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accent. His smile widened. “I got time for you, though. If you want it.”

He was mocking her. Laurel started to feel upset, and a little angry.

“I think I’d better be going,” she said stiffly.

He made no move to stop her, just stared at her, that languid smile never leaving his face. What was it about him? Why couldn’t she move? She found herself fixated by a bead of moisture that clung stubbornly to the dusky hollow at the base of his throat.

“I’ll bet you were the type of kid who ate all the Wheaties to get to the prize at the bottom of the box,” he said. “Me, I never saw the point. Man, if you want something, why do it the hard way? Just reach down and get it.”

Laurel felt her skin burn where his finger was now tracing a line down the side of her face. Then he was kissing her. And this time she didn’t pull away.

To her surprise, she found she liked kissing Jess. His mouth was incredibly soft, but when she felt his teeth, she tensed a little. That hard, searching edge she’d sensed in him, it was there … pressing into the tender flesh of her underlip … pressing hard, but not cutting. She could feel his hands printing damp circles into the thin cotton of her blouse, and she shivered, not from the wetness of his touch … but from the sureness of it.

Laurel, not wanting to or intending to, began imagining it was Joe she was kissing … Joe, whose cool fingers skated along her sides as he pulled her blouse free from the waistband of her skirt.

Jess pushed the door shut with one swift kick. As it thunked into its frame, Laurel felt it in the pit of her stomach. She felt a sudden need to say something … anything.

“The girl downstairs says nobody around here locks doors.”

“Not for keeping people out,” he laughed. “Just for keeping them in. Now,” he said, his laughter dying as a spot of color rode up each of his high, Indian-looking cheekbones. “There’s something I been wanting to know

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about you since we were in the sixth grade. Are you really that white all over?”

As if in a trance, Laurel began to undress. Her blouse lay crumpled on the floor at her feet, and now it was joined by her flowered skirt and her sandals. Last, her bra and panties.

Finally, she stood before Jess, naked in the rosecolored light, goose bumps up and down her arms and legs. Somewhere downstairs she could hear a dog barking. And through the window, just beyond Jess’ right shoulder, she could see the furled purple head of a morning glory nodding in the bright sun. But except for those small, comforting touches of everyday life, she knew this wasn’t really happening … that it was all a dream … and that in a few minutes she would wake up and be back in her own room at Smith Hall.

Jess, for the first time ever, appeared to have lost his composure-lips parted, his eyes wide open, his face stamped with color that had formed ridges of red along his cheekbones.

“Holy Christ,” he whispered, letting his breath out in a long, awed sigh. Then in a single, neat motion, he shucked off his jeans. She’d seen him naked before, that time in her drawing class … but this time was different … he was … well, hard.

Under Jess’ intense scrutiny, Laurel’s dreaminess ebbed and she began to feel panicky. Wouldn’t it be better to just stop right now-tell Jess she’d never done this before? Not that she hadn’t had plenty of chances, but let’s face it, hadn’t she known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the real reason those guys always seemed to do something to turn her off at the crucial momentwhether it was their funny whimpering noises, or whispering “I love you!” in her ear loud enough to break her eardrum, or catching her slip in her zipper while they were trying to open it—was because of Joe. She had wanted her first time to be with Joe.

The hurt she felt over Joe’s rejecting her was a solid thing, a thing she clung to, holding it in a tight ball against her the way she’d long ago held her old blanket, Boo. She

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knew it was childish, and wrong, but somehow she still couldn’t make herself let go.

“I don’t know if I like being compared to a box of Wheaties,” she tossed back lightly, determined to hide her true feelings. ‘

And the thing about cereal-box prizes, she recalled, was that they were mostly not what you’d expected from the picture on the back of the box.

Jess nuzzled a breast, nipping at it lightly with his teeth, sending a sharp, delicious shiver through her.

“Breakfast of champions,” he said with a little laugh. “And, you, Beanie, you’re the champion of them all. Only the trouble with champions, they don’t hardly ever get to roll in the mud with the rest of us lowlifes.”

