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Show Woodworth/l6l me that time she caught me playing with matches. She said that she had never really believed that parents should hit their kids, but that it was for my own good, and that she always felt bad about it. She said that she knew you and Jake used to go skinny dipping in the pond. But she'd decided not to do anything about it. She also knew that you and Jake used to sneak out at night. But she didn't do anything about that, either. She thought it was a stage, and that you would grow out of it. She asked-me if I thought she was doing the right thing." "What did you say?" "How the fuck should I know? I was just trying to figure out what she was talking about. She asked me if I resented her for hiring Mary Gallagher, and if I thought she hadn't spent enough time with us. She asked me if I thought she should have been more open with us in talking about sex. I mean, Marty, I've never even heard Mom say the word "sex" out loud before." The girl in the apartment across the alley disappears out of sight, carrying something wrapped in aluminum foil in her hands. Marty sits up and stares through the darkness at the picture of the cracked, sepia-colored picture of the ship. Her mind is going numb. "Then she went into this whole long thing about how she had wanted a bicycle, but her mother would never let her have one because she said that it was too unsafe for her to ride it around where they lived. So whenever her friends went anywhere on bicycles, she had to run along behind and could never keep up. Then, when she got her license, she borrowed her mother's car one day, took it out, and smashed it up. She said she got going down a hill, and knew that when she got to the bottom, |