Becky

Becky is Judy Manitow’s daughter, a former student of Joanne Doss, and Stacy Doss’s one-time friend. Though she appears only indirectly, Becky’s changing behavior gives shape to a concealed history of sexual abuse: Judy comes to believe that Joanne harmed her repeatedly