The Intimates

by Ralph Sassone

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

A powerful and compassionate debut novel about friendship and how it helps shape us into the people we are

The Intimates is a brilliant and deeply moving first novel about the varieties of romance. Spanning years and continents, beginnings and endings, it is about two gifted and striving people who discover themselves in the reflection they see in each other, and how their affinity anchors them at critical points in their lives.

Maize and Robbie are drawn to each other from the first time they meet in high school. When it becomes obvious that their relationship won't be sexual, they establish a different kind of intimacy: becoming each other's "human diaries." Their passionate Friendship plays out against a backdrop of charged connections: with lovers and would be lovers, family members, teachers, and bosses. For the better part of a decade they're inseparable fellow travelers, but ultimately they must confront the underside of the extreme and complicated closeness that has sustained them since they were teenagers.

Full of indelible characters, engrossing situations, and observations as sharply witty as they are lovely and profound, The Intimates renders the wonders and disappointments of becoming an adult, the thrills and mesmerizing illusions of sex, and the secrets we keep from others and ourselves as we struggle to locate our true character. The Intimates marks the emergence of a remarkable new voice.

Release date: February 1, 2011

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 256

Sample

Part One

Whenever Maize snuck away to see Hal Jamesley, there was always a blissful moment when she hardly recognized herself. It happened at the desk in the guidance suite where a smoked glass partition separated the secretary's cubicle from the counselors' offices. Maize would stop to check herself out in the partition before taking the extra five steps to loiter outside Hal's door, not knocking, just standing there until he noticed her shifting her feet on the carpet and summoned her forward for their next conference.
There were several mirrors Maize could gaze into during the school day—in the girls' bathroom or the girls' locker room, in the rearview mirror of her friend Lyla's car or the compact in her own pocket—but the smoked glass partition was her favorite. In its charcoaled and wavering reflection she was miraculously improved—slightly older and more cultivated, like Hal, with an urbane and faintly Gallic mystique she knew she didn't have in her real life at seventeen. Her brown hair went black and her perfected skin grew luminous in the constant midnight of the thick dark glass. She looked, she thought, like a memory of herself come blazingly alive, only stranger since it was a memory that hadn't happened yet.
Maize brushed her fingers against her cheeks or her forehead or her wavy hair whenever she stared, to verify that it was really herself she was seeing. The regular old Maize bobbed to the surface threateningly and then receded and rose again. She had to do it all extremely quickly or the guidance department secretary would glower from her computer and say, "Do you have an appointment?" startling her from her spell before she could move closer toward Hal Jamesley.
Mr. Jamesley's office was like the portal to a more intelligent life, the vivified existence she hoped she'd have someday, although the door to it was ugly and institutional and always shut. It was beige steel with a glass-and-chicken-wire insert through which Maize could observe what he was doing and brace herself until he beckoned her. She'd noticed that when Hal Jamesley was alone he'd mostly be staring at the ceiling or the green cinder-block walls with a faint grimace, as if in a seizure of insight or indigestion. When he was with another student advisee he'd gesticulate wildly while he spoke, his face thought-tormented, twisting and re-twisting a black phone cord around his hands as if failing to lasso his own interest.
He was her college counselor, a job at which he was incompetent. He made no secret that he was unqualified for the position and that he'd been hired under duress, as a last-minute replacement for Mrs. Franc, the college counselor who'd gone on a forced sabbatical after twenty years at the job. He had no experience as a counselor—he'd be the first to tell you that—having taken a teaching degree in studio art. In his other life, after school hours, he made collages and watercolors and paintings; he'd framed one small, blurry, burnt orange rectangle and propped it on his desk corner where the other counselors would have displayed bland smiley photos of their spouses and children. His fingertips were often stained with blue or red pigment like someone with an exotic circulatory disease.
So he was probably temporary, which was fine with him. The school had been desperate. Toward the end of the burnout preceding her hasty leave, Mrs. Franc had been known to tell students that it didn't matter how hard they worked or where they applied to college because they wouldn't be successful or happy in the end anyway. She scoffed at the prospect of future achievements. Specifically, what she said was "What? You think you're going to escape this whole mess-of-a-life just because you have good grades and nice manners and clean hair? Think again!" She'd said that to Maize, glaring toward her poster of Picasso's Guernica. Parents, not Maize's own, had started to complain.
