What if I could be taken to wherever Gregory Charleston went? Would it be worse than here or better or the same? Cannot stand another day in this kitchen … Billy says there are times in a life when all the stories break down, and how we chose to react then says everything about who we are.

For a time, her letters to Ted took an explicit turn—not toward him but about herself. “I want it more than both ways—I want it all ways. I only want a dick because boys look at me more than girls do and it seems a shame to go around empty-handed.”* She writes of lovers, but never love. She writes of fucking so frankly, it seems she’d shrugged off her upbringing in the ST like an old coat. If these letters are to be trusted, she seems to have spent an incredible amount of time pursuing sex, having sex, planning new pursuits of sex. In one twenty-four-hour period she had a trio of threesomes with five different people. Why? A compulsion, a fit, a need to outweigh all the dying with warm bodies, maybe. Living in the shadow of her friends’ deaths, she catapulted herself from bed to bed.