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blue Buick that May and announced they were going to visit Aunt Patsy in New Jersey. “If you think I’m stayin’ in this godforsaken excuse of a town while your daddy parades around with that whore girlfriend of his, you’ve got another think coming,” Mama said, throwing the car into reverse and slamming into the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She didn’t even stop to look at her crumpled rear fender.

    Visit? How about move in with her mother’s older sister, Aunt Patsy, a part-time hairdresser and full-time alcoholic? By fall, Maryn had emerged from puberty and entered junior high, two inches taller, wearing a B cup, tight-fitting new acid-washed Jordache jeans, and a glamorous blond hairdo courtesy of Aunt Patsy. Also by fall, Maryn’s mother had joined Aunt Patsy at the hair salon—and the liquor store.
    Maryn’s first few weeks of junior high had been a triumph. A petite brunette named Brooke sat in front of her in homeroom and took pity on the new girl, inviting her to sit at the cool girls’ table at lunch. She’d gotten invited to sleepovers and skating parties and spent hours on the phone with Brooke every night, rehashing who-likes-who, with her mother and aunt relishing every second of Maryn’s newfound popularity.
    In October, she’d gotten invited to her first boy-girl function: a Halloween party. The invitation threw her mother and Aunt Patsy into a frenzy of sewing and thrift-store shopping. On the appointed night, Maryn slithered into Heather Palumbo’s basement rec room dressed in a towering black wig and a flowing, long-sleeved black sheath with a deeply plunging neckline. Her face had been whitened with pancake makeup, her eyes rimmed and outlined with stark black liner, her lips lacquered bloodred, matching her inch-long fake red fingernails.
    All these years later, Maryn could still remember the impact her entry had on the party. Brooke and Heather and Colleen, dressed in ’50s-era poodle skirts, bobby socks, and letter sweaters, gathered in a circle around her, staring at her as though she’d just been beamed down from another planet. “What are you supposed to be?” Colleen demanded, hands on hips.
    “You know,” Maryn said, taken aback. “Elvira. Mistress of the Dark. Like from TV?”
    “You look,” Heather sneered, “like a prostitute.”
    Maryn’s cheeks burned with shame. She’d slipped upstairs to try to callher mother and ask her to come pick her up early, but Mama and Patsy had dropped her off and headed straight to Harlow’s, their favorite bar.
    When Maryn got back to the basement, she’d found that the girls had turned on her. The boys, however, had been a different story. They’d swarmed around her, laughing and talking too loud, bringing her Cokes and asking her to dance. In what seemed like an instant, she’d simultaneously become both the belle of the ball and the school skank—depending on your gender.
    If Brooke and Colleen quit calling, Alex and Nathan and Jordan (an eighth-grader) took up the slack. At first, Maryn was devastated at the loss of Brooke’s friendship. But her mother and aunt reveled in her sudden status as a femme fatale.
    “You don’t need those silly little bitches,” Aunt Patsy advised. “Every single one of them is jealous of you because you’re cuter and the boys like you better than them.” As the weeks and months passed, and it became clear that she held a surprising new power over the opposite sex, Maryn decided she liked boys just fine.
    Not that she didn’t miss having a best girlfriend. When Aunt Patsy lost her job at the Stylesetter Salon at the beginning of Maryn’s sophomore year of high school, forcing them to move to a smaller rental house in a different school district, Maryn made a conscious decision to reinvent herself.
    Before school started that year, Maryn hung out at the mall, studying what the other girls were wearing. She bought button-fly Levi’s 501 jeans and pastel Gap tees, quit bleaching her