And God, what a feeling when the bus pulled out of the depot, when the driver punched her ticket and said, “In Grand Rapids, head to bay nine. Bus to New York City.” The sensation of miles of asphalt putting time and distance between Delilah and the life that held her down titillated her. She wasn’t running from anything, she wasn’t running toward anything—she was just running for running’s sake, and it was a drug: the blurred landscape out the window was a soothing poultice for her itch. Go, go, go!

She transferred buses in Grand Rapids. Peed in the terminal, bought some peanut butter crackers because somewhere in her head was her mother’s voice nagging her about protein. She had both seats to herself practically the whole way to New York. She stretched out and used her backpack as a pillow, she read seventeen of the Complete Stories of John Cheever, which had been assigned in her English class. She noted, with a certain satisfaction, the difference between reading a book because it was assigned and reading a book because she wanted to. Which led her to her next quasi-intellectual thought, which concerned Henry David Thoreau and his desire to live deliberately.

And that, Delilah decided, was why she had hopped on this bus. She was going to Nantucket Island because she wanted to live deliberately, she wanted to choose her path every second of her existence, she wanted to cultivate a heightened awareness. She was in charge of her well-being; she was her own person. Forget the edicts of home and school, the din of the hallways and the obligation she felt when Dean Markbury handed her a joint. (She had to take a toke to be socially acceptable.) She was free of that now.

Sing it: Free!

The bus stopped just before crossing the George Washington Bridge. Delilah had had a seatmate since they stopped in Williamsport, Pennsylvania—a brown-skinned man of indeterminate ethnicity (Salvadoran? Thai? Lebanese?). The man was about fifty and stunningly handsome. He had bulging arms, he wore a tight black T-shirt and jeans, he wore a diamond stud in his left ear and a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He had nice feathery black hair, and he wore what looked to be an expensive watch. But what was riveting about this man was that he held a pack of cigarettes in his hands the entire time he was on the bus. He opened the pack, inspected the filter ends, counted them perhaps, shut the pack. Opened the pack, pulled a cigarette halfway out, dreamed about lighting up right there on the bus, the inhale, the burn, the satisfaction, the high. The addiction met. Delilah was fascinated with watching his struggle. The want, the can’t-have. The need, denied, minute after minute. It was almost sexual, watching this handsome, tough-seeming man, older perhaps than her father, want it want it want it. It was transferable. Delilah wanted a cigarette, too, and she wanted this man. The boys Delilah had known at school had wanted only one thing: to touch her breasts, to ogle them, bare. Would this man also want that? Did he notice her breasts? She breathed deeply, squared her shoulders, tried to edge her breasts into his field of vision. He wanted only the cigarettes.

The bus stopped; the mighty bridge loomed in the windshield. The man stood up, collected his backpack. Delilah was heart-broken. No! He could not leave! Was this even his stop, or was he getting off the bus solely so he could smoke? She wanted to follow him. Who was he, what was his name, where did he live, what country was he from, where was he going, what had he been doing in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (“Home of the Little League World Series,” the sign said). There were a thousand stories contained within this man, a thousand stories in Delilah herself and everyone else on this bus, not to mention the thousand stories of the 8 million residents of the city on the other side of the bridge. Delilah watched this man’s back—she would never see him again, of this she was sure—and then she eyed the cherry-red cover of the Cheever. It was a grain of sand. The stories that made up the world were infinite, like the stars.

New York to Boston, Boston to Hyannis. Out the window, Delilah saw the ocean. On the ferry to Nantucket, she scanned the local paper and found several ads for rooms to rent. She craved a small space of her own, a hole in the wall, a hiding place like Anne Frank’s where the Nazis wouldn’t find her. She was very far away from home, and yet she felt exposed and obvious, as though she had a camera trained on her. She disembarked from the ferry. There were people waiting on the dock, but none of the people was waiting for her. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who had traveled twelve hundred miles to get here, to Nantucket Island, her newly discovered spiritual home.

The best thing about Nantucket was that it fulfilled its promises. It looked exactly as it did in the magazine. If anything, the air was more rarefied than Delilah expected—it was fresh, and filled with salt spray, evergreen scent, and fog. Delilah found a pay phone on the wharf and started dialing numbers from the ads in the newspaper. The first place she called had already filled the room, the second place ditto. The third place ditto, and this worried Delilah, because everyone knew the third time was a charm. At the fourth number, no one answered. Delilah filled with a hot, prickly panic. This was an island—she had to find a place to stay. It wasn’t like she could just move a town over. The fifth place had to work (there were only five ads), but the man who answered the telephone asked Delilah how old she was (she said nineteen) and then what she looked like. Delilah had heard all the requisite warnings about people who didn’t have her best interest at heart. She hung up. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. She was dangerously close to screaming out, What have I done?

Deep breath. She called the fourth place back, let the phone ring fifteen times, and after the sixteenth time someone answered. A little old lady. Yes, the room was still available. The room was free of charge. The woman—Tennie Gulliver, her name was—just wanted someone else in the house, someone to take out the trash, which she could no longer do, someone to be around in case the unthinkable happened. Delilah would be responsible for paying a quarter of the electric bill in addition to her phone charges. Okay?