Braden comes across a 15-year-old girl named Martina Sheridan in an alley behind the creamery after she has had sex with an older man. He shakes her and tries to help her see the truth: These older men are using her, and none of them love her. Braden is afraid Martina will become pregnant and have a child that will not know love. Martina does not listen to Braden, calls him a queer, and yells for a man named Smigs, who Braden knows is a demented bully and criminal.

Braden is overwhelmed by feelings of unfairness and disgrace regarding the young girls and covetous older men who abuse them, as well as for the babies the girls have who will never feel proper love. That night he returns to the alley to seek traces of semen, hoping the man used a condom; he breaks down upon placing his hand in a pool of semen, upset that such a small amount of liquid could lead to such heartbreak. The world of his hometown is very different from the fantasy hometown about which he writes.