There is nothing interesting to say about those last years of her virginity. She had no choice. She got a job. Three afternoons a week she emptied the drug store’s trash bins, washed the day’s utensils and tupperware in the staff kitchenette, and delivered paper bags of pills to the thresholds of the town’s frail housebound, including the old folks’ lodge. The job was mostly walking: sidewalks, gravel, ditches, lawns, the pine-branched shoulders of potholed sidestreets. She was not required to climb into the neighbourhoods that creeped the flanks of Cloudmaker or Mount Cascade, nor did she have to cross the highway that split the valley into north and south, sun and shadow. As she walked through the old, dark yolk of the town, she trained her thoughts on the cannibal, weedy and fox-faced, rags rank with death, and how someday soon he’d emerge from the coal mines to take her.

Through the first month of the job, which was also her first month at the high school, she scuffled under the sun’s perigean burn, which fell thin and needling for weeks and weeks, until, suddenly, snow. The wide and complacent river of sky overhead went staticky. Nightfox, Deadman, and Sulphur Mountain’s faces were dashed wet. The town molted white. All the mountains left and came back wearing tattered mantles, lace habits, sheepskin horse blankets. The valley smelled new, like the century had changed. The day after it snowed she turned fourteen.

By then, she thought, dozens, if not hundreds, of people had watched her as she walked with the white paper pill bags: teachers, hockey players, her father’s garrulous friends, members of the sleek caste who drove around after school in coupes and pick-ups registered in their own names, unaccountable to schoolwork or timeclock, seats filled with lieutenants and lackeys, each of whom increased her humiliation by an order of magnitude. The job, when compared to her cousin Melissa’s position filling tanks on the highway, or her best friend Hailey’s post at the video rental place—which had a porn section but also one day an actor from Star Trek came in and rented Boys Don’t Cry—at least did not require much speaking. But just existing publicly fixed a spotlight on her inconsolable ugliness. She walked stiff-armed from locker to drug store to address to address to drug store to home, hair strung across the bulging glare of her forehead, glasses and braces glinting, damp secreting from every fold of breast and belly. The sun dropped behind Deadman before the bell rang, leaving the sky a bitter, glowing blue. Full black by four. Her parka hid the wet halos round her armpits.

As she walked, she practiced speaking with the cannibal. The sidewalks hadn’t yet been cleared, and her socks were damp at the ankles, and, via a cheap seam, from her left sole up.

“How is it you came to be here?” the cannibal asked her, firelight flickering over his face. His lair wasn’t in the timbered mouth of the old mine, which was trashed with graffiti and beer cans, but tucked in a ventilation drift further up the slope, where deadfall spruce shielded his fire’s glow.

“I had no choice,” she said. Or, “I was born here,” or, “My parents made me.”

“But how do you stand it?” asked the cannibal.

“I can’t,” she said. Or, “It won’t be much longer.”

The conversations were difficult work and occupied her fully; sometimes she put on an arch expression and tested the sentences in a murmur to see if they were satisfying. She wanted to say things to him that only she could say. She was striving to get to the part where he’d convince her to come away, but it was a struggle because she had only a nebulous grasp on her own role in the things that happened to her. She knew, however, that once she agreed, he would take her west, through the dense conifers along Cloudmaker’s hull, and when the mountain tapered into the green glacial lakes they’d turn north and trek into the roadless, unpeopled valleys beyond.

She pressed the yellowing button at a pastel split-level with three snowy lumps in the yard. In eight months the lumps would reveal themselves to be juniper bushes. The man was old and leaky, he whistled his sibilants and tipped a quarter. She didn’t know to be insulted by this, like a more experienced girl might. A quarter was worth half a can of Coke with her staff discount. This same man had once farted, mid-handover, while meeting her eyes. Left to her own devices she would have avoided him forever. But her parents had made clear that the only thing a quitter deserved was derision, and they easily listed all that she’d squandered with her laziness: swimming lessons, piano lessons, Girl Scouts, Air Cadets. So she continued to ring the bell at the pastel split-level every fourth Wednesday, offering up exact change counted out beforehand by the assistant manager.

