My father owned a hardware store in a small town in northern Missouri. My mother was a housewife. We were solidly middle-class, neither high nor lower end. I had done well in high school, but back in the early 60s the school did not offer a wide range of courses for the university bound. Therefore, my parents, along with my grandparents, decided to rack up their modest savings and send me to a boarding school for my senior year. I didn’t mind. I thought of the town as a quagmire—my vocabulary word of the day—sucking me down in the muck when all I wanted to do was fly.
I wasn’t a popular kid in high school anyway. I hung with a small group who turned their noses up at pep rallies, cheerleading, sports in general—anything rah-rah. We wore black, read the beat poets, listened intensely to LPs of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Miriam Makeba on our parents’ hi-fi’s and guzzled beer on Saturday nights bought by the older brother of one of the boys. Marijuana had not yet come to our town, nor any other drug, but it was all on the way. So very much was on the way.
I think my mother had sent away for brochures on private schools as certainly no one else from the town had ever gone. I believe she’d read some ads in the back of Ladies Home Journal. She landed on The Swift-Linton School in Pennsylvania that rather looked like a southern plantation nestled in the heavily wooded Allegheny Mountain range. Founded by Reginald Swift-Linton and family, it was now run by his son Governor Swift-Linton (name, not title) and his wife Samantha. I was accepted, received a reading list for the summer (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Moby Dick … ), and began planning my escape.
The drive there took two days. Very unexpectedly, for being the tough beat chick I fancied myself, I began to feel homesick for my parents even before we got there, probably because my mother was wiping away tears, saying how it was the end of an era and (overheard in a motel room on the way) Did we do the right thing? I had to wear sunglasses as we pulled into the grand, gated entrance where we were greeted by the Swift-Lintons, dressed exquisitely, he considerably older than she, a slender platinum blond. I detected a slight condescension, especially from Mr. Swift-Linton, towards my father. Daddy didn’t seem to notice but it tore at my heart. I would come to despise this prematurely white-haired headmaster, who consistently ignored me in favor of the DuPont girl, the Gordon Gin girl, the Kraft girl, and every other girl there in fact. He’d served as a judge for our drama auditions later that fall where I did so well I felt sure I’d gotten the lead, but no, I didn’t so much as have a walk-on role. “You were great, Cassie,” one of the girls said, “but you know why you didn’t get picked, don’t you?” “No,” I said. I had no idea. “’Cause you’re only here senior year and most of us have been here since seventh grade. Our parents have really lined the old man’s pockets, so . . . can’t disappoint. It’s the pits, I know.” This gentleman’s name would pop up in a most unexpected way in my adult life, but until that time he rode with me, disturbing the moments, sporadic as they were, when he flitted into memory, rather like a painful tooth that has the occasional brief flare.
And then there was the riding school. One of the reasons the school had looked appealing to me was that you could ride horses. I’d loved riding Quarter Horses on my grandparents’ farm from time to time. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me the required English riding boots, but I adored my Western boots and wore them proudly. I got some stares from the girls the first day, but that was nothing compared to the looks I got in the riding ring where I bounced along with the trot, as I always had, instead of posting, and later went flying on a jump, unaccustomed to both jumping and the sparse English saddle. The riding instructor, evidently sussing that no alumni funding would be coming from my quarter, wrote me off as fast as Governor Swift-Linton had.
The girls weren’t nearly so bad. Cliques had formed by senior year, so I was left with the roommate no one wanted, Jordan Kelly, set to be valedictorian. She was an attractive, petite redhead, but had no filters and spoke whatever she thought so pissed off everybody. The first night, as I was dressing for bed, she said, “You know, I don’t think you’re as well proportioned as you should be, anybody ever tell you that?” “No,” I said, but would worry about it for a long time to come, spending hours studying myself in the mirror and hating myself for doing it because really, where was the disproportion? I just couldn’t see it.
There was a phone in the hall of the dorm, just outside Jordan’s and my room, and every Sunday night after chapel my parents would call. “How’s it going, honey?” Mother would say. “Just great,” I’d say. Because I felt the full weight of their sacrifice and had no intention of relaying some of the less desirable aspects of the school.
I could hear every phone call due to my room’s location to the phone and none of them were like mine. The first time I ever heard a string of expletives came from a senior named Gretchen, who apparently hadn’t seen her father for over two years: “You cock-sucking, mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch!” And then she slammed the phone down. “That’d be her Dad,” Jordan said.
