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securing his pajama bottoms with his hand as she padded past him. He followed her into the bathroom, then squeezed by her to get the bandages and antiseptic.
    He sat on the edge of the tub, and she lifted the pajama top, exposing her thighs and belly. How unself-conscious she was! The easy intimacy, the gesture of trust, it all made him uncomfortable. Her deep tan was accentuated by the contrast with her white panties. They said “Hi, Sugar!” in pink on the front, and there was a kitschy little picture of a waving sugar cube.
    “This is going to sting a bit, okay?” She nodded and bit her lower lip.
    Jenner slowly stripped off the bandaging he’d used to cover the scrapes on her lower belly. As she’d gone over the wall in the backyard of her building, the bottle-glass spikes embedded along the top had cut her hand badly, and carved three raking slices into her lower abdomen. The wounds Precious Blood
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    were now raised dark seams of flaking clot, the skin around them unevenly bruised. They were clean, though.
    “Jenner,” she asked as he sprayed antiseptic, then carefully applied fresh gauze and bandages, “will I have a scar?”
    “I think you probably will. Yes.”
    Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes brimmed with tears.
    He hurriedly said, “Give me your hand now.”
    As he unwrapped the mitten of gauze and then redressed the cut, the tears came faster and faster, spattering hotly onto Jenner’s hands as he pressed the last of the tape into place.
    He stood, waiting for her to stop crying. When she didn’t, he tentatively reached up to pat her head; it was the best he could manage. She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.
    He saw himself in the mirror, the girl sobbing against his chest, watched himself put his arms around her, hold her stiffly as she wept.
    Christ. Why him ?
    The man ran along the East River in the dawn sleet, his hard paces splashing thin gray mud in all directions. The sodden hood of his sweatshirt was plastered against his scalp and neck, the cold, clinging garment heavy as the hand of God on his back.
    Despite the cold, he ran in shorts. He used to have beautiful New Balance running shoes, but his last pair had finally fallen apart over the summer. He needed his money for his projects, so he ran in work boots laced tightly around his knee socks. His feet had callused hard, and he barely noticed the pain of each foot strike through the uncushioned soles.
    His route along the waterfront was more an obstacle course than a path, zigzagging through crumpled piers, fenced lots, collapsing brick walls, and barren fields strewn with junk.
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    j o n at h a n h ay e s
    He was thinking about the house on East Seventh Street, what he’d done there.
    After he’d finished with Andie Delore, when he calmed down, he’d caught sight of the TV screen; he had sat there transfixed and incredulous. MTV’s Spring Break: Daytona Beach , an actual, real-life orgy, naked men and women, broadcast for all the world to see. He’d lived a life apart, mostly; spring break at his small rural university had been nothing like that. Or maybe he just hadn’t known about it; he knew some students went south to Florida and the Carolinas.
    But he’d never gone, never had any real idea what it was about. Even if he could have afforded it, no one would have invited him.
    How available they were, those girls! They danced for the camera in tiny bikinis, jiggling and writhing, all golden brown skin and glistening flesh, hot, slippery prizes for the mobs of boys. But it was the boys he really stared at, buff and vigorous in the sunshine, stripped to the waist, their skin smooth and tan. Had they never been adolescent, never had pimples? Where were their scars? he wanted to know.
    In the bars at night, half-naked girls lay giggling as boys lapped alcohol from the hollow between their breasts. The drunken girls kissed each other on the mouth as the boys hooted like apes, and the girls cursed