"I'm hardly a font of knowledge about this stuff," Mr. Jamesley had said the first time they'd met. "I mean, when I was in high school, I wrote my personal essay on why my morose poetry was going to change the world, and then I wondered why I didn't get into Yale. I actually referred to my poems as ‘my friends.' How lame!" He'd laughed and turned away, looking for something on his shelves.
Maize had watched him while he searched, sitting as silently as she did in all her classes. (Maize is very bright and perceptive and an excellent writer, her evaluations often said, but she's shy and doesn't participate enough in discussions.) She hid in the middle or the back of rooms—never up front unless forced—with her hair shielding her soft round face and her eyes bowed toward a notebook. Every now and then she pressed her fingers to the center of her full lips, as though suppressing an impulse to shout something rude. In her imagination she looked like nothing sitting there, and sounded like nothing and smelled like nothing, unlike Mr. Jamesley, who gave off a piney scent as he stalked around his office, rooting through drawers and cursing at the messy piles on his desk. "Where the hell is— I just had the damn thing in my— Yes! Finally!" he said with a gusty sigh. He handed her a thick book called Endless Alternatives for Top Students.
"Thank you, Mr. Jamesley."
"Hal. Not Mr. Jamesley. The only Mr. Jamesley I know is my asshole of a father. Hal."
Maize had smiled wanly at the faint crease in Hal's forehead, estimating him to be between twenty-seven and thirty-two. Certainly not any more than that. He made it sound like he'd graduated from college in the past decade, listening to the same alternative music in his dorm that Maize had started playing in middle school. But she was clueless at guessing the ages of adults unless they were truly ancient. The last time her mother fished for a compliment by saying, "Tell me the truth, Maizie, do I look my age?" Maize surprised them both by blurting, "No, you don't. You look a lot older." Sometimes Maize had the brutal candor of quiet people who don't socialize enough; she'd noticed that about herself.
During that same conversation her mother had instructed Maize to pick three forceful adjectives to describe herself (college interviewers always asked that, she said) and warned Maize that one of those words had to be ambitious as in: intelligent, creative, ambitious; sensitive, enterprising, ambitious.
"Who the hell told you that?" Hal had said to her that first day, after Maize asked him about it. He'd glanced at her and squinched his silky black eyebrows.
"I don't remember." Maize had darted her eyes at her jeans. "I guess—I guess a friend of a friend."
"These days the questions are more abstract than that," Hal had said. "Do you know what I mean by ‘abstract'? No—of course you do." He'd tapped her student file. "Extremely impressive. Your grades and scores are killer."
"Thank you."
"The only problem is that you have ‘oral communication difficulties,' according to some teachers."
Which teachers? Probably the lazy social studies teacher who encouraged everyone to babble to fill the class time—especially the cute boys—and downgraded Maize for bad participation even though her written tests were flawless.
"Look, I can relate," Hal had said. "I was shy at your age—I mean, I'm still shy, really. I don't assert myself enough. To be honest." He ran his hand through his thin dark hair and yanked it in the back, as though snapping himself to greater attention. Then he tweaked his earlobe. "Lack of confidence, which in your case is unjustified. Ludicrous. I mean—" he waved his arm at the other student folders piled on his desk and rolled his eyes—"far be it from me to say that most of these kids, including the honor students, are imbeciles, but—well, enough said. Right?"
He had invited her to come back to his office once a week—at least once a week—to practice mock interviews with him. Although Maize liked him she didn't know if she wanted to do that. All she knew was that their initial meeting had taken longer than expected and that her best friend, Lyla, would scold her when she joined her in the hallway. "So where were you?" Lyla would say, but Maize would merely shrug.
She returned to Hal's office the following week, during free period, and then frequently during the weeks after that. Yet they didn't exactly talk about interviewing strategies and college admissions. They talked about the same things she talked about with Lyla: movies they'd seen, songs they'd downloaded, favorite books they'd read, and the lobotomizing vapidity of the suburbs where they lived. Or rather Hal talked and Maize mostly listened and he'd praise her for being so sensitive and mature. When she could slip away from Lyla at lunch without being noticed, she'd stop by Hal's office with an orange that they'd split as they talked, offering each other slices and putting the pits in Hal's Bennington College ashtray.