The cool girls in the school, the juniors and seniors, congregated in the smokers’ room in the basement before dinner. I didn’t smoke, but I wanted to sit with that group, which did not include Jordan, because I liked how they dressed, lots of black like me, and how they wore their hair long and loose, which I was beginning to do with my straight, brown hair. Mallory was from Greenwich Village, of all places, and played guitar. I desired to sit with this in-crowd, who’d actually invited me, but my parents would not give me permission to the Smoker, even though I promised not to smoke, so I spent most of my time in the library where I worked my way through all of the plays of Tennessee Williams. I’d already decided I wanted to major in theater arts in university, which I knew would crush my parents, so I was withholding that for now. I was good in science and math and there was a big push at that time for girls to enter medical school and other professions predominately filled by males. I played with the idea of becoming a brain surgeon slash playwright-actress because that’s how you think when you’re seventeen. It was an ambition that didn’t wane until I flunked out of university my junior year, the first in a string of disappointments to my family, at which point I scaled back to the modest goal of becoming the next Edward Albee.

I’d always felt at ease around boys whereas the girls at Swift-Linton, I learned, had no idea how to act. This became apparent when we had a senior dance with the boys school. They arrived in a bus from an hour-long journey and we congregated in the auditorium where a sickly sweet punch was served. At first it was all the boys on one side, the girls on the other, but the mingling soon began. I was always the first to be picked to dance and I never lacked a partner the whole night. “How do you do it?” the girls asked. I was confused by the question at first, but then realized that they had never been around boys except at these awkward, heavily chaperoned dances, and their fear and hesitation showed whereas I must have radiated come get me, boys! We’d dance, then usually I’d sneak off in the hallway with one for some petting. If girls were lucky, they’d get invited to the boys school for a dance by one of them. I never failed to get invited. So, as far as having any reputation at this school, it was for that. I didn’t mind. Had one up on them there. How lame not to know how to talk to a boy!
One night we senior girls, those of us who signed up, went to a concert in Harrisburg, which was a bit of a drive. I forget the concert, that’s how interesting it was, but I always opted to get away from school whatever it was. On the way back, around 10PM, we stopped at a diner to eat. I immediately cased out the L-shaped layout and headed to a booth hidden from the chaparones, which I instinctively knew to do. Soon enough, three guys walked up to the table, three hoods, my parents would have said. “You from that Swift-Linton school?” one asked, the one who was not at all bad-looking in that dark-haired, greaser kind of way. “You read the bus right,” I said. “What’s it like up there anyway?” he asked. “I always wondered.” “It’s just a school,” I said, causally entering into conversation while the other three girls at the booth, Jordan included, sat frozen. “I’d sure like to see it,” he said. “We live so close but I never been through those gates.” “Well, you can’t enter unless you’re a relative,” I said. “I could be a relative,” he said, giving me a look that brought the response he wanted: “Ok,” I said, as I could hear the girls gasp. “We could say you’re my cousins, but I’d have to book a time.” “Far out!” he said. “You pick a time, doll.” “How about next Sunday at 4,” I said. “And I’d need names.” So that got arranged, all in about 10 minutes. “Thought I’d have a cow!” Jordan said. “The old man’ll never believe they’re your cousins.” Jordan continuously amazed me. She was the smartest girl in the class and probably the prettiest, and yet the stone fear on her face around boys threw their attention elsewhere as it was clear she was a block of ice too solid to melt. That mouth of hers could take any of us down, but boys turned her mute. Before bed that night she said, “Did you ever think you might be a slut?”

I doubted they’d even come, but the next day I signed up my three cousins for a visit. Kyle, the leader, Lester, and Tommy. The Swift-Lintons would have to believe the lie because how else could it have been arranged? Did I mention the guys were riding Harleys? We’d watched them mount as they roared off from the diner, like Johnny and gang from The Wild One.