Likewise, a more experienced girl might have peeked at the names of the medicines and researched their implications. But sickness seemed as unknowable as religion, and boredom made her impervious to both. Her only experience of religion was a red bible desultorily handed out at a school assembly. She took it because it was a book; she even started to read it because she understood, dimly, that it might be useful, in the same way she’d spent one of her paycheques on a copy of The Merck Manual the last time her mother had brought her to the mall in the city. Not because she had aims at studying medicine, or even particularly enjoyed biology, but because she had a sense there were things which her lax, friendly teachers neglected. Hard facts, old ones, drilled with consistency. Reading the bible, she guarded herself against accidental conversion with a pink highlighter, which she used on the passages she didn’t like because of their cruelty to animals or women. But this cynical reading held no pleasure, and she soon returned to her library books, which were not explicitly instructive, sexually, but had exciting art on their covers, and stirred her up with night gropings among cave-people, or women science officers pitilessly tortured while the spaceship slept.

She took the farting man’s twenties and the quarter into her left jacket pocket, fist closed over them, and stepped in her own prints until she was back on the street. Next, she trudged to a shadowy bungalow with an uncertain front door—there were too many pines in the yard to tell where it was until she was upon it. A child answered her knock. She was obliged to take off her boots, but she kept her coat on as she followed him to the chilly living room, where a woman lay, contorted like wrought iron, in a recliner with blankets and plastic railings. The woman called for her wallet and her claws scrabbled for a long time at its folds. The recliner took up most of the room, along with little tables bearing detritus. There was no TV, and the walls were mostly window, looking out into the yard’s grim pines. She dropped the woman’s change on a table and crammed her feet into her boots without untying them. She did not recognize the little boy from school but she pitied him, living here. Adults, in her experience, did not lie down in the middle of the day, and living rooms were full of magazines and lamps, not pill bottles and tubing.

“You will be very beautiful,” the cannibal told her. His mouth was wet from the dinner with which he’d tantalized her. Herself, hollowed with abstention.

She didn’t say, “Doubtful.” She said, “How do you know?”

“Oh,” he said. “It’s clear to anyone who sees you.”

“I don’t want anyone to see me.”

The cannibal was an officer, or a priest, and generally a liar, which did not bother her because she hadn’t yet met a person who’d lied to her. She knew her parents, for instance, thought she was a rude, malevolent girl, but they’d never claimed otherwise. They just spoke in low voices, when everyone was meant to be in bed, about how it was possible she’d turned out so awful. The cannibal wore mangey furs that he’d mostly taken from ungulates he’d skinned himself. Hunched against the snow wind, in his pretty, bitten accent, he said the same sentences over and over, as she reworked them, as he told her about her future.

The old folks’ home was the final stop on her route. She did it last because although it was comfortable and easy—she just had to follow the curving corridor clockwise or counterclockwise until the correct number on the door appeared—it was somehow more horrible.

321 had a wreath made of plastic orange and brown leaves with a cartoon of a smiling squirrel. She knocked. The corridor was empty of denizens and aides. She stood listening. She began to count. She counted to twenty, fifty. She didn’t know what she would do if the old man didn’t answer. Probably she would walk back to the drug store. She knocked again, as loudly as she dared, and began counting again. At thirty-four, the door opened.

“Ah, it’s the after-school girl,” the old man, whose name was Sidney, announced. The TV was showing the five o’clock news. Sidney was famous at the drug store for his loquaciousness. “Girls don’t look like you anymore,” he’d said once. The assistant manager told her to take it as a compliment, but she hadn’t understood the compliment. Another time, she was stocking product, elbow deep in the grime of the lower shelves, and he’d dragged his finger along her back as he walked by. A straight, confident line across the bare skin. She’d bolted up. He’d sucked that fingertip as he shuffled on, giggling. She needed to know how she’d looked from his vantage: how exposed, how folded, the waist of her jeans low as she crouched, the hem of her shirt high as she bent, the studs of her belt biting her hips, how fat, how stupid, how stupid she always looked.

Sidney chattered at her as he took the white paper bag, opened a drawer to rummage for cash, accepted his change. His accent sounded exactly like the cannibal’s. He’d come to work in the mines in his youth. She had nothing to say to him. As the door closed, her silence shamed her. A better person would speak to the old man. But she never did. She’d never acclimated to the sound of her own voice, and using it made her heart rattle and the sweat rise. Her mind was full, but full of things that were unspeakable.

Now the sky had narrowed itself into sideways needles of snow, and she had to walk back to the drug store hunched, her eyelashes clumping into ice, her chin tucked into the moist cave of her collar. Her jacket’s metal zipper threatened to stick to her lip and tear off the skin, so she sucked on the hard, icy nub till it was warm.

“I will devour you,” the cannibal promised.

“When?” she said.

Inside the drug store she stamped her boots, acknowledged the older girls working the cash by lowering her eyes in submission. Her return stirred a wave of anticipation; their shifts ended when hers did. She had the sense they waited in bored stasis all day for her to arrive so they could ask questions like, “Do you have a boyfriend?” They felt a need to talk to her as she shook out their trash into her bag, elbows clamped to her ribs, but she had no responses for them, either.

