.”

  Cleaning up the house had been a fevered, concentrated activity. Everyone was grumpy, hung over, tired. The last two nights at the Vineyard were low-key. People packed up their gear, or collapsed in front of the television. Even Julia needed sleep; she and Sam satisfied themselves with hungry kisses on the back porch before going their separate ways to bed.

  Back home, the rush of getting ready to return to school kept them busy during the day. They found ways to be together most of the evenings. They found ways to make love, in Sam’s room when his parents were out for the evening, or in Sam’s car. Every moment they spent with each other bound them more closely together.

  Julia didn’t know if Sam had told Chase about them until the day Chase left for college. He clomped up to Julia’s room to give her one of his awkward good-bye hugs. His back was much thicker than Sam’s, his shoulders broader. They hadn’t been close recently, but as Julia felt her brother’s warm solidity, she felt a surge of affection for him. She hoped he would find someone he loved as much as she loved Sam.

  As if reading her mind, Chase stepped back. He b
lurted out: “It’s cool about you and Sam. But be careful.” His face flamed and he quickly turned, left the room, and galloped down the stairs.

  Julia knew Chase meant contraception. She wanted to get some birth-control pills but hadn’t had time. Sam was good about using condoms. She wanted to tell her parents, especially her mother, about Sam, but Jim and Diane were suddenly engrossed in their work again, and all at once the summer was over, Sam had driven away to Wesleyan, and Julia was back at Gressex for her last year.

  As she walked through the campus to her classes, she realized that Gressex had, overnight it seemed, become a monstrous enemy to her—an institution with a hundred doors slamming into place, imprisoning her with examinations, regulations, study sheets, black ink, white paper, straight lines. Her friends talked about nothing but the agony of choosing the right college. In addition to her schoolwork, application forms piled up on Julia’s desk instructing her to write essays about “my most important quality,” or “the most significant moment in my life,” or “how I envision the future of the world.” The documents seemed to give off an angry static that radiated through her room, giving her headaches.

  Sam drove up every weekend in September. He wrote her love letters that made her melt. He called her almost every night, when he could get through on the single phone in the dorm. He was as intensely in love with her as she was with him; Julia knew that. Yet they both knew that as the semester continued, with its required papers and tests, their time to be together would be eaten away to nothing.

  What she had done was drastic. She knew that. But she wasn’t sorry she’d done it. Her actions had gotten them here, in the Howard Johnson Motel, in bed, wrapped around each other.

  She didn’t want to go to sleep. On the other side of sleep was waking up, and facing the consequences. Sam wanted her to call her parents to let them know where she was. The thought made her wince. They’d be so gruesome, so tyrannical.

  She was not going to go back to Gressex, no matter what. She was going to marry Sam if she could persuade him, and she thought she could. She’d persuaded him along this far. He had taken her away from Gressex. He was in her arms, spent and sleeping, and she held on to him for dear life. The bandages on her wrists itched. Otherwise she was fine.

  Chapter 4

  Diane

  After the headmaster’s call late Monday night, Diane couldn’t sleep. She tossed in her bed, worrying about Julia, while by her side Jim slumbered deeply.

  When the alarm went off at six-thirty, Diane was already dressed. When Jim came downstairs, showered and shaved and ready for the day, she handed him a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll wrapped in a napkin. He looked surprised.

  “We’ve got an appointment with Mr. Holmes,” she reminded him.

  “Oh, right,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “I’ll drive. You can have your breakfast on the way.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  They settled into his Volvo—her convertible made Jim nervous. As they negotiated the early-morning traffic, then sped along on Route 2, Jim listened to the news on the radio. How could he? Diane wondered. How could he think about the rest of the world? All she could think about was Julia.

  They parked in the circular drive in front of the administration building at Gressex and walked through the echoing old halls to Mr. Holmes’s office, which very much resembled a smoking room in a British men’s club. Diane was surprised to see Sonja Stevens sitting primly on a leather sofa.

  Mr. Holmes greeted them politely and shook their hands, but his expression was guarded. Indicating chairs near his desk, the headmaster said, “Please sit down. I have some more news for you. Or, rather, Sonja does. Sonja?”

  Sonja perched on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward toward Diane as she spoke. “Julia’s okay, Mrs. Randall. She really is. I just thought someone should know.” She swallowed. “Julia … slit her wrists with scissors yesterday.” Diane gasped and Sonja put out her hand. “No, really, she’s all right. It’s harder than you think, to slit your wrists. It really does hurt. She just sort of stabbed the point of the scissors in … she only made little cuts … she was doing it because Sam was there and she wanted him to take her away and marry her.”

  “She was composed enough to wrap her wrists and pack a duffel bag,” Mr. Holmes added, his voice cold. “She was not in true psychological distress. She knew what she was doing.”

  “What did Sam say?” Diane asked, her voice shaky.

  “I don’t remember what he said exactly,” Sonja replied. “I mean, he didn’t want to take her with him, but that was the only thing he could do to get her to stop cutting herself.” She turned to the headmaster and her face went scarlet, but she spoke, “She was in distress, Mr. Holmes. She was crying. She wasn’t faking. She was very upset.”

