The Pact by Jodi Picoult

Melanie suggested. “You know, getting to first and second base and all that.”
    “Who let him check this out at the library?” Gus demanded, turning to her friend. “What kind of adult lets a child do something like that?”
    Melanie scanned the rear of the book. “No one,” she said. “This was never checked out.” Gus buried her face in her hands. “Great. He's a pervert and a thief.” The kitchen door swung open again, and Michael came through, carrying a large box of veterinary supplies. “Ladies,” he greeted, dropping the box heavily to the floor. “What's up?” He peeked over Melanie's shoulder and, grinning, took the book from her hands. “Wow,” he said, flipping through the pages. “I remember this.”
    “But were you nine when you read it?” Gus asked.
    Michael laughed. “Can I take the fifth?”
    Melanie turned to him, surprised. “You were aware of girls that young?” He kissed the top of her head. “If I didn't start early,” he said, “I wouldn't be the dynamo I am now.” He sat down in the chair across from Gus and slid the book toward her. “Let me guess. You found it under his mattress. It's where I used to keep my Penthouse.”
    Gus rubbed her temples. “If we ground him again, Child Protective Services is going to show up at our door.” She glanced up miserably. “Maybe we shouldn't even punish him,” she said. “Maybe he's just looking for answers about girls.”
    Michael raised his brows. “When he finds them, will you tell him to come talk to me?” Melanie sighed sympathetically. “I don't know what I'd do, in your shoes.”
    “Who says you're not?” Gus pointed out. “How do you know Em isn't in on this? Everything else those two do, they do together.” She looked at Michael. “Maybe she's the mastermind.”
    “Em's nine,” he said, appalled by the thought.
    “Exactly,” Gus said.
    Gus WAITED UNTIL she heard the sound of her son tearing his room apart.
    Then she knocked on the door, to be met by a whirlwind of clothing, mitts,
    hockey sticks, and anguish. “Hi,” she said affably. “Lose something?” She watched Chris turn several rich shades of red. Then she drew her hands out
    from behind her back. “Lose this?” she asked.
    “This isn't what it looks like,” Chris said immediately, and Gus was astounded. When had he learned to lie so easily? “What do you think it looks like?” “Like I've been reading something I shouldn't have?” Gus sank down on his bed. “Are you asking me, or telling me?” She
    gentled her voice, stroked her palm over the cover of the book. "What
    makes you think you shouldn't be reading it?"
    Chris shrugged. “I don't know. The naked pictures and all.” “Is that why you wanted to read it?”
    “I guess,” Chris said, looking so miserable she almost-almost-felt sorry for him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
    She stared at the crown of her son's head, and remembered how, when he was born, a labor nurse had held a mirror between her legs so that she could see it appear, dark and downy, for the first time.
    “Can we just forget about it?” Chris begged.
    She wanted to let him off, seduced by the way he was squirming beside her, a butterfly on a pin. But she chanced to look down at his hands, clenched over each bony knee. They were no longer toddler-soft, each digit puffy, like the hands on the balloons at Thanksgiving parades. At some point when Gus was too busy to notice, they had turned knuckled and blue-veined, larger even than hers, hands that already reminded her of James's.
    Gus cleared her throat, aware that this boy sitting in front of her, whose face she could have identified by touch alone, whose voice said her name before any other word, was someone she did not recognize. He was someone who heard the word woman and no longer thought of Gus's features and a mother's embrace, but of a faceless girl with breasts and curved hips. When had this happened?
    “If you have questions, you know,