Sunday rolled around and I was feeling certain the guys would be a no-show. Still, I put on this khaki-colored, corduroy jumper dress that I liked—shorts and pants were only for sports—and took time with my hair, which was now a couple of inches past my shoulders. Four o’clock, nothing. But at four ten I heard a distant rumble, which grew louder and louder, every second bringing more and more girls to the windows until every single window was full of girls hanging out to get a look. I thought of them as lemmings, following me right up to the cliff edge, but then halting as I alone took the plunge. I braced myself and strolled down to the front veranda, feeling not a little nervous as I wasn’t at all sure how all this was going to play out. Governor and Samantha were standing there as the boys dismantled and headed up the steps.
Governor lifted his head to the heavens and kept his eyes closed a bit too long, then looked down at me as though I were a lump of poo stuck on his shoe, something he didn’t want to have to think about but had to deal with. “So you gentlemen are Cassie’s cousins?” he asked, in that supercilious way of his. “Yes, sir,” Kyle said. “Uncle Harold’s kids,” I added, “father’s side.” “I didn’t know you had family so near, Cassie,” he said. “Well, I don’t think you know my family at all, sir,” I said. “There’re a lot of us and we’re scattered all over.” I knew he’d consider that cheeky, but I had the upper hand now and it felt good. Samantha placed her hand on Governor’s arm, perhaps fearful that the conversation might escalate. “Why don’t you show your cousins the grounds, Cassie,” she said. “You have an hour until chapel.”
We headed up the steep dirt road to the side of the school that led to the hockey field directly behind it further up the mountain, hidden from a dense part of the forest.
“So here’s the hockey field,” I said.
“Ain’t that supposed to be on ice?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah, well, you can play it on a field, too,” I said.
“On horses, right?” asked one of the guys.
“No, that’s polo. This is hockey.” I was thinking what a dunce he was but remembered that I’d never heard of field hockey before Swift-Linton.
We just stood there, looking out at the field. Kyle shook out a cigarette from his pack of Lucky Strikes and lit up. “Want one?” he offered. “No, thanks,” I said.
“So what’s the chow like here?” he asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “We get sticky buns every Sunday, they’re good.”
I won’t say we were uncomfortable, but suddenly everything became a bit strained. Kyle continued to take deep drags off his Lucky while the other two lit up.
“What do ya do for kicks?” he asked.
“This is a girls school, man. Kicks aren’t part of the curriculum.”
“Foolin’ around with each other then.”
“Are you out of your gourd?”
He laughed and took a big drag of his smoke. One of the other guys, Tommy, I think, the short one with close-set eyes, piped up: “So you like it here or what?”
“Not really. It’s a bummer being cooped up here,” I said.
“You wanna get out of here?” Kyle asked. “You could come with us, I got a pad.”
The third guy, a bruiser with a bad case of acne, threw him a look.
“It’s OK, Lester,” Kyle said. “There’s room for everybody.” Then to me: “Lester just got outta county, so he’s crashin’ with me now.”
Here is where I’d like to say I never for a moment entertained this harebrained invitation. But for a moment I did. Of course, it could only end in tears, or worse—some kind of violation or death, if I let myself be dramatic—but my longing for independence was in the unnatural range. It’s something that had been banged into me all my life, the importance of making one’s own way in life. It was the American way. Any child still living at home in their mid-twenties was a loser. Any adult-child that had to ask their parents for money was a bigger loser. When you’re a seedling in this fertile soil of belief, you grow accordingly, and I had been a particularly robust seedling. It’s what prompted me to want to leave a comfortable home for boarding school, and what prompted me now to want to escape the many rules and regulations that went with this pompous-ass school. Of course I wasn’t stupid either.
“Nah, Kyle, I’m OK here. Counting the days.”
No one seemed to know where to take the conversation from there, so I fell back on what I’d just learned in Samantha’s etiquette class: “If you’re finding it difficult to converse with someone, just ask questions.”
“So what do you guys do anyway?”
“We’re kind of between jobs now,” Kyle said, “but sometimes we work at the mill.” The mill was a paper mill nearby that seemed to employ a lot of people. It put out a big stink that had all of us girls holding our noses as we passed by on trips to town. “So what causes that rotten egg smell?” I asked. “That’d be sulfur compounds,” Kyle said, “from the pulpin’.” “That bother you, working there?” I asked. “You get used to it,” Kyle said.
I was trying to think of another question just as I could see Kyle was likewise straining. After a bit of silence, he said, “You wanna see Tommy walk on his hands?”
