The party
Just like the majority of teenagers, Evie was excited about parties. She “floated” through it “in a stunned hush.” The air on her skin was “insistent,” her armpits were “sliding with sweat.” She kept thinking, “it had happened.” She was with Russell and she “liked it.” She assumed “everyone would see it on” her: “An obvious aura of sex.” She “wasn’t anxious anymore, wasn’t roaming the party squeezed with nervous need.” Her worries “had been satisfied,” and she took “dreamy steps, looked back into passing faces with a smile that asked nothing.” This imagery evokes a feeling of worry, for Evie is just 14 years old, she is stoned and an adult man fools around with her. The worst part is that her parents don’t even know where their daughter is.
An expert
Russell had become “an expert in female sadness – a particular slump in the shoulders, a nervous rash.” He always noticed “a subservient lilt at the end of sentences, eyelashes gone soggy from crying.” Russell did “the same thing to” Evie that he “did to those girls.” There were “little tests” such as “a touch on” a back, “a pulse” of a girl’s hand. Those were his “little ways of breaking down boundaries.” How quickly he could ease his “pants to his knees.” “An act,” Evie thought, “calibrated to comfort young girls who were glad, at least, that it wasn’t sex.” The imagery evokes a feeling of repulsion. A person who uses other people’s insecurities for his or her benefit deserves only contempt.
The boarding school
“Come September,” Evie “would be sent off to the same boarding school” her mother had gone to. They had built “a well-tended campus around an old convent Monterey, the lawns smooth and sloped.” The good thing was that the place was at least picturesque. “Shreds of fog” in the mornings, “brief hits of the nearness of salt water.” It was “an all-girl school” and its students had to “wear uniform” that consisted of “low-heeled shoes and no makeup, middy blouses threaded with navy ties.” This imagery evokes a feeling of boredom, for this is what Evie feels when she thinks about the place.