Her official duties were listed in order of importance on the fridge in the back room, beside the office, near the safe, and she would consult it when she needed an idea for more work to do. The list said AFTER-SCHOOL GIRL, and the top three duties were emptying the trash, washing the staff’s lunch dishes, and deliveries. If she finished early she might clean the microwave, stock shelves, or refill the pharmacy’s drawers with empty pill bottles. Regardless, the time she spent inside the drug store went slowly, though it did not seem to bother the people who spent all day there. The young, exotic cashiers, the disappointed older ones. The assistant manager in the back office and the frazzled, self-important pharmacists, all men.

In her second year she was promoted to cashier, but only on Sundays, when it was her, one of the older girls, and the owner, Randy. On Sundays most of the trash bins stayed relatively empty, but the pharmacy’s giant orange bin would fill up with glossy, peeled label backs and empty beer cans. He drank the same brand her father drank. Randy had originally opened the drug store with his wife—he the pharmacist, she the manager—but then Randy moved out to a ranch in the foothills with his girlfriend and his wife stopped coming to the store at all. Randy himself drove the white paper bags to any customers who lived in the higher altitude neighbourhoods. His pickup was as old as her father’s, but blue. He was a small, loud man with a stringy brown combover imprinted across his cranium like the footprint of a chicken or a dinosaur. The volume of empty beer cans did not shock her because she had never been drunk and didn’t have an idea of what a reasonable number of Sunday beer cans behind the pharmacy counter might be.

When summer came, the tourists swarmed and she was promoted to full-time cashier. She tended an obsession with the vampire who worked across the street. He rushed in one hot, quiet afternoon to buy bandages, not band-aids but a serious roll of gauze, and when he produced a twenty from his apron pocket, he paused, gave her a colluding grin, and asked for a pack of Du Maurier Kings.

This was the day she was wearing Hailey’s little brother’s sandals, because she had stormed out of the house barefoot and walked forty minutes down the gravel path that traced the valley to sleep on Hailey’s floor. Her eyelashes were bald, her pimples were showing, her scalp was flaking under her greasy hair. She was wearing yesterday’s shorts and tank top. The vampire was sickly, bluish and gaunt with his white shirt collar open to a hairless clavicle. The sweat on his skin looked cold, the oil in his black hair was crushingly sexual. She had been crying at the till all day, taking breaks when the odd tourist came in to buy a Coke from the fridge. He looked like he must be high or hungover or both, but his pale eyes were amused, even friendly.

She opened the drawer with the red packs, and then looked back helplessly: they came in too many interchangeable varieties.

“Far left,” he said. “Are you old enough to sell me these?”

She wasn’t, but she was too embarrassed to pick up the phone and call the older girl, so she just rang him through.

The vampire grinned as he took his change, and hopped out of the store. She went to the window to watch him trot across the intersection. He evidently worked at the Hotel, which was not a hotel but a bar, built for the mine and therefore older than the town itself. Its new, prosthetic patio lorded over the main drag. Crowds of drinkers accreted there down the backslope of every afternoon. Easy youth from Australia and Quebec, fresh from chambermaiding or line-frying; construction-work drunks like her father and his friends; and, inside the dark crevices of the bar proper, the ancient, withered miners. Finally, last among the picnic tables and trumpet flowers, were the pathetic tourist families, mostly weekenders from the city, who occupied the cedar-shake luxury duplexes that lined the valley, and whom no one except the servers acknowledged. She herself hadn’t been to the Hotel since she was a very young child, trailing her father, terrified of being caught in a venue so plainly forbidden.

That summer she’d try to spot the vampire whenever she brought the trash bags to the dumpster, which had a relatively covert view of the Hotel patio, as well as the parking lot of the new sports equipment shop, full of athletic rich boys in yellow spandex and insect helmets, who blanked her brain to a high, keening panic. Still, even at the dumpster, she could feel the glare of gazes on the backs of her legs and her arms, on her pimpled back, on her pimpled chest, her hideous, gleaming forehead and deformed jaw, her entire surface sunburnt with mortification. She saw him once, carrying a tray of dirty glasses rimed with sticky foam, and another time, in the back alley, lifting his pale slender forearm, striped with burns, to suck his cigarette.