He brought his hand down and cupped it between her thighs, a sudden gesture that shocked her. Not moving, or pressing … just holding it there … creating a pocket of warmth that built to a fine, maddening point and began to spread up through her belly.

“Hey, maybe rolling in the mud is what it’s all about,” he whispered in her ear, bringing the sharp edges of his teeth down against her earlobe hard enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Then, with surprising gentleness, he led her over to the bed.

Laurel, facing Annie’s shocked, miserable gaze, realized something odd: The possibility of getting pregnant had never entered her mind. Not at the time. Unless, deep down, she’d known perfectly well what she was getting into and had secretly wanted something like this to happen … something cataclysmic and final.

But if so, then it had been a secret to her, too. Mostly she knew that she did not want to be pregnant. But now that she was, more than three months, she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t so.

She hadn’t told Jess, and she didn’t intend to. The baby seemed hardly connected to Jess, with whom she’d slept only a few times, and who hadn’t written or called

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all summer. Since the start of the new school year a couple of weeks ago, she’d only seen him once. So somehow she’d begun thinking of it as Joe’s baby … conceived out of her love for him.

Still, she would have to tell Annie how it had really happened … she couldn’t go on just making believe.

“Does he …” Annie swallowed with what appeared to be an effort, her face a white circle above the navy silk pajamas she wore. “Does Joe know? Have you told him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because it’s not his baby. The words were on the tip of her tongue.

She started to say them, but then something inside her stopped her.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she said, horrified and amazed at her smooth cunning.

Not a lie. Not exactly. Then why did she feel so guilty? And why was her stomach heaving? She hadn’t felt sick at all in the beginning-that was another reason she hadn’t bothered going to the doctor-but now she felt like she might throw up.

“I don’t believe it,” Annie said. “Joe wouldn’t-” Her words were choked off.

Laurel remained silent, her lips pressed together, her knees pulled tightly in against her chest.

“Have you … has this affair of yours been going on a while?” Annie seemed to be slowly falling apart, her voice looping strangely in and out of pitch, like a warped record. But the bitter note in it was clear.

“No,” she said. “It was just a few times.”

Annie seemed to be gulping for air. Finally, like a mountain climber gaining a tenuous foothold, she said, “Well then. You’ll just have to tell him.”

Cold sweat broke over Laurel. She wanted to run for the toilet, but she didn’t. She forced herself to remain where she was. She had to tell her sister the truth. It wasn’t fair to let Annie go on thinking it was Joe. And anyway, Annie would find out the truth the minute she talked to him.

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But you could let her think what she wants for just a little while longer, couldn’t you? It’s not as if you actually lied … Annie just assumed that was what you meant… and when you really got down to it, if. she really, really trusted Joe, why would she have thought it at all?

No! she snapped at herself. It’s rong! It’ll break Annie’s heart!

The way yours is broken, you mean?

Laurel saw it then … like the fork in Robert Frost’s yellow wood: perfectly clear in her mind, the two choices before her. On the one hand, letting go … letting go of Joe and the dream of his ever loving her … letting go and letting the pain wash through her in a great, stinging, healing tide. She could tell Annie, not only about Jess, but that she understood about Joe and Annie loving each other. It would be hard. The hardest thing she’d ever done … and that was what Frost must have meant about that road being a lot less travelled than the other one. But she could do it. If she wanted to, she could.

A strange, wild exhilaration rilled Laurel … and for the briefest moment she glimpsed the woman she could be … the woman she would be if she could just … just let go.

Then she was remembering watching them at Dolly’s party, remembering how she’d felt. And how she had felt year after year, always following in Annie’s firm footsteps. And now this-the only thing that she had ever really wanted, Annie had taken from her. All her longing and resentment came boiling to the surface.

“I can’t think about it right now,” she controlled herself enough to say. “I don’t feel too good.”

“But-” Annie began, then her mouth snapped shut.

