He decided to go to California and work for the Sierra Club or become a nature

He decided to go to California and work for the Sierra Club or become a nature photographer Human emotions were too difficult. He shared his stash (which I knew he had), and before long he was praising my orphan's maturity, the integrity of shoplifting in a consumer society and of course saying that I was older than my age (at least three years for his sake, I hoped).Wyatt signed off on my parole, then dropped out of grad school I had been a bad influence on him, he said. There were motels in the afternoon, flowery pastures, canoe trips I could ruin him if I wanted, and he knew it. I was only 13, but I was a knowing 13 when I didn't want to hide it, and mellow-voiced Wyatt was the first man I showed it to.Our little Circle meetings grew shorter and shorter, our trips in the country longer and longer. And then the time will come when she begins to feel her own power. She'll interpret anything as a little sign, she'll believe anything he says, she'll do anything to prove herself worthy of his notice. It was the early Seventies and I was just a garbage sack thrown out on the hippie trail.There's no passion in the world like that of a 13-year-old girl; she'll do anything for love, or what seems like love.

Someone must have seen something."And what could they have seen in a baby girl whose unnamed mother identified herself as Clear Water Iris-Daughter, and whose father, also unnamed, was called Asian National in the adoption papers? The nuns weren't interested in my origins, they didn't care about filling in the gaps of my life; they were into good works. "You have a bad day, you wake up with a dry nose, with dull eyes, you take a nap, you scratch your fleas - it's your life.""What are you saying?""I'm saying you've got a chance, don't blow it You might never have made it out of that orphanage. No one ever told me they gassed puppies and kitties."Cuteness is all that counts," Wyatt said. You don't usually visualise the dog pound as the palace of love. My family always called the animal shelter the pound, and I thought of it, if I thought of it at all, as an alternate lodging between loving homes. "Love and Death," he said, "Kindness and Killing." He thought he could be the catcher in the pound, everything depended on his keeping his orphans clean enough, making them just a little more appealing, giving them cutesy names like Barbra, walking them and running them in the park.

It was where he'd worked on weekends and high school summers It was the place that had formed his philosophy of life It was the only place where the Ultimates sat side by side. Lawyers, they always said, but it had to have started with the Church, all those little pledge envelopes for missions in Asia that Mama still fills out. I knew only that they'd found me in an orphanage run by Gray Nuns."You're not even interested?""I always figured it was fate.""Schenectady was fate?"Wyatt took me out to the animal shelter. "How did the DiMartinos come to adopt you?"I'd never asked, and they never told. A couple of other girls couldn't take it either and said Wyatt's voice drove them to drugs and housebreaking.

Wyatt was the first to ask me about adoption, what I knew, what I remembered. He put a lot of stress on it, and I know it would have upset Pappy if he'd known that rehabilitation meant bringing up feelings I didn't know I had."I've been reading your file, Debby," Wyatt'd say, once we were out of the Circle. The penalty was I would do some service, I would read some books and write something about them, I'd stay in school and improve my grades, and I'd talk my problems out in a circle of troubled girls, as we were called, led by Wyatt. I got to stay in school and no one knew about the Circle, or Wyatt.Celia would never have made it, she would have laughed in his face, or she would have stared at the floor. And the total value of the loot was over a hundred dollars, which automatically sent us to court and gave us a police record, and some sort of correction.Pappy had connections in court and with the police. Celia had connections, too, but all the wrong kind, and she was out of school and in a facility for girls two days after her appeal I never saw her again Me, I got Wyatt, and a chance to erase my record. He had that low, slow, soft voice that just cries out sex, sex, sex! and deep brown eyes that bathed you with attention without ever blinking.