It is Christmas, and Gemma has wandering hands. Beatrice is a woman who does not think you can truly experience something if you do not bring a part of it home. Her house is full of careful displays of conspicuous wealth, every vacation recounted with an expensive souvenir. She makes a careful distinction. Nothing here is a tchotchke. Everything is tasteful, perfectly proportioned, carefully displayed. Objets d’art, she says pridefully.

There is a maid who comes once a week to dust, and mop the floors, and fluff the pillows on the couch, and make the beds, and wipe the granite counters in the kitchen that are cut from one smooth piece of gray stone. Ethan and Gabrielle, who are three and five, already know what they can and cannot touch.

Gemma has never lived in such opulence. Her stepmother’s home is a forbidden kingdom, and she is a quiet, grubby pilgrim with wide eyes and grasping fingers and everything must be touched and examined and some things must be taken.

It is Christmas, and Gemma is cast out from her father’s house before the wrapping paper has even been collected. He calls a taxi to take her to South Station and she boards a train that will have her home in time to eat dinner with her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend who will last until roughly Easter before he decides he can’t deal with Carol or her drama any longer.

The light over the kitchen table flickers with the spinning of the fan. Gemma uses her fork to make a landscape out of her yams. Her mother looks at her with heartbroken eyes: here she is, her broken baby, her foolish girl, her delinquent daughter. Later in the evening, she sits on Gemma’s bed and pleads with her: I taught you better than this. Why do you do these things. What are you going to become?

The week between Christmas and New Years feels bleak. Gemma goes back to Saint Mags to be with the other girls whose families can’t deal with them over the long holiday. In the cold crawlspace behind the library, a classmate offers her a joint and say it will make her feel copacetic, which is a word Gemma has never heard before and has not heard since. The smoke makes her feel warm inside but she doesn’t like how fuzzy it makes her head. She is fuzzy enough already. She asks, “Is there anything that will make me feel clearer?”

The girl shrugs “Ritalin,” she guesses.

It is July, and her father calls the office at Saint Magdalena’s and says he’d like to have her up for a visit. Gemma cannot say no. He is not her custodial parent but frankly she has no custodial parent and he makes the kind of money that makes people shut up and listen. So in the morning, before the sun rises, she boards a train that will take her back to the city she left in disgrace.

Around ten in the morning, Boston looms out of the fog like some dark kingdom. Gemma clenches her hands on the windowsill. There is darkness in her now, and clarity. She thinks: what would Avalon do?