Sometimes if Hal was with another student when Maize appeared behind his door, he'd stop the other student in mid-sentence and tell him or her to come back another time. Once she heard Hal yell, "Enough already! Basta!" at Josh Kaufman, a ridiculously pragmatic future pre-med type who wouldn't stop talking about his chances at Johns Hopkins; he'd been talking about that since he was twelve years old. Maize was surrounded by kids who'd been prepping for college since they were toddlers—kids who'd been trained to describe every crummy playdate and softball game and summer job as an "extracurricular activity," who'd never really been allowed to be kids—and parents who claimed all they wanted was a good education for their children when anyone could tell that was just a line. They were like Maize's mother—snobs who lusted after elite colleges the same way they lusted for foreign cars and expensive handbags and giant houses. Josh Kaufman jumped out of his chair and scurried past Maize into the vestibule.
Inside his office, Hal coughed out a laugh. "Oh my god—for this I get paid. I get paid to talk to these little morons," he said to Maize. "Remind me of that. Please." He touched her arm, then quickly withdrew his hand.
"Okay. I'm reminding you," Maize said. A little more sternly than she'd intended. "This is your job."
"Right," Hal said. "Right."
She looked at Hal for a moment. He was handsomer than she'd first thought, with his silky black eyebrows and fierce dark eyes, and the fine hair on the back of his hands, and his Adam's apple like Ichabod Crane's, and she sometimes tingled a bit after she left his office, where Hal slumped in his desk chair inhaling the cigarettes he wasn't supposed to light indoors and blowing the smoke toward a tiny window screen, telling her about art between puffs. He expounded on abstract expressionism and Dutch Master paintings and postmodernism. He told her that he himself was working on a series of post–Pop Art copies—fake reproductions he called appropriations—on weekends and after school hours. He would light up Camels and she'd breathe in his secondhand smoke deeply, as if ingesting wisps of his sophistication. The buzz she felt afterward was probably just the nicotine. In any case, she didn't tell Lyla about it.
"Sorry to bother you again," she sometimes said when she dropped by his office unannounced.
"No—glad you're here. Be with you in a minute, Maize."
"Thank you, Mr. Jamesley," she would say. She called him Mr. Jamesley in the hallway, where the secretary could overhear her, and Hal when she was behind his closed door. When she was with Lyla she referred to him as Mr. Jamesley again. She didn't want Lyla to find out about her special meetings with Hal; she didn't exactly know why, and she felt a little guilty since she and Lyla talked all the time—before school, during school, after school, and at night. Lyla leavened the damp humor of Maize's house with breezy reports of her sexual escapades. Maize especially liked to speak to Lyla after meals alone with her mother, at the table where Maize's father and ex-stepfather, Bruce, had once sat, where it was sometimes so quiet Maize could hear herself chewing. She'd grab the phone and let Lyla's words rush over her as though washing off the residue of misery itself, which would otherwise congeal inside her like something on a dinner plate.
Lyla told her everything intimate about herself. Seemingly. But no matter how graphic Lyla was about the details of her after-school adventures (he bit my arm, we did it backwards, I blew him forever, he ate me out for days), Maize knew there must be something missing. No matter how much Lyla told and told and told, the essence of what she did remained a mystery to Maize. It was a little like the feeling she had when she stood outside Hal's office and watched him, thinking she understood what was going on in there and inside Hal's head, which was filled with exotic things she hadn't learned, yet perhaps not knowing at all.
* * *
Now it was Saturday morning. Maize was going off to her first college interview—an "alumni interview" for a Vermont party school, held at the apartment of a recent graduate who lived on the other side of the county. Her mother had been firing warnings at her all through breakfast: "Don't be yourself. Don't be late which is typical of you. Get on the road in plenty of time in case you get lost and take a minute to fix yourself up once you get there. Your hair is always such a mess…"
It was mornings like this when Maize wished her father hadn't died and her stepfather were still around, if only to tell her mother to lay off.
On Maize's way out the front door her mother shouted, "Have your three words ready and remember to use ambitious!"
