"Yes," she said. "It was as though no time had passed." A shiver went up his back. He was wide awake. "No time had passed." "Yes. I was living with a nice family in Oakville who were sending me to a nice girls' school where we wore blazers over our tunics, and I had a permanent note excusing me from gym classes. In a building full of four hundred girls going through puberty, one more fat shy girl who wouldn't take her top off was hardly noteworthy." "The family, they were nice. WASPy. They called me Cheryl. With a Why. When I asked them where I'd been before, about 'Auntie,' they looked sad and hurt and worried for me, and I learned to stop. They hugged me and touched my wings and never said anything -- and never wiped their hands on their pants after touching them. They gave me a room with a computer and a CD player and a little TV of my own, and asked me to bring home my friends. "I had none. "But they found other girls who would come to my 'birthday' parties, on May 1, which was exactly two months after their son's birthday and two months before their daughter's birthday. "I can't remember any of their names. "But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinner and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table, but I couldn't sit there, though I can't remember why." "Wait a second," Alan said. "You don't remember?" She made a sad noise in her throat. "I was told I was welcome, but I knew I wasn't. I know that sounds paranoid -- crazy. Maybe I was just a teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don't know what it was. I knew then. They knew it, too -- no one blamed me. They loved me, I guess." "You stayed with them until you went to school?" "Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse, more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee's and drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one bugged me.