“Sure,” I said. Tommy immediately flipped his feet in the air and started walking on his hands, the contents of his pockets spilling to the ground. We could see holes in the soles of his shoes. He wasn’t that graceful, but managed well enough. We all stared at him, silent, until he turned right-side up. I felt embarrassed for everyone, but wasn’t sure why. “Impressive,” I said, as he picked up his loose change and keys.
Then I thought of a question and asked if they wanted to see the riding ring.
“Sure,” they said. So we headed there. The boys said they’d never ridden a horse, only lots of horsepower.
After that we walked back to the entrance where the three Harleys sat like a blight on the blue-blood landscape. “Nice bike,” I said to Kyle. “47 Knucklehead,” he said, “suicide clutch.” I made a face indicating I thought that was cool, which I did, even though I had no idea what it meant.
They all three hit the clutch at the same time and started revving up. The loud noise brought the girls to the windows again though there was no sign of the Swift-Lintons on the veranda. We said our good-byes and I headed to my room to dress for chapel. Jordan didn’t say a word. She appeared to be engrossed in a book, but I felt sure I’d seen her red hair in a window. Some of the girls let loose with a smile as we walked to chapel, but only Mallory spoke to me. “I heard how you got those guys here,” she said. “Pretty cool. What did you talk about anyway?” “We covered a lot,” I said. “It got heavy.” “Wow, like what?” she asked. “Existentialism,” I said. “How freedom and action are fundamental to human existence, that kind of thing.” I wasn’t trying to be a smartass. I was trying to impress her, this folk singer from Greenwich Village, and I think I did. Was the hypocrisy that Swift-Linton was so imbued with finally catching up with me? Because I couldn’t remember ever lying to impress anyone. For the rest of my life the mere mention of existentialism would send blood to my face. I came to think that she’d seen right through me and had a good laugh with the girls in the Smoker. Then I’d remind myself that she didn’t know boys at all at that time, which would console me for a while, but there was always that nagging doubt, and as an adult when sleep was elusive and I’d run down every one of life’s humiliations at 3AM, that inane exaggeration always made an appearance.
What else is there to say about Swift-Linton? That elitist, patriarchal plantation stuck on a northern mountain that prided itself not on diversity, a word hardly known at that time, but rather on being “international,” with a few Canadians and, in my class, one German, Gaby Bach, my sexy, dark-haired suitemate, with her cool demeanor, who would come to figure so greatly in my life. It wasn’t all bad, but overall its foundation reeked of false pride and privilege, and I longed to get out of there. Sentiments kept tightly locked away from my parents.
Graduation finally arrived. Not everyone’s parents were there to see us girls in our long white gowns carrying a bouquet of roses when we walked to collect our diplomas on the lovely front lawn, but of course my parents were. Jordan’s aunt and uncle represented her family, and Mallory’s grandmother covered hers. For Gretchen there was a chauffeur with a limo. Where were all these rich, busy parents? I remember one girl saying her mother was in Bermuda and her father in Paris. Gaby had no one, but would be joining her mother who was vacationing in Manhattan. My parents had looked forward to this day all year; hard to imagine them being sidetracked by anything short of illness or an accident. I was nervous that one of the Swift-Lintons—it would be Governor—might mention my “cousins,” but that never came up. Jordan, who had no problem speaking her mind to adults of either sex, got her parting shot in as I introduced her to my parents: she kept staring at Daddy and then said, “I could sleep with you, if your wife wouldn’t mind.” They’d been warned, of course. Daddy laughed and said, “I think she would mind, yes.” And then she strolled off.

Of course, for all that sacrifice, my life turned out to be a spectacular failure. There was the flunking of out of university (because of that unhealthy desire for freedom and independence that rebelled against a tight schedule and intense study), and then, after returning and sticking with the program, getting expelled (for breaking curfew, which girls had but boys did not, which I considered unfair), and later the late-sixties move to San Francisco where I hung out with the Diggers until that became too patriarchal for me as well. But Haight-Ashbury—after the confines of prep school and university—felt like stepping out of a claustrophobic, oxygen-deprived world into one where I could finally breathe. And what a vibrant world it was. The loose and colorful clothes (bras to the wind), the trippy music, the drugs—so much fun (until it turned ugly later with hustlers out to make a buck).