Maize concentrated on blocking out her mother's voice. When her mother wasn't looking, she rolled her eyes. The whole application process was ridiculous when you stopped to think about it for two minutes. The colleges wanted to know all kinds of irrelevant information, like your mother's maiden name, a famous person you admired, whether you wanted to cure cancer or design toasters or dig fossils. As if you could really know for sure at seventeen or wouldn't be smart enough to simulate different ambitions for different colleges, like a stage actor changing costumes in the wings. On her application for the school in New Hampshire, Maize planned to present herself as a nature-loving cross-country skier; for the hippie college in Oregon, as a budding social activist; as a feminist bookworm with a special interest in archaeology for the famous women's college in Pennsylvania; and for the Big Ten university in Michigan, as a smart girl who knew how to cheer on a football team and handle herself at a frat party although she didn't know how to do that and disliked sports.
The smaller colleges wanted to get to know you personally during a forty-five-minute face-to-face interview like the one Maize had scheduled for today. The larger universities couldn't care less, though some of them pretended by asking you for a photograph of yourself.
Okay then, Maize thought, as she turned the steering wheel at the end of her driveway and glanced at the dashboard clock with a sigh. She was insanely ahead of schedule for this interview—two and a half hours—but it beat listening to her mother criticize her and then, between criticisms, remind her that she needed to project confidence. Her mother took Maize's applications more seriously than Maize did, offering to hire an SAT coach and an "essay doctor" and listing dozens of colleges under the headings REACH, COMFORT, SAFETY. Today's school fell under the category SAFETY, but you could never be safe enough for her mother, who'd been the first in her family to graduate from college and, as a result, considered herself unhappy and frustrated at a higher level than her relatives. She was hysterically vigilant, clutching Vuitton purses like body armor and never letting herself be caught in public unless she was dressed "professionally" in pressed clothes, and her pretty face was prematurely lined from the strain of all the effort. She acted as though with any misstep Maize would drop down the social ladder and drag her along with her. Suddenly their Audi would be detoured to a poor neighborhood where everybody had broken-down jalopies and cheap shoes and nobody could get out.
Her mother had been even more vigilant with her ex-husband, Bruce, whom she'd badgered for years, correcting his grammar in public and telling him to tuck in his shirttails at the dinner table and suggesting he lose weight and wear better neckties and take up a classy sport like golf, until it became clear to her that she'd never transform him into the gentleman CEO of her dreams. Bruce would remain obdurately who he was no matter how much attention her mother paid to remaking him. When her mother finally realized that, she'd kicked him out of the house.
It had come to the point that Maize could hardly go online when her mother was around. Her mother refused to let Maize file electronic applications or request information from colleges if it meant surrendering personal information besides her e-mail address. She refused to let Maize order anything off the Web with a credit card. Although she'd armed their P.C. with firewalls and spam blockers and spyware and every other kind of filtration device, she remained convinced that they were only a few clicks away from the horrors of identity theft: ruined credit, ruined reputations, ruined prospects that would take years to rectify while others ran amok with their data. Whenever her mother lectured Maize on these imminent dangers, Maize wanted to say, Do you really think your identity's good enough to bother stealing? but she didn't. They argued enough as it was.
Originally, Lyla was supposed to drive Maize to her interview. She was going to drop Maize off and meet up with her afterward at a secondhand store nearby, where Lyla liked to buy sleazy camisoles and teddies. But Maize's mother exploded when she heard that plan. If Maize wanted to drive to the interview with someone like her friend Jayne—a class officer who knew Wellesley's median SATs off the top of her head—that would be one thing. But the notion of Lyla driving Maize in her blowsy mother Bonnie's car (a dented red convertible with a license plate that read BON BON) was unacceptable.
"You'd never get there in one piece," her mother said. "Much less on time. God knows what would happen to you."
Her mother made no secret of disliking and disapproving of Lyla although the two girls had been friends since third grade, the same year Lyla flashed the boys on the playground during recess and got into big trouble for it. She feared that Maize would be vacuumed up into Lyla's world of unsavory things. She made up all sorts of excuses why Maize couldn't come to the phone when Lyla called (Maize is in the bathroom, Maize is doing homework, Maize is indisposed) and asked her daughter if it was really necessary for the two girls to speak several times a day. Her mother knew Lyla was bright but an indifferent student. Maize once made the mistake of telling her that Lyla cut study hall, and her mother seemed to intuit all the other things Maize didn't dare divulge: that Lyla napped during calculus; that Lyla rushed to the girls' bathroom at the end of the school day to change from her plaid uniform into a leather miniskirt; that she caroused with older men and underage boys she'd met in chat rooms; that she was pierced and tattooed in places Maize's mother didn't even want to think about, much less think about adorned. She eyed Lyla suspiciously as someone whose "gallivanting" would derail Maize's ambition and make it impossible to get it back on track.
