It was unfortunate about the unreliability of Vickie J’s parents’ absences, because otherwise her house would have suited the three girls best. Her father had a wonderful hidden collection of magazines with provocative pictures, and her mother had fine clothes and cosmetics for them to examine. There was always Coke® and aspirin if they wanted to experiment with getting high (they tried and failed).

Vickie D’s house had its own pluses and minuses. Her mother was often there, but she was completely lenient. She smelled like tobacco and beer. She looked like an older version of her daughters: freckle-faced, buxom, with mouse-brown hair (which took color well). She let the girls eat tacos and watch “The Twilight Zone.” Vickie’s sister was sometimes there; Lavonne was obnoxious and fascinating. But Vickie J was seldom permitted to visit; her parents always found some reason to prevent her from passing time up the street at the other Vickie’s house. Beth has memories of spending nights there, ensconced with Vickie D in the sofabed in the family room, watching high-risk TV and overhearing the high-risk affections of Lavonne and some greasy-haired boy, and Vickie J is no part of those memories. Beth can recollect unsolitary bathing by the light of the glowing wall heater, what-iffing about life on earth and heaven afterward, and there were just the two of them in that tub. It was only four decades later, while randomly recollecting 1963, that Beth got to view them in perfect class perspective, and saw that Vickie J’s parents were faithless snobs, and Vickie D’s family was trailer trash, and Beth’s own mother had been too self-absorbed and busy to notice any of it.

In 1963 the girls were thirteen and looking for a place to be alone, and one late summer day they found the barn. They had been out behind the high school, exploring cavelets and reading in a book called The Amboy Dukes, which Vickie J had liberated from her father’s closet. They were dusty and thirsty and overheated, walking abreast on the rutted dirt track. Vickie D was telling them about her big sister with the kid from around the block; she leaned forward and her brown hair bounced as she described Kevin groping under Lavonne’s blouse and grabbing at her lap. He was Lavonne’s age: sixteen. He was the nasty red-haired kid in the neighborhood: the one who egged them on Halloween and taught the boys how to masturbate. “Ee-ewe…” came from Vickie J, as she twisted a hank of her smooth blonde hair behind her ear, “Gross.” Beth walked forward between the two Vickies, her eyes unreadable behind the glare off her glasses.

“What’s that?” Beth stopped and pointed to their right. “Is it a machine?” She moved toward the object before anyone answered. Whatever it was looked stationary and rusted, stalled in tall dry weeds fifty feet away from them. Beth continued her approach, careless of foxtails, and the others straggled after her.

“I think it’s some kind of spreader,” she said as the two Vickies joined her. The object was spiky-round and rusty, and looked like it needed a horse to pull it. There was no doubt it would have an effect upon the ground. Then the girls noticed other machinery, in pieces and whole, dotting the meadow in which they stood. And off to the left, shaded almost unnoticeable under big pepper trees, an old barn. “Look,” Beth pointed. They approached together.