It was hard for the young spies to operate near the handball courts. There was no shelter except the concrete structure itself, and the ground was clear in all directions around it. Candace and Mellie watched Carmella enter the area, heard laughter and other nonverbal sounds, and witnessed some suggestive exits, like when Carmella headed with three boys for the hills behind the school or the time she emerged, hair mussed, with her sometime boyfriend Bob’s arm so wrapped around her that his hand was almost touching her right breast. But for real action they had to stalk the older teens in the wild or catch Carmella with a date at Candace’s house.

The arid hills behind the high school were undeveloped. The campus had been built a few years ago, on property hacked out of clay-filled dirt and a landscape of manzanita and scrub. There were birds and rodents and rattlesnakes out there, and there were no parents. Kids climbed the walls of small canyons and dared one another to jump off the tops onto the piles of eroded sand below. They discovered small semi-caves, holes worn in the adobe clifflets, and they used the pockets as secret meeting places. Boys brought their 22s out there, and took shots at small animals. Girls like Mellie wrote protest poetry about those hunting forays. Mellie’s father had given her a copy of The Sea Around Us for her birthday, and Rachel Carson had made her a budding conservationist.

Sometimes Candace and Mellie headed into the scrub on their own, walking and talking or even visiting one of the small caves themselves. There was a medium-sized hole-in-a-dirt-wall they thought of as theirs, until the afternoon they visited it and found the cigarette butts and condoms. They didn’t know what the balloon-like litter was then; they were a year or so away from the season when the local boys would start proudly showing off Trojan packets and ring-impressions in their worn wallets. But they knew the cavelet was being used by others, and they stopped entering it. They observed it from a distance whenever they walked by it. They played investigative reporters and tried answering the five “W” questions. They’d heard about yellow journalism and wanted to write some.

One afternoon they almost ran into Bob’s friend Tony there. They were nearly in plain view of the cavelet’s entrance when they heard human noise and ducked behind a thick clump of manzanita. Tony walked toward the school, passing within about ten feet of them, luckily oblivious. Additional noise made the girls hunker lower. At which point Bob exited the cave. Right behind him was Carmella, obviously distraught. Her hair was mussed and she acted angrier than Candace had ever seen her. “Hey it was no big…” Bob said back to her, but Carmella yelled, “I hate you! I can’t believe this!” and then stumbled on a rock. She almost fell to the ground. Bob went back to her and after a short tussle took her arm. He was murmuring something as they half-walked, half-staggered past the foliage that concealed Candace and Mellie.

The young girls looked into the cavelet after that. A few empty beer cans and a lounge chair pad had been added to the litter.