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showing women.
    â€œSo, what were you doing at the hospital?” Sadie asked.
    â€œA friend of mine, he—”
    â€œDon’t you think she’s hot?” She pointed to the picture of Jennifer Lopez I’d turned to. “I mean, I’m not a lesbian. But she even turns me on.” After that comment I didn’t bother talking about Damien. I asked instead what she was doing tonight. She said not much, that she and some friends were getting together at the Avalon, that if I wanted to come, I could come, that there would probably be people from UBC there.
    She took a black crushed-velvet top out of her closet. As I waited for her to return from the washroom, I paced the room and debated about whether I should go to Avalon. It would probably just make me feel lonely, but I wanted to go.
    A beige bra hung off the back of the chair, and I bent down and examined it. I imagined her nipples pressed against the inside of the cups, and flipped the tag and read the measurements on the strap. 32 B. I repeated the number a couple of time trying to remember it.
    It was strange—I could never really imagine Sadie having sex. I knew she had sex with guys, she was beautiful, and I was always seeing her in partial stages of undress, but when it came to the actual visuals, there was a blind spot.
    Black and white model photos were wedged in the right side of the mirror frame, and I leaned forward to study them. They’d been taken when Sadie was fifteen, before she’d stopped growing and was told she was too short to model. When she told me, I’d remembered a quote by Hitler from the History 12 textbook: “the Czechoslovakians are a vile race of dwarfs.” She looked happy in the photos.
    Ten minutes later Sadie came back in the room. Before going to the washroom her face had been pale and featureless, like a young girl’s. Now, with lip gloss, rouge and eyeliner, it looked like the faces in the magazine.
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    On the drive down to the club, I asked Sadie if she was going out with anyone and she said no. She had broken up with Steve just before the exams, and she wasn’t going to date anyone for a while. She wanted to leave her summer open, she said. The drunken chant of Offspring’s “Self Esteem” came on. She asked if she could change the station, and flipped to one playing Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.”
    At the Avalon there was quite a group of people—some I knew; some I didn’t—and they’d pushed the tables together to form one long table. I sat down in what looked like an unoccupied chair, and Sadie sat next to me. As she’d predicted, people from UBC were there, and I waved at Hugh and Anna at the other end.
    I was about to ask Sadie if she wanted anything to drink when I felt a hard tap on my right shoulder.
    â€œThat’s my place.” The guy was large, and bulky, and he wore a backwards Raiders hat and a down vest.
    I tried to think of something to say.
    â€œLeave—or I’ll make you.”
    I went to the other end of the table to join Hugh and Anna and Paula. Hugh, whose real name was Hugo, and was either French and spoke Spanish or Spanish and spoke French—I couldn’t remember—was dressed (as he always dressed) in light blue jeans (holes in the knees) a tweed jacket and a scarf; and he was talking to Anna, a Polish girl, who apparently modeled and who, when I met her the previous fall, had been going out with a guy called Bruce whom she’d said she loved and would marry and whom two weeks later she had to break up with—because she was in love with Hugh. As I sat down next to them I held out my hand for Hugh to shake. I guess he didn’t see it. I turned to Anna and asked how her summer was going. “Great!” she shouted in a tone that suggested she hadn’t heard what I’d said. She kept smiling and I couldn’t think of another thing to say, so I said