The Torn Skirt (1-39)

Summary
In the opening of the book we met up with a few characters. The narrator and also the main character of the story's name is Sara. Sara is 16 years old and she lives with her father who is a pothead. All he does all day is get high and scream at the t.v like they can hear him. Sara was living with a fever for basically all of her life but at this stage of her life the fever has subsided. Well, Sara made her way to a grocery store with a diner on the side that's called Ming's at Ming's she saw this girl who walked in with a torn skirt and she looked like she could have been 12. After the girl left Ming's, Sara asked Ming what the name of the girl was and he told her that the girls name was Justine. Sara followed Justine until she turned into an alley and started running, Sara didn't know why or where she was running too but she knew that she couldn't follow her anymore or she wouldn't be able to find her way. While Sara was walking trying to find her way back, she came across this place called Day and Night, later that day she found out that the diner was a teenage hooker hangout. Two men named Stanley and Braun started telling her that she would have a great career in being a model in the magazines but she wasn't so sure about it and turned them down. Sara met up with a new girl that called herself China, and China asked her to come to a party at a hotel with on of the sailor guys she was talking to, but Sara told her that she was feeling feverish and she would meet up with her later. I hope that she gets whats going on around her and understand the kind of place shes in.



Quotation
"That may be so, but unlike you, she's lost the necessary innocence" (Godfrey 28).


Reaction
When i read this quote, I didn't really know what it meant, But as I kept reading I found out that it was saying that the girl they were talking about, someone who looked like Sara's friend, Heather was a hooker. After I finished reading that I understood that the girl was just a teenager and was still in high school and she needed to have a good girl innocence and she didn't have it because she was a hooker. Also while i was reading between these 39 pages, it seems to me that Sara doesn't know who she is yet and she doesn't understand her place. The reason I believe that is because when she was at the place that the "hookers" hung out, her body language to me seemed as if she knew how to act in that crowd. But she still is confused on who she is and what she really wants. It seems to me that shes just following the crowd and not what's right.