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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
The narrator (Jackie), a thirteen-year-old girl, is charmed by the local bad boy, Boner McPharlin. Boner is two years older than her and is eventually expelled during her first year of high school, in 1970. Nevertheless, stories about his exploits are ubiquitous. Jackie becomes enamored with him from afar; her best friend, Erin, does not approve. Boner’s misdeeds include a long list of elaborate pranks; he is also blamed for things Jackie does not believe he did, including burning down the school. After he is expelled, Boner starts working at the meatworks like Boner's father; they both share the nickname Boner because they work in the boning room. In the meantime, Jackie and Erin begin to see other boys, but only casually; Erin has better luck, and an implicit competition between them emerges. Told as a flashback, this story finds Jackie reflecting on her memories of Boner McPharlin and the impact he had on her life. Set around the same time as “Long, Clear View,” “Big World,” and several other stories, her experiences take place against the backdrop of the 1970s, as economic decline gives way to social turmoil and the proliferation of drugs in Angelus. This story features Boner, the boy who fascinated the young Vic Lang, up close, tying together both the history of Angelus and the story of police corruption that the reader (and the Langs) has thus far only partially understood. Two years pass, and Boner acquires his distinctive car, a garishly tricked-out van. Much to Erin’s chagrin, Jackie agrees to take a ride with him. While nothing sexual happens between them—Boner only wants to drive around town in silence—Erin is aghast, and rumors spread quickly. In the popular imagination, Jackie has become Boner’s moll. Jackie does nothing to contradict these rumors; she even plays into them. Nevertheless, her drives with Boner are chaste and largely silent, either around or out of town, with Boner hardly ever moving from behind the wheel. They are careful to be discreet, and Jackie’s parents do not catch on. She wonders, however, if they even care; Jackie’s father is a strict, unlikeable building inspector, and Jackie’s mother, she learns much later, is addicted to valium. Both Boner’s strange social position—simultaneously an antihero and an outcast—and the ostracization Jackie experiences after becoming his “moll,” at least in the public eye, suggest the rigid social hierarchy of her school, and of Angelus in general. Similarly, it is also clear that her peers pass judgment based on surface-level impressions, giving little consideration to the actual nature of Boner and Jackie’s relationship or Boner’s personality. Jackie’s parents make clear that the process of social decay in Angelus is hardly exclusive to the young, and
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