She was partly right, Maize knew. Sometimes Lyla would cock her head at Maize when they were alone together, give her a long assessing look, and say, "You've got potential, you know," and Maize would say, "Oh yeah?" It was exactly what her teachers and guidance counselors had been saying to her for years—You have such potential—only Lyla meant something different.
Maize liked to think of herself as versatile and open-minded, befriending girls as utterly different as Lyla and Jayne, each of whom thought the other freakish. (Jayne on Lyla: "A sketchy nympho." Lyla on Jayne: "She'd wear navel rings if she could find clip-ons.") But secretly Maize knew it was only her own wishy-washiness that made the two friendships possible. Nebulous, ambivalent, ambitious.
"What? You're, like, actually stressing about this?" Lyla had said to her last night after dinner, when Maize admitted she was nervous about her impending interview. "A fourth-rate college in Butt Fuck, Vermont? Where the cheesehead students like to smoke up and tip over dairy cows? Come on, Maizie!"
"I suppose you could call it a safety school," Maize said.
"For you it's a safety school, yeah," Lyla said. "Not for me. I'm the one who should worry." Through the phone line, Maize could hear Lyla dragging on a Marlboro Red. "Imagine me there. Walking though the snow with the frat boys and sorority girls. Wearing mohair panties to get through the winter. Shit."
Then Lyla rang off. She had to primp for a date with a twenty-four-year-old she'd met on the train to the city. "Catch you at the lingerie place around three tomorrow," she reminded Maize.
"Aren't you going to wish me luck?" Maize said.
Lyla grunted. "Aren't you going to wish me luck?"
* * *
As Maize drove through their hometown, she wished she could call Lyla again. The insouciance Lyla had loaned her had worn off overnight. Her mother's fears threaded into her own thoughts and tangled them. Her hand quivered on the steering wheel. She was no longer like Lyla, she was just herself again: a tall and dark-haired honor student who often got tongue-tied, whose almond eyes blinked and high forehead blushed when she had to speak in public, on her way to fail or succeed at something new. If she pulled over and used her cell phone Lyla would undoubtedly still be sleeping. It was only a few minutes before noon. On weekends Lyla was unconscious until at least two, her mouth dry, her long legs parted, her curls a lovely auburn cloud on the pillow. Maize had studied Lyla the times they'd slept over at each other's houses, until Lyla woke with a languorous groan to say, "Oh shit, babycakes. Is it tomorrow already?"
For a moment Maize considered calling Hal Jamesley. He was probably awake by now, wearing a smock or a spattered T-shirt and working on one of his paintings. He'd given her his unlisted home number during one of their conferences, swearing her to secrecy because no other student had it but telling her she could use it in emergencies. Yet even as he wrote out the digits on a scratch pad, Maize knew she'd never have the nerve. What were her opening words supposed to be? Hi, what's up? Do you know the weather forecast today?
In the village, Maize spotted a pack of classmates sitting on a bench outside the bakery: football players and the pert girls who hung around the boys scarfing down doughnuts the girls hardly touched. She stopped at a traffic light, looking straight through the windshield, hoping they wouldn't notice her. Not that they did normally. She remembered that the windows of her ex-stepfather Bruce's car were heavily tinted so she could see people but they couldn't see her, which was, she thought, exactly the way it usually happened. She didn't register very much for these people. For all her self-consciousness, she moved largely unnoticed through the hallways, speaking only when called on in class, and even then she mumbled. She imagined that years from now people would see her picture in the yearbook and think, Who was she again? Did I go to school with her?
On the bench outside the bakery, one of the girls threw back her head in laughter. Maize found herself looking for Bethany Campbell—the only truly pretty girl in the honors classes, and the only girl in honors who hung out with football players—before she remembered that Bethany had fractured one of her long legs in two places last weekend, during a ski trip to Aspen with her parents. Right now one of Bethany's gorgeous legs was in traction, according to the rumors that swirled around the school, and she might have to have surgery. Maize figured she should delight in a bad thing finally happening to perfect blonde Bethany, who was rich and popular and well-rounded, and whom even the female teachers looked at dreamily.