“Can we talk about it in the morning? I really just want to go to bed.” And as she spoke, Laurel realized how exhausted she was. The sick feeling had gone away … and now she felt so tired and heavy she could hardly stand. The room pitched drunkenly.

I’ll tell her tomorrow, Laurel thought.

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Annie, gripping the banister for support, slowly descended the stairs to Joe’s floor. This hallway was usually a place she passed through and never noticed, but tonight it seemed dingy, the treads worn, the air sour. She felt weak and frail, as if in the last half hour she’d become an old woman. And why was it so dim? On the landings above and below, bulbs were lit, but she felt as if she were going down into some kind of cavern.

Joe’s baby.

After the hours and hours they’d spent together, wouldn’t she just once have seen that side of him-that he could be so devious? Wouldn’t she have known!

Joe … kind, sweetly impulsive Joe … underneath the man she’d been so sure she loved, could there be a whole other person, a person capable of letting her think he loved her after he’d slept with her sister”!

No. Not Joe. Not possible.

Only minutes ago she would have sworn to it, bet her life on it. But now …

She pictured Laurel, white as a sheet, looking both scared and defiant… almost as if she was protecting him. Why would she lie? Why would she have made up something as horrible as this?

Annie’s knees buckled, and she sagged against the banister rail, covering her face as a sob broke loose. How could he have done this to her? To Laurel? How?

And Laurel, damn her, how could she? With him! And to have been so stupid, so naive? At eighteen, to get herself pregnant!

Annie lowered herself until she was sitting on a step, and found herself imagining how it might have happened: Laurel pouring her heart out to him, and Joe being kind, taking it all in, not wanting to hurt her feelings. But after

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that, he must’ve started to see her in a new light … not that first time, or even the second … but later, after a week, a month … noticing more and more how beautiful she’d become. How alluring. And then maybe a movie or dinner, like in the old days when it was the three of them, not intending that anything should happen, but then, well, it just had… .

Anger rose in her, engulfing her. She felt herself being pulled to her feet, not as if she was just standing up, but as if somehow she was propelled upward by some explosive heat.

Damn him, how dare he! How dare he have made me think that he loved me … that we … oh, God!

Or had he thought she wouldn’t find out? That it would remain his and Laurel’s little secret, a tiny slipup he’d take care not to repeat? And, actually, if Laurel hadn’t gotten pregnant, she might not have found out.

One … two … three … four. Descending, she counted each step as if in doing so she might somehow arrive at a sum, an answer to how she was ever going to get through this.

Now she reached the door to Joe’s apartment with its mottled brown paint, its round glass peephole staring back at her like a dead eye. She knocked. Then rang the bell, over and over, then knocked again. Pounding, she felt pain shoot up through her knuckles.

Joe appeared, so quietly she was only barely aware of the door swinging open. He was barefoot, holding a coffee mug, and still wearing the clothes he’d had on at the party—jeans, white shirt rolled up over his elbows. She felt as if she were seeing him from a great distance, but as if through a powerful telescope, every tiny hair of his beard stubble, even the specks of gold flecking his irises, magnified to an unreal clarity. Music was playing on the stereo. Jazz trumpet. Stanley Turentine. But how could she have known that? She hardly ever tuned in to Joe’s jazz-she preferred rock and roll. It felt as if her senses had been honed to needle-sharp points.

“Annie!” Joe broke into a grin, which faded just as quickly. “Annie, what’s wrong? Jesus, are you all right?”

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She nodded, but somehow she couldn’t speak.

“Is it Laurey? She looked really out of it at the party, like she was coming down with something.”

It was as if he’d grabbed her, shaken her, sprung her voice free so that the words tumbled out.

“She came down with something all right.” Annie shot him a cold look. “She’s pregnant.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Joe took a step back, as if to let her in, but then he staggered a bit, off balance. He swung his arm out as if to steady himself, the mug in his hand throwing an arc of liquid that spattered onto the frayed hall mat at his feet and on the Miro print on the wall.