Then, as I was hanging out on literally the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the spring of ’67, a charismatic guitarist named Charlie tried to talk me into a communal way of life down around L.A. where he hoped to launch his music career. “No one telling you what to do,” he said, zoning in on what he knew of me to lure me because Charlie could read people. “The world is what we create. Follow me, away from hypocrisy, away from those trying to control you.” “I don’t follow anyone, Charlie,” I said. “But I am you and you are me and all is good,” he said. Once again I wish I could say I didn’t give it a minute’s thought. But I did. Not long though, because, no, I’m not stupid. He took up with a girl named Mary, who wasn’t stupid either, but was terribly vulnerable. Next I saw him, he had a whole harem. At least Charlie, in all of his rambling talk, never said “between you and I,” and we all got to hear him enough so I know. I’d corrected him, half jokingly, but he remembered and never used subjective pronouns as objects of prepositions, the term “hypercorrection” putting him off enough to make an effort to drop it. We had Swift-Linton to thank for that as the hypercorrection had been the norm in my hometown as were certain pronunciations like “worsh” for “wash,” which quickly got scoured out of me.
I was nearly thirty when I finally found my footing. Finished university and then grad school where I was determined to get a 4.0 average and did. I went on to become an instructor in the Linguistics Department and rammed home transformational grammar in the introductory course as I haphazardly pursued a PhD, one or two courses at a time.
In one of life’s curious turns, I had ended up forming a close relationship with my Swift-Linton suitemate with the cool demeanor. We hadn’t been that close at school. Gaby kept to herself and so did I if not always by choice. But I genuinely liked her and we’d had some good talks about the pitfalls of being one-year girls, which Gaby could clearly see was harder for me because at least her parents were loaded. She once went to bat for me for receiving a low mark on an art appreciation essay. “Cassie answered basically the same as me,” she’d said to Mr. Wooster in his fussy little bow tie. “In fact, even better.” But not every girl could get an A, and I rarely did. Gaby and I had exchanged addresses and so it was after Swift-Linton that our friendship really took flight. I loved receiving her long epistles in the thin-papered, light-blue airmail stationary. Which for years she sent to my parents who would forward it to whatever P.O. Box I was using at the time. Gaby turned out to be the first in our class to have a child, not long after leaving school. A little girl, named Sabine, who unlike her mother looked to be honey blond in the photos. “I wanted a child and so I had a child,” she’d written. Which sounded like Gaby, who was as fiercely independent as I was, and well off enough to bring a child into the world, so why not? Her mother had been considerably older than most of the girls’ mothers, and she had not wanted that for her child.
Gaby was from just outside Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg, which was predominately Catholic. Neither Gaby nor I were believers, but she had asked me to be godmother to her daughter. “I want it to be somebody like us,” she’d written, “and so that is you. There is no one else.” I found the request odd given our talks on the evils of religion—we’d worn our atheism like a badge—but I agreed, especially as she’d added, “Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to raise her if something should happen to me, but I would like you to be there for her, as friend and mentor, if only by post.”
When Sabine was ten, Gaby asked if I would do her a favor and accept a plane ticket to come visit. My younger self would have been too stubborn to accept, but I had mellowed a bit over the years, and I wanted very much to see Gaby, so plans were made for the following August and off I went. I had never traveled abroad so it was an adventure, the trip to Munich, stepping into new smells, predominately a pleasant-smelling cleaning product of some kind, and the excitement of hearing German on the P.A. and all around me. Then the short trip to Stuttgart where Gaby and Sabine awaited me. What a beautiful little girl she was! As bold and brazen as her mother! “Hi, Sabine,” I’d said. “I’m Cassie.” “Of course you are,” she said in perfect English with a bit of accent like her mother. “You’re prettier than your picture.”
Gaby drove a Mercedes, which I knew was her family’s business in some way, and drove us to a posh cottage near the Black Forest. I was heady from all the new sights and sensations, reeling from the power and beauty of the dense forest with its strong-smelling pines and silver fir, the forest floor covered with satiny lichens, abundant moss and lush ferns. Sabine retired to her room and Gaby and I took a seat on the terrace with some cold German beer. She looked stunning, taller than I remembered, her long, dark hair in a braid down her back, the cleavage of her ample breasts exposed in a cherry-red halter top.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” she said, and we both laughed because I had been the one to teach her this phrase at Swift-Linton. “I have an illness. It’s something that hasn’t been clearly diagnosed yet, but it attacks the nervous system. Perhaps you noticed I walk with an unsteady gait? And the prognosis isn’t particularly cheery.”
