scandalous [is one of my favorite words]

     People want to know why I liked Fiona so much. What they should be asking is how come Fiona didn't come running to me? Adults have forgotten the feel of a teenager's love. For you a teenager will walk through glass doors, stay awake three days in a row, be an angel standing under your window in the rain. So what that we don't know how to order from the butcher or apply foundation or insert a diaphragm. Show us.

- The Silk Road, Jane Summer

(I swear this novel, published in 2000 but set in the 1970s, isn't unlike an updated The Price of Salt [1952] by Patricia Highsmith [writing under the pseudonym Claire Morgan] with an even more extreme age difference and possibly more compromising scenario. Scandalous! When I think about it, I feel somewhat surprised my local library carried this novel at all. Never know what you'll find at the library!)