But he didn’t speak to her again until one late-summer weekend at a house party in a crusty staff dormitory owned by one fast food restaurant or another. She had never imagined such a party, let alone being invited to creep the rooms of one, but her cousin Melissa was going, and she was sleeping over at Melissa’s. Her parents were off on vacation with her little sisters, and she was not allowed to disappoint her work schedule, or stay home alone. Melissa was a year younger, balletic and mouthy, with powdered freckles and flat-ironed hair. The teachers derided Melissa for being such a poor relation to her, the hideous ruler of the honour roll, but Melissa was indisputably superior by all other measures. She cut class constantly, and she was friends with the older drug kids, some of whom had stopped going to school entirely, but still clung around the valley like half-shed skins.

Melissa and her friend Dana sat on the bedroom carpet, in front of the propped mirror, applying makeup. Dana’s skin was softly, evenly tan all over because she had a membership at the tanning salon. Her belly button piercing gleamed below the hem of her spaghetti-strap top. Dana said into the mirror, “My back fat is driving me crazy.” If Dana’s back was fat, then all other bodies were hopeless. It was unclear what grade Dana was in, or how often she attended school, but the aura of failure was nearly masked by the streaks she’d peroxided into her hair.

Hope surged when Melissa twisted around with a sparkling pallet and insisted on enacting a makeover. She slid off the bed to join them before the mirror. She took off her glasses. She closed her eyes. The brush tentative across her skin. The poke of the pencil. Dana stood up and changed her bra as they evaluated the boys who’d be at the party: names from older grades, names she didn’t recognize. “Okay,” said Melissa. “Done.”

One sideways glance in the mirror immolated her with despair. Betrayal of magazine promises. Nothing could cure her profound ugliness. Her feeble bangs greasy against her forehead. The turquoise brought out the bags under her eyes. The painful red zit on her throat. She smiled with her lips pressed tight, but her braces pushed through. She put her glasses back on, and her own fingerprints clouded her vision.

“Do you shave your pits?” said Melissa, handing her a one-shouldered tank-top splashed lavender and bronze.

“You look like a supermodel,” said Dana. “No one’s gonna know who you are.”

They rode to town in the crumbling back seat of a car driven by a thick blonde boy who wore a toque and a shirt with its sleeves cut off. Another one sat in the front seat, and she vaguely recognized him too, and in the constipated silence she suspected she was interfering, somehow, with the order of things. Was one of them Melissa’s boyfriend? Did Melissa regret inviting her? Would whoever’s party it was find her presence disappointing? Where was the party and how would she get away from it? They parked outside a flank of rowhouses where she’d frequently delivered pills to a woman who was always in the middle of frying supper for her TV-glazed toddlers. It was all familiar: the buzzer with its obsolete directory, the gritty, carpeted steps, the filthy walls, the heavy door leading into the dim sliver of a kitchen, just a windowless cranny with a fridge and a stove, where the vampire was waiting to talk to her.

He was there under the light of the hood fan, slender under a dingy white collared shirt. The grey-blue of his skin was especially grey. “Drug store girl!” he said, “Want some drugs?” and offered her a DVD case with a wad of white powder on it. When she shook her head he didn’t seem to mind. He passed her a beer from the fridge and she held it guiltily—would its owner recognize it?—while he leaned against the wall and stared languidly at her. Melissa and Dana and their boyfriends hadn’t paused, they’d left her behind and moved on into the rest of the party.

There was no way to understand what he was saying. She produced no language herself. She couldn’t listen because the idea that he was speaking to her was too surreal. He seemed to be speaking in dactylic hexameter, in iambic tetrameter, in Smashing Pumpkins lyrics. Speaking to her head-on, face-first, eyes colourless, the sharp point of his nose angled down at her, would he take her neck in his mouth, finally? Grab her throat, crunch it, shake her and splatter the tiles with her blood. Her virginity.

But, no. He did something with the drugs and then squeezed past her, carrying the DVD case before him like a silver platter. The Mummy. She followed him into the living room and hovered by the wall as he spoke with the people there, who were maybe strangers or maybe people who recognized her, she couldn’t tell because she couldn’t bring herself to look into their faces. She followed him upstairs to a bedroom where a television was on because people were playing video games. She recognized one boy’s ballcap from chemistry. The vampire went down the hall and she followed him until she realized her mistake, spun around to pretend she hadn’t followed him to the toilet. She went and looked at the video games again. No one had tried to speak to her except for him. Once, Melissa swept by and chattered something happily incoherent at her. A damp, wriggling hug. When he left the bathroom she went in. It was full of fresh stink. She peed hard and stared at her hands as she soaped them. The deranged makeup was wearing off. But now she’d lost him. She went to the kitchen, hoping he’d pass her another beer. But the people there didn’t say anything to her, though she accidentally looked one in the eye. He must be waiting for her somewhere. Outside. Outside on the sidewalk, more people she couldn’t look at were smoking. But not the vampire. The noise of the party was clanging against the other buildings. Soon they’d all be in trouble. She turned the other way, into an alley, but he wasn’t there. In the park by the river, she decided, and she went there, only to find, below Cloudmaker’s sheer moonlit peaks, before the timbered gap of the black old mine, more strangers gathered, closed off in circles, watching her through the backs of their skulls, laughing at her through mouths full of pleasure.

