River East, River West

She thought about how, in a movie, someone might take her hand and say, You're a woman now, and how untrue that would be.

You are so confident that what you know is the truth. Don't be so sure of yourself, Alva. What do you know of the world?

She told her mother the most important, most devastating thing that had happened to her and somehow it had turned into a fight.

But the sea wasn't a border, and no one was here to stop you from swimming out a litter farther each day. The only border here was the limitation of his own body.

They each had puzzle pieces that might never lock into a flat smooth hole.

She was alone and grown. And had somehow done the worst thing a Chinese woman could do, whore herself out to a white man

Just a child" but it wasn't true. Something broke and suddenly you were no longer a kid. You were out on your own and no one asked questions. No one paid attention.

She still said nothing. You are fifteen and this is living life, she thought. She'd be like Serena or Blair or those girls on TV. Powerful.

If what she had done made her compromised, or mature, or if both were the same. She tried casting last night as an age-defining Graduate-style affair. One she'd later look back on with some distance, laugh off as a wild anecdote. But there was only the hollowness in her gut, and the memory of warm, wet liquid dripping down her stomach.