Finally, helpless, she said: 'Do you like me?'

He said: 'You're beautiful.'

She was.

'Is it time yet?' She asked him in the darkness.

He looked at his watch. 'No.'

Faintly, through the board floor, came the thump of the juke playing She's Got To Be a Saint, by Ray Price. The Cavalier, Chris reflected, hadn't changed their records since the first time she'd been there with a forged ID two years ago. Of course then she'd been down in the taprooms, not on one of Sam, Deveaux's 'specials.'

Billy's cigarette winked fitfully in the dark, like the eye of an uneasy demon. She watched it introspectively. She hadn't let him sleep with her until last Monday, when he had promised that he and his greaser friends would help her pull the string on Carrie White if she actually dared to go to the Prom with Tommy Ross. But they had been here before, and had had some pretty hot necking going on – what she thought of as Scotch love and what he would call, in his unfailing ability to pinpoint the vulgar the – dry humps.

She had meant to make him wait until he had actually done something,

(but of course he did he got the blood)

but it had all begun to slip out of her hands, and it made her uneasy. If she had not given in willingly on Monday, he would have taken her, by force.

Billy had not been her first lover, but he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim. Before him her boys had been clever marionettes with clear, pimple-free faces and parents with connections and country-club memberships. They drove their own VWs or Javelins or Dodge Chargers. They went to UMass or Boston College. They wore fraternity windbreakers in the fall and muscle-shirts with bright stripes in the summer. They smoked marijuana a great deal and talked about the funny things that happened to them when they were wrecked. They began by treating her with patronizing good fellowship (all high school girls, no matter how good-looking, were Bush League) and always ended up trotting after her with panting, doglike lust. If they trotted long enough and spent enough in the Process she usually let them go to bed with her. Quite often she lay passively beneath them, not helping or hindering, until it was over. Later, she achieved her own solitary climax while viewing the incident as a single closed loop of memory.

She had met Billy Nolan following a drug bust at a Cambridge apartment. Four students, including Chris's date for the evening had been busted for possession. Chris and the other girls were charged with being present there. Her father took care of it with quiet efficiency, and asked her if she knew what would happen to his image and his practice if his daughter was taken up on a drug charge. She told him that she doubted if anything could hurt either one, and he took her car away.

Billy offered her a ride home from school one afternoon a week later and she accepted.

He was what the other kids called a white-soxer or a machine-shop Chuck. Yet something about him excited her and now, lying drowsily in this illicit bed (but with an awakening sense of excitement and pleasurable fear), she thought it might have been his car – at least at the start.

It was a million miles from the machine-stamped, anonymous vehicles of her fraternity dates with their ventless windows, fold-up steering wheels, and vaguely unpleasant smell of plastic scat covers and windshield solvent.

Billy's car was old, dark, somehow sinister, the windshield was milky around the edges, as if a cataract was beginning to form. The seats were loose and unanchored. Beer bottles clicked and rolled in the back (her fraternity dates drank Budweiser; Billy and his friends drank Rheingold), and she had to place her feet around a huge, grease-clotted Craftsman toolkit without a lid. The tools inside were of many different makes, and she suspected that many of them were stolen. The car smelled of oil and gas. The sound of straight pipes came loudly and exhilaratingly through the thin floorboards. A row of dials slung under the dash registered amps, oil pressure, and tach (whatever that was). The back wheels were jacked and the hood seemed to point at the road.

And of course he drove fast.

On the third ride home one of the bald front tyres blew at sixty miles an hour, the car went into a screaming slide and she shrieked aloud, suddenly positive of her own death. An image of her broken, bloody corpse, thrown against the base of a telephone pole like a pile of rags, flashed through her mind like a tabloid photograph. Billy cursed and whipped the fuzz-covered steering wheel from side to side.

They came to a stop on the left-hand shoulder, and when she got out of the car on knees that threatened to buckle at every step, she saw that they had left a looping trail of scorched rubber for seventy feet

Billy was already opening the trunk, pulling out a jack and muttering to himself. Not a hair was out of place.

He passed her, a cigarette already dangling from the corner of his mouth. 'Bring that toolkit, babe.'

She was flabbergasted. Her mouth opened and closed twice, like a beached fish, before she could get the words out. 'I-I will not! You almost k-you-almost-you crazy bastard! Besides, it's dirty!'

He turned around and looked at her, his eyes flat. 'You bring it or I ain't taking you to the fuckin fights tomorrow night.'

'I hate the fights!' She had never been, but her anger and outrage required absolutes. Her fraternity dates took her to rock concerts, which she hated. They always ended up next to someone who hadn't bathed in weeks.

He shrugged, went back to the front end, and began jacking.

She brought the toolkit, getting grease all over a brandnew sweater. He grunted without turning around. His teeshirt had pulled out of his jeans, and the flesh of his back was smooth, tanned, alive with muscles. It fascinated her, and she felt her tongue creep into the corner of her mouth.

She helped him pull the tyre of the wheel, getting her hands black. The car rocked alarmingly on the jack, and the spare was down to the canvas in two places.

When the job was finished and she got back in, there were heavy smears of grease across both the sweater and the expensive red skirt she was wearing.

'If you think-' she began as he got behind the wheel.

He slid across the seat and kissed her, his hands moving heavily on her, from waist to breasts. His breath was redolent of tobacco; there was the smell of Brylcreem and sweat. She broke it at last and stared down at herself, gasping for breath. The sweater was blotted with road grease and dirt now. Twenty-seven-fifty in Jordan Marsh and it was beyond anything but the garbage can. She was intensely, almost painfully excited.

'How are you going to explain that?' he asked, and kissed her again. His mouth felt as if he might be grinning.'

'Feel me,' she said in his car. 'Feel me all over. Get me dirty.'

He did. One nylon split like a gaping mouth. Her skirt, short to begin with, was pushed rudely up to her waist. He groped greedily, with no finesse at all. And something – perhaps that, perhaps the sudden brush with death – brought her to a sudden, jolting orgasm. She had gone to the fights with him.

'Quarter to eight,' he said, and sat up in bed. He put on the lamp and began to dress, His body still fascinated her. She thought of last Monday night, and how it had been. He had