But Maize couldn't feel glee. She felt sorry for Bethany, whom she secretly liked as well as envied. The truth nobody wanted to admit—not the girls, at least—was that Bethany Campbell was genuinely lovely to everyone. She had a flattering personality. She wasn't stuck up and she wasn't competitive. She started almost every conversation with a compliment (I like your blouse, I love your earrings, you're so good at French) and she touched people's arms when she agreed with them. ("Right! Exactly!") She smiled and made small talk and congratulated classmates when they got higher test scores than she herself did. You couldn't go any further than that with Bethany ("Oops—gotta run!" she'd say before you could) but at least she made an effort. That was more than Maize could say.
The last time Maize saw Bethany they were standing next to each other on the cafeteria lunch line, and after Bethany told Maize she was looking really good ("I love your cheekbones") she asked Maize what colleges she was applying to. As it turned out, Bethany was also applying to the same school that was interviewing Maize today. "I'm not as smart as you, so it's kind of one of my first choices," Bethany admitted with her usual openness. "I don't know what I'll do if I don't get in."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Maize answered. She meant she didn't think it was a school worth getting at all worked up about, but Bethany interpreted it differently.
"Thanks. You're so sweet. Oh—listen," she said, touching Maize's forearm. "Wouldn't it be awesome if we both got in? It would!" She removed her hand to give a two-thumbs-up gesture.
"I guess," Maize said. But she'd glanced down at her plate of French fries and the rubbery burgers under the heat lamp, vaguely embarrassed. In truth, she didn't want any of her classmates to go with her to college. Not even Lyla. She wanted the chance to start completely fresh—dye her hair or throw her voice or change her entire personality and not have anybody complain, "That's not like you," with a look of gaping stupefaction.
"You know what, Bethany?" she heard herself saying. "Sometimes I think I'd just like to go to school in Alaska or something. Or someplace nobody else would even dream about going. You know?"
Maize had to stop herself from wincing. She felt herself blush. What did she think she was doing, talking like that on a lunch line? And to someone like Bethany Campbell, no less, whose dazzling blue eyes clouded in bemusement. They inched forward toward the cash register and retreated toward opposite ends of the cafeteria.
"I saw you over there with the Virgin Bethany. What the fuck were you talking to her about?" Lyla asked when Maize joined her at the lunch table. She was alert to any signs of defection.
"Oh." Maize touched her hair, feeling its coarse darkness more acutely after a moment in Bethany's soft blonde presence. She shrugged. "What would Bethany and I be talking about, Lyla? Nothing."
* * *
The traffic light changed. Maize was clear of the village and passing a ramp to the town where Hal Jamesley lived. She made a left onto the cross-county road, following the simple directions the interviewer had e-mailed her. She studied the road signs with the intensity of an illiterate, narrowing her eyes at each of them and trying not to get distracted by the tassel swinging lazily from the rearview mirror. It was Bruce's tassel from his high school cap and gown; he'd hung it there for good luck, as if proof of education might save Maize from bodily harm. This was his old Subaru she was driving—one of the few things he'd left behind after the divorce.
Bruce wasn't so bad. Her mother had insisted Maize call him "Dad" rather than his real name, from the minute he'd moved in with them, but as she grew increasingly disenchanted she decided that Maize should call him Bruce again. "Stop referring to him that way. He's not your father," she'd said to Maize, a few weeks before she banished him from their house. "He's not your father. Your father is dead."
Maize and Bruce had gotten along well enough. He'd never been anything but kind to her regardless of how miserably things were going between him and her mother, helping Maize with her homework, making her lunch sandwiches, praising her compositions and art class projects as if she were a genius. He had a conspiratorial sense of humor about her mother's craziness, shouting, "Silenzio! Silenzio!" when she nagged them both at breakfast about how sloppy they looked and raising his eyebrows behind her mother's back. He was big and lumbering, sort of a goofball, but he had a stubborn streak despite his seemingly passive exterior. He repelled her mother's efforts to improve him by nodding in agreement with everything she said and then doing exactly as he pleased. Recently he sent Maize a photo of himself from California with nothing but the phrase "Why Is This Man Smiling? How Are You, Babe?" on the back. She hadn't told her mother about it.
"My stepfather used to smoke a lot of Camels, too," she said to Hal Jamesley, the week she got the postcard. "My mother's ex-husband, I mean. I always wanted to try one of them." She looked at Hal plaintively, waiting for him to reply.
"I don't want to be a bad influence on you," he said. "You know, some sleazeball pusher.