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THE FIRST TIME she lets a boy touch her is in December, just before her 18th birthday. The day the rain starts. It usu ally doesn't begin until January or February, but this year, the rain comes early. Buckets and buckets of water dump down against the cement, against the strip malls, against the freshly painted stucco homes. In Southern California, the further you get from the ocean, the less interesting it becomes. The beach boardwalks and bronzecolored beauties from the TV shows are replaced with high-desert heat, dust storms, and barren foothills. The annual precipitation is laughable, but for two weeks each year, the skies cloud over, and it rains with vengeance. The sandy soil can't absorb the water fast enough, so the streets become rivers, hill sides become hill slides, and then as quickly as it comes, it goes away. 4
Skylish is a senior in high school and her mother is out of town for the annual Herbs4Life convention. She's in Atlanta or Dallas or Vegas, one of those convention cities where, each year, thousands of stay-at-home moms and drop-out dads meet up for a weekend of inspirational speakers and selling workshops designed to help them be the very best work-from-home vitamin sales people that they can possibly be. Reverse aging, fight obesity, a cure for cancer. It's all there. The little pills, the gel caps, the powered drinks, the essential oils. First you pressure your family to buy, then your friends and your friends' friends. Once people start buying, then they can start selling too. And for every pill that's sold in her network, Skylish's mother gets a share of the profits. According to the start-up kit manual, the network can grow infinitely. There is no limit to the amount of money you can make, the lives you can save. Her mother calls it genius, but Skylish calls it pyramid panhandling.
Things are really happening, her mother says over the phone the morning the rain starts. Skylish is in the kitchen with the cordless wedged between her ear and her shoulder. As her mother talks, Skylish hurriedly spreads margarine and peanut butter over two slices of bread that she thawed out from the freezer for J.J.'s breakfast.
I met a woman...