The goats walked and their pen mucked, Eve risked her father’s wrath over the gas bill and stood in the shower for almost thirty minutes, slathering herself with strongly scented bath gel and shampoo, cheap but potent things she bought at CVS. Even so, she thought she caught a whiff of feed and manure beneath all those flower and berry scents. To her knowledge there were no high-school kids in the houses behind her family’s farm, but what if someone she knew saw her walking the goats? She believed she would never live it down, and Eve had lived down a lot during her seventeen years, more than her share. That’s how she had come to be friends with the skeezer girls in the first place, because she had held her head high and refused to be cowed when the divas started gossiping about her.

“Skeezer” was an ancient bit of slang in this part of the county, older than Glendale itself, older than Eve’s parents even. Its origins, while murky, dated back to a time when this valley was true country and Baltimore seemed as far away as the moon. The original skeezers had something to do with hot rods-the boys who drove them and the girls who liked them. Liked the boys and the cars, that is, because cars offered escape. Eve’s mother often said she thought “skeezer” might be connected to an old comic strip called “Gasoline Alley,” whose main character was named Skeezix. Then she would start to get all nostalgic about other comic strips she had liked-“Mr. Tweedy,” the girls in “Apartment 3-G,” “Mary Worth”-and Eve would end up tuning much of it out. Eve’s mom was prone to memories.

Today’s skeezers might have been called goths at another school, although they weren’t quite that. Nor were they to be confused with “skeezy,” a more recent coinage that suggested a combination of sleazy, skanky, and sketchy. They were mostly girls who hung with the skater punks, mellow and nonjudgmental.

Yet even the skeezers wouldn’t be friends with an out-and-out redneck. The farm kids weren’t exactly at the bottom of Glendale ’s social hierarchy, just separate, assumed to have different values and ambitions. When Eve’s history class had read about the walled ghettos in Poland, she had thought that Glendale had managed to turn this idea inside out. The rich kids lived behind gates and curving brick walls, while the farm kids were left outside at day’s end, forgotten. Sometimes even the teachers seemed to forget that the rednecks intended to go to college, that they couldn’t just work on their family farms. That’s how dumb the teachers were. Eve didn’t know of a single full-time farmer left in the valley. Her father managed a fleet of school buses, and her mother boarded horses, while Binnie Snyder’s father sold farm machinery and riding lawn mowers. The Coxes were Amway reps. Even the kids who actually liked farming knew they had to have something else going.

Again, this was not a subject that Eve could speak of to Val and Lila, her new friends. To keep their approval, Eve believed she had to give up things she had once loved-competing in the state fair, making jams and jellies with her mother, participating in 4-H. She was raising Claude and Billy for the livestock auction only because her father had laid down the law, insisting that Eve contribute to her own college fund, and he wouldn’t let her take a job at any of the mall shops, although they paid much better than raising and selling goats. Plus, it wouldn’t give you a pang, selling a sweater at the Gap, whereas Eve had never gotten used to handing over her animals at summer’s end.

Eve’s father was rigid, and she had decided early on that the only way to cope with such an unmoving, rock-hard man was to maneuver around him. A curfew of 10:00 P.M. was ridiculous for a seventeen-year-old girl, but that was Eve’s curfew, and she wasn’t going to change her father’s ideas by arguing with him. So, since taking up with Val and Lila, she had learned to escape her room at night by climbing out on the porch and jumping to the ground. She figured this was between her and her conscience. And if she got caught…well, then, Eve’s behind would be between her father’s knee and hand. That was fair, that was okay. She knew the risk of disobeying her father, and she was willing take it. Besides, she hadn’t come close to getting caught. Her father was already in his mid-fifties-Eve was a late baby, born thirteen years after her next-oldest sibling-and a little deaf. He slept, her mother said, the sleep of the dead. Her mother did not, but if she ever heard Eve’s footsteps on the porch roof, she let it go.

Eve was naturally stealthy, had been from an early age. If there were a contest for keeping confidences, she would win that every time. She had started out by learning and then protecting her parents’ secrets. These were small privacies, things that could be concealed in drawers or tins of flour, beneath the loose floorboard in the barn. A cache of money (her mother’s), for example, or a bottle of whiskey (her father’s). No one ever told Eve not to reveal the whereabouts of these things, because no one knew she had discovered them. Yet Eve understood instinctively that the fact of these stashes was as important to her parents as the items themselves. Her father wasn’t a drunk-the level in his bottle stayed more or less constant for months, his breath seldom smelled. Nor was her mother saving up to run away or buy something outrageous. They just needed a part of themselves that wasn’t wholly known. Eve understood.

Over the years she tested them a time or two-sliding a bill out of the lining of her mother’s sewing basket, taking a nip of her father’s whiskey. Her mother’s eyes would look distant and troubled for a while, but the look would gradually fade. As for her father, he never missed a swallow as far as Eve could tell. Sometimes she wanted to tell them what she knew and assure them that their secrets were safe, that she loved them more for knowing they had things to hide, too. But she did not think her father would see it that way.

Now, however, she had a real secret, a huge one, one she must never tell. Eve had given her word readily, sure of her ability to keep any secret. Yet this one was so enormous she wasn’t sure how she would hold it inside, or even if she should. The knowledge already felt oppressive, so omnipresent in her thoughts that she thought she might blurt it out at any moment, much like this one joke her father liked to tell, about the self-conscious boy with a wooden eye who asked a girl to dance, only to end up yelling at her, “Harelip! Harelip! Harelip!” She wanted to tell Claude and Billy, she wanted to say it out loud, just to hear the words, but she almost feared that the wind might carry it away, over the hills and into the world.

Ms. Cunningham was always telling her students that gossip was a weapon, that talking behind someone’s back was a destructive act on a par with hitting someone from behind. Yet Eve was in the curious position of knowing even the meanest, evilest gossip could change a person’s life for the better. Eve had been saved from her redneck-girl existence by a horrible story, one made all the more nasty because it was the word-for-word truth.

It had happened more than a year ago, the fall of her sophomore year, on a field trip to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Eve had entered high school with the brief hope of starting over and forming a new identity for herself, but Glendale was not big enough to wipe out the knowledge of the dorky kid she had been for eight years, first at Meeker Creek, then in Hammond Springs. Eve was beginning to accept that she was a dork for life, a dork without even the consolation of being a brain, like Binnie, who was turning out to be some kind of supergenius. They didn’t share a single class in high school. Binnie didn’t even go on the same field trips, being a year older, so Eve sat alone on the bus to Philadelphia, odd girl out. She should have been used to it, but maybe you never get used to it.