On most weekdays, Betty makes Jesse breakfast. He rolls in sometime after Betty's parents leave for work and before Betty heads for the alternative school she attends in the afternoons.

"Make me breakfast, bitch," he says. She makes huevos rancheros or waffles or french toast. She sets the table with a glass of orange juice, a crossword puzzle clipped from the day's newspaper, a pen, a fork and a napkin just-so.

Jesse's not really her boyfriend. They sleep together and each gets jealous if the other flirts with someone else. But they're not official. Jesse has never asked "Will you go out with me?" and Betty says she doesn't want that kind of commitment. Jesse's more into it than Betty, though. He bought her a ring with silver hearts for Valentine's Day. Betty slips the ring on and off with her moods.

She's plotting to have a pretend affair with Chris, one of Jesse's good friends. Chris is in a punk band called Draghandle, and he wrote a song about Betty. The chorus goes "What would it be like to fuck her? What would it be like to fuck her? What would it be like to fuck her." Betty thinks that's so sweet.

This is the same girl who sat at the popular table in middle school. Betty, then Nikkie, used to be a long blond-haired, preppy, student council kind of girl. One day she made fun of a punk kid who got beat up in the hallway. She felt bad about it later and took a plate of brownies to his house. They spent about an hour together, talking about music. He introduced Betty to his friends, and she began to hang out with them after school. They listened to punk, drank beer and smoked pot. They encouraged Betty to think for herself. It didn’t take long for her to like them, to want to be like them.

Betty runs into her old friends every once in awhile. They dress in Tommy Hilfiger and Gap and bleach their hair blond. Betty has nothing to say to them; she watches them and notes the differences between their lives and hers.

Betty and I are in IHOP, where we have to sit in the non-smoking section because Betty's straight-up-in-the-air ponytails gave her age away.

Betty drinks endless coffee, exactly two creamers and two sugars in each mug, and talks about last summer when she got kicked out of her house because she stayed out five days and didn't bother to call home. "Uncle Gabe," a 40-something man to whom she's not related, gave her some money for food and an apartment. I don't ask. She moved in with friends, and they partied like punk rock stars all summer long. "Guests" came to party, passed out on their floor and stayed for weeks sometimes. Betty lost her virginity that summer in the bathroom of a Chevron.

It didn't take long before she was broke and burnt out from too many acid trips and too many sleepless nights. Her parents agreed she could come home on the condition she went to drug counseling, which she did for awhile, hating every minute of it. Her parents let her drop out.

Betty lives with her parents and her 14-year-old brother, Cody, in a three-bedroom rambler in West Eugene. Her mom, Mitzi, is an accountant. Her dad, Charlie, is a carpenter. They have sit-down family dinners. They talk about their days. They have loud, heated, ringing-in-your-ears discussions about the public school system, the influence of song lyrics on teens, Frederich Nietzsche, Betty's favorite philosopher. They bake cakes during the week for no reason. Betty and Cody have fights with spatulas and kitchen towels and listen to their parents when they tell them not to. Betty thinks her family is too normal. Too middle class. She once told her parents she wished they were divorced or on drugs. She wants to suffer.

Raising Betty has been the hardest thing her parents have done. They feel like they're on the right track now. Betty's doing well at school, and she's staying away from drugs, as far as they know. There's not much left they can do. Betty is graduating early, and plans to enroll at a community college in Sarasota, Florida, where the family used to live.