  “Nevertheless, this is not the kind of behavior we can tolerate in a school like Gressex. We’re deeply sorry for Julia, Mr. and Mrs. Randall, but you can understand, I’m sure, that the only option open to us is to expel her.”

  “You’re kidding!” Diane exclaimed, so surprised she almost laughed.

  “Is that really necessary?” Jim asked. “I would think that—”

  “If you’ll read Section Fourteen of the school handbook—” Mr. Holmes began, but Diane stood up, blood rushing to her face, anger shooting through her body, and announced, “Do you think we care if she’s expelled or not? Do you think we even want her to return to this place—a place she hated so much she cut her wrists in order to get away? You’ll be lucky if you don’t have a lawsuit against you and your school, Mr. Holmes!”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” the headmaster said, his tone becoming syrupy. “I’m afraid I have no recourse but—”

  “Sonja,” Diane said, interrupting the man, crossing the room to take the girl’s hands in her own, “tell me. Please. Anything else you can tell me about Julia.”

  Sonja looked wildly from Diane to the headmaster, then back to Diane. “I think she’s really all right, Mrs. Randall. The cuts were just slits, really, and we bandaged them and she didn’t need to go to the hospital or a doctor or anything. She looked happy when she went off with Sam. She was smiling.” Tears filled the young woman’s eyes. “I didn’t know whether or not to tell you. I didn’t want to worry you, but then this morning I talked to some friends and we agreed you should know.”

  “I’m glad you told me. Thank you, very much.”

  “Do you think they went back to Middletown?” Jim asked.

  “I’m sure they did. Sam has classes, and you know Sam. And he really does love Julia. He’ll take care of her.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” Diane said. She hugged Sonja for a long moment, tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks.

  “If you’d like, I’ll discuss this matter with the disciplinary committee,” Mr. Holmes told them.

  “Don’t bother!” Diane nearly spat the words out.

  “Come on, Diane.” Jim rose to put a restraining hand on her arm. “There’s nothing more we can do here. Sonja, will you call us if you hear anything?”

  “Of course.”

  “We called Mr. and Mrs. Weyborn this morning,” the headmaster told them. “They assured us they would try to reach Sam, and they’ll let us know as soon as they talk to him.”

  Jim and Diane spoke the necessary, empty words of polite parting, then walked back through the building and out into the sunlight in silence. They settled into the car, Jim behind the wheel now.

  “It’s nine-thirteen,” he said, looking at his watch. “Let’s say nine-fifteen. It took us forty-five minutes to get here from the house but that was in morning rush-hour traffic. I’ll drop you at home and be able to get to the lab by ten if I hurry.”

  “Jim. How can we just go to work? We should do something.”

  “The only thing we can do is wait. Let’s be logical. We know she’s with Sam. We know Sam’s levelheaded. He’ll get in touch with us when the time is right. Or he’ll call us
if something is terribly wrong. The Weyborns are trying to reach him at Wesleyan. They’ve got several calls in. We’re doing all we can.”

  “But she tried to slit her wrists!”

  “Sonja said the cuts weren’t deep. She didn’t have to go to the emergency room. The bleeding stopped before she left. Come on—think about it. Think about Julia. She’s dramatic.”

  “This is more than dramatic! This is—stupid! Self-destructive. It’s crazy.”

  “Teenagers do stupid things. And Julia wasn’t trying to destroy herself. She was manipulating Sam.”

  “If she succeeds in dying it won’t matter what her motivation is, will it?” Diane dug in her purse for a handkerchief. She was weeping from fear and helplessness. “I’m going to drive down to Middletown and find her.”

  Jim turned and placed a sympathetic hand on Diane’s shoulder. “I know.” He patted her consolingly. “I know you want to rush down and rescue her. But, Diane, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Honey, Julia’s not a child anymore. She’s eighteen. She wants to get married.” After a moment’s silence he said carefully, “She’s in love.”

  “Yes, with Sam!” Diane cried.

  “What could you possibly have against Sam? He’s a good guy. He’s smart, reliable, we’ve known him forever—”

  “Oh, I like Sam, but he’s so predictable. He’s so on track, right through college, into grad school. He’ll have Julia working as a waitress to support him. She’ll never get to travel, have a career, experience life; she’ll never reach a fraction of her potential!”

  “Her potential for what? What’s important, Diane? Maybe this way Julia will be happy.”

  “Oh, yes, you would settle for ‘happiness’ for your daughter,” Diane said scornfully, her tears drying up, her face flushing as her fear fueled her anger. “Let her be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, cooking food for the man all her life. You wouldn’t let Chase get married now, become a waiter, and stay in a house dusting and baking pies. Would you? Would you?” Before Jim could answer, she continued. “No, of course not. Chase is brilliant. You certainly want your son to reach his full potential, and you can’t deny it. But you don’t want the same thing for your daughter.”