She retreated into the shadows of the trees. She climbed the slope, ducked through the tilted barbed wire fence, traced the deer trail to that other mouth. The cannibal’s lair: a slit wide enough for a black bear or a wolf bitch to crawl in. The orange, flickering glow of his fire. The scent of roasting meat. He was still in there. He had waited. Though she hadn’t spoken to him all summer while she held her breath for the vampire. His skinny arms bare. His face, gaunt in the firelight, flashed cold rage at the sight of her.

“If you’re not careful,” the cannibal said, tearing at his meal with his teeth, “you’ll stay here forever.”

“No, I won’t.”

She reached across to saw a mouthful for herself, and, swallowing, waited for the strength to pour into her.

In the morning when she woke up, wretched with nausea, terrified for work, Melissa was sleeping deeply in the other bed. She waited all day at the drug store cash for the vampire to come finish their conversation. She waited until the leaves died, the Hotel patio closed, Cloudmaker and Nightfox and the rest went away behind their veils of cloud and snow. After school, wet boots through the slush to the old folks’ lodge. She did not speak to the cannibal again. Without either of them, there was almost nothing.

In the last summer before she left, Randy sold the drug store to a man named Patrick Phipps who owned a chain of drug stores in the city, and who cut everyone’s hourly pay so that all the pharmacists quit and went to work in the new grocery store on the highway. She protested by stealing tooth-whitening strips, chocolate bars, and eyeshadows. Patrick Phipps did not hire after-school girls, but made the cashiers wash their own tupperware and empty the trash bins themselves. There was no delivery service under the new regime and the old folks had to come in, trembling on walkers, or beg someone to come for them. Pharmacists rotated in from the city locations, but the town was too expensive now and they didn’t stay. The customers complained. “You’re the only one left here who knows me,” said Sidney as he paid for his pills in coins and bills, but by the time he got his mangled words out she was greeting the customer behind him.

One of the new pharmacists wasn’t even a pharmacist yet but a university student with cat eyes and long black hair, which he wore in a badly-woven braid at work. When she saw him on the street he wore it loose, with a studded dog collar around his neck just like the one she had, but his was black and hers was red. He didn’t seem that much older. In a few months she’d be a university student from a city, too. Hailey had been accepted to a different school, on the coast. Melissa was in court for stealing debit cards at the gas station. The pharmacy student must’ve got her number from the phone tree in the back room, which was posted over the yellowing AFTER-SCHOOL GIRL list, because he called her at home. Her mother yelled down the stairs at her to pick up the phone. When she picked up, there was nothing to say. One morning he came forth from the pharmacy, through the aisles towards her, holding a hand-lettered CD. She hid it under receipts all day, only to learn on her walk home that the songs were too sad and too slow. He invited her to a movie at the theatre in the next town over. He had a car, somehow, and he drove it nervously on the highway. He locked the keys in it while it was running and didn’t notice until after the movie. They waited in the lot for the tow truck driver to come with a gallon of gas and booster cables. Their palms sweated silently together. She was annoyed by the delay. She’d decided on that night. It was just a matter of saying something, or nothing. She didn’t know the music he was playing. He turned it up. Her parents were on vacation with her little sisters again. With his shirt off in her bed, his back was cold and wet. Her fingers brushed the individual mounds of pimples, and the long, coarse strands of his hair. In her mind, she was telling him, she was not telling him. She didn’t know which. It didn’t matter.

“You have to move, too,” he told her.

“I’ve never done it before,” she told him.

“Actually.” She could feel him trying to look her in the eye. “I haven’t either.”

Repulsed, she crawled on top of him.

“I don’t—” he said. “Maybe we shouldn’t yet.”

She took the long prongy thing out of his underwear and she put it where it had to go. She’d decided, and soon it would be over. He said no. Not just once, he said no again, and again. But he didn’t stop her. He gripped her hips with force. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel good. It was interesting. Him saying no, and her doing it anyway.