Peaches

brushing off her rear end with both hands. Enrico laughed a little harder. Then he looked down at her butt. Birdie felt her face flame up again.
    “Well,” she said, backing away. “If you need anything, just let us know.”
    She actually couldn’t believe her luck. She had handled the whole thing so gracefully. She stepped onto the threshold, wanting to quit while she was ahead. “See ya.”
    Birdie turned to walk out the door, then turned back to give Enrico a little wave. As she turned, her feet caught each other wrong, and she fell backward into the grass. So much for luck.

Chapter Four
    “M om, you can’t do this to me.”
    Jodee McGowen looked in the rearview mirror of her maroon 1990 Pontiac and smoothed her Wet ’n’ Wild Passionflower-lipsticked lips together. “Honey, you did this to yourself. You know I’ll miss you.”
    Murphy rolled her eyes at the hypocrisy of it all. If someone was always “doing it to herself,” it was her mother.
    “Judge Abbott made it pretty clear—” Jodee added before Murphy interrupted her.
    “You’re ruining my life,” she said, and opened the door quickly to get out. She walked around to the back of the Pontiac and rapped on the trunk with her knuckles. The lock popped open.
    Murphy hoisted her green army-issue bag onto her shoulder and then slammed the trunk. She walked back to the open window. “This is worse than jail. Can’t I just go to juvie instead?”
    “How do I look?” Jodee asked, moving a wisp of her copper hair away with one fingernail. All of her fingernails were long and had tiny little seagulls painted on them above tiny littleoceans. Murphy and her mother looked nearly alike, but Jodee dressed to accentuate her femininity—low-cut tank tops from Wal-Mart, short skirts to show off her admittedly perfect legs, long nails that her boyfriends seemed to go for.
    “You look like a floozy,” Murphy muttered.
    Jodee frowned at her. “Watch your mouth.”
    But Murphy only shrugged. Her mother was the least intimidating person she’d ever met.
    Jodee looked in the mirror again, unsure now. “I happen to think I look very nice. He works at Pep Boys. His name’s Richard. He’s taking me out to dinner. Not bad, huh, baby?”
    “Are you going to Burger King or Arby’s?”
    Jodee lifted one plucked eyebrow. “I might just never come to pick you up.”
    “Tragedy,” Murphy said darkly.
    “I’m gonna run off to Mexico and drink margaritas every day,” Jodee threatened.
    “That would be fine.”
    Murphy backed up and gave a half wave. Jodee blew a kiss to her.
    “I love you, honey. See you in two weeks.”
    “Not if I die of boredom first,” Murphy said.
    The Pontiac pulled away, its wheels crunching in the white dirt of the long drive out of the orchard. Murphy sent up a silent prayer that Richard wouldn’t be that interested in her mother. She didn’t know if she could take another of her mom’s boyfriends. Then she looked around.
    Damn.
    Murphy dropped her bag and stuck her hands in the pocketsof her cords, surveying the orchard. The house stood directly behind her. In front, stretching back toward the road and to either side as far as the eye could see, were the peach trees, their tops low and dipped in the middle like cereal bowls, rows of white sandy dirt striping straight paths between them. The branches were dotted in tiny spots of fluorescent green where the leaves were sprouting. To her right were two other houses, about twenty-five yards apart, strange looking because they were both sort of sunk into the ground and more run-down than the main house. To her left was a barn, also worn and sunken, its red paint closer to an ambitious brown.
    It was different than at night. Murphy felt like the one thing that did not belong in the picture.
    “Well, hi,” she heard, and turned. There was Chickie Darlington, cuddling one of her dogs against her chest. The other stood by her heels.
    Murphy just stared at her. Chickie seemed to falter, her hands freezing on the enormous ears of her dog. “I’m Birdie,” she said, trying to sound bright in that fake way Murphy hated. Birdie. Chickie. Whatever. “This is Honey Babe.” Birdie held one dog forward, then nodded down to the other. “And Majestic. Welcome to the farm.”
    Murphy stared coldly at the dogs, then looked up at Birdie—a picture of innocence with huge brown eyes and softly wavy auburn hair. “What kind of name is Birdie?”
    Birdie’s cheeks flushed. “When I