“Oh god, Gaby, no. I’m so sorry, I—”
“Ah, I don’t want to hear that, Cassie. Of course you’re sorry, me too, but let’s not waste time on all that. I have something to tell you, only for you.”
“OK,” I said.
“Remember that day when you showed your cousins around?”
“Hard to forget that one.” And we both laughed.
“I had a tennis lesson scheduled for that time exactly one week later,” she said. “Governor was the instructor, of course, ace that he was, and as we walked to the court we could partially see the hockey field, and, well, his mind must have been on that visit because he made some crack about how some of your ‘Ozark clan’ must have migrated north, and I just smiled. I had this sense of power over him because I knew the truth and he didn’t. That power felt good because god knows we didn’t have any at that school.
“And then I sprained my ankle trying for a return and Governor took me to the dressing room to wrap it. His hands were trembling slightly as he looped the bandage around and that’s when I realized that I held another kind of power over him. Do you know what I mean?”
“Uh . . . I believe I do, yeah.”
“I was a year older than all of you, so I was already eighteen, and, well, I’ve always had these breasts, looked considerably older than I was. Governor was keenly aware of all that, but he didn’t want to act on it.”
“My god, Gaby, are you going to tell me he came on to you?”
“No, quite the reverse. I was puffed up with the power I held, so I took his shaky hand and placed it inside my top, held it strong.” She slid her own hand under her halter squeezing her breast, to show me how she’d done it. “‘I can’t do this,’ he said. So I placed my foot between his legs and that’s all it took.”
We sat looking at each other. “Governor?” I finally said. “Governor?”
“I know,” she said. “Who would have thought, huh? I always appreciated it that you never kept on me about who Sabine’s father was because you knew it wasn’t important, but—”
In a classic goofball move, I shot straight up from my relaxed position and nearly spit my beer across the terrace, only managing to rein it in by sheer will and a lot of hard patting on the chest. Then I couldn’t help but laugh—how precious!—which Gaby indulged with a sly smile, serenely resting her gaze on the wald.
“—but some day,” she continued, “she needs to know and, well, I might not be here.”
“Oh, fuck, Gaby . . . fuck,” I got out.
We continued to sit for a while, both of us focused on the conifers, sipping our beer and listening to what I learned was the peculiar drumbeat sound of a capercaillie. For some time we sat like that, just listening.
“Does Governor know?” I finally asked.
“No. I wasn’t even fully aware until graduation, and I thought it would be great to have a kid at nineteen. It was, too. No regrets.”
“Don’t you want him to know now?” I asked. We knew he was still alive from the alumni bulletin where he always appeared on the tennis court, still with a full head of white hair, probably in his early seventies now.
“I’ll leave that to you,” she said, “and Sabine. Now let’s break open something stronger. I want to hear everything about Haight-Ashbury, you rebel girl.”

Gaby had seven more years to live. Her letters dwindled as writing became hard for her. She sent a few tapes, which I will forever keep, but then her voice became shaky. I never let up with my letters, once a week, always. The last I received from her she had dictated to someone. She said Sabine would be attending her senior year in the States—not Swift-Linton!—and she wanted us to meet up. “You remember the conversation,” she’d said. “I know you do.”
I picture Sabine looking like her last photo: tall like her mama, svelte, wearing a tartan tam, with a smile so radiant it compelled anyone to smile who took it in. If all is going according to schedule, she is sitting right now in O’Hare airport on layover. She is flying in from the East coast to visit me here in California. She is seventeen.
When, at the same age, I walked out of Swift-Linton on graduation day, I swore I would never return. Little did I know that a faint tentacle had attached itself as I now began thinking, not unpleasantly, of passing through those gates once again.
Of course, I have no idea what Gaby did or didn’t tell Sabine before she died. But I will find out and I will fulfill my duty. Whether or not she will want to meet Governor, that’s her decision. But I fervently hope she does. I want to be there, to witness the shift of expression in that smug look. No one sought retribution, of course, nor money, nor anything really, only a casual introduction. But he wouldn’t know that. Not a first.
How luscious a thought, really: to be there. A desire not lost on Gaby, I’m sure.