"Jesus fucking Christ on a busted crutch – so what?"

Marjorie swung around and stormed out of the bathroom, the light of battle in her eye.

"What did you say?"

"You heard me, damn it!" Al's voice rose to a roar.

"Now you shut up and stop bugging the kid, or I'll give you a belt in the teeth – and I mean it, by God!"

Julie peeked around the corner. Her mother, her face pale with anger, was confronting her father in the living room. The teen-ager wrapped the towel around herself and scurried into her room shutting the door behind her.

Safe inside, Julie dried herself, wondering for the thousandth time what was wrong with her mother. Up until six months ago, they had been so close it had been wonderful. Julie had felt she could tell her mother anything, ask her anything, and her mother would tell her and everything would be all right.

Julie stared at herself in the mirror. It was them – those breasts, they had been the problem. She'd been taking a bath and her mother had come in, as she had countless times before, to talk. But instead of sitting down and chatting, she'd stared at Julie's chest until the teen-ager blushed and covered her body.

Without saying a word, her mother had gotten up and gone out, and ever since that night, Julie relized, there had been an enormous undercurrent of tension in the house, getting worse and worse all the time.

Her parents were still arguing, but Julie didn't listen. She didn't want to hear them. She put on her nightgown and got into bed with her history book. She'd meant to study earlier, but history bored her, and she left the reading and homework till last.

The argument died down and then Julie heard her parent's bedroom door slain shut. She sighed and shook her head. Arguments upset her and she tried to keep out of them as best she could.

"Julie?" Her father was rapping on her door lightly.