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And not her sisters, though
it was true, last summer.

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Franny had once watched
through the staircase spindles

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as curvaceous Martie
and the ROTC member

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entered into a clothes-wrinkling
struggle on the living room

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couch.

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All that slow and
serious movement

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had seemed so utterly foreign
to Franny like the first time

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she had seen a newborn puppy
nurse or a cecropia moth

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make its way from its
cocoon, that she did not

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judge it by any
parental injunction she

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might have overheard.

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Martie loved the ROTC
boy, and he loved her,

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and Franny watched their
activity on the couch

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not from mere curiosity but from
envy and sympathy and worry,

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too.

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Heart aching, she sensed that
the sum of all that writhing

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could not equal Peg and Brick's
taking center stage at a party

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to touch-dance to Tommy
Dorsey's "So Rare."

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And suppose that Martie and the
ROTC boy's species of living

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room struggle were all that
were left for the rest of them.

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This impoverished,
privately formed notion

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contradicted all
that Franny had been

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raised to believe lay in
wait for her grown-up self.

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But there was a measure
of comfort in the fact

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that Martie appeared to know,
at that acute moment, exactly

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where she lay, and
that someone cared

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at least for a while
for her movements

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and her breath and her lips.

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The taste of the kiss
that Bob Prohaski

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had given Franny in the
Strawberry's dark garage--

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elemental, almost a little
bloody, reminiscent of the way

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that the old-fashioned porch
screens at her own house

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tasted when she pressed her
tongue to their rusty weave.

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I'm going to stop there.

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That's actually the
end of chapter 1,

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but it looks like we're
running fairly long.

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So that's chapter 1.

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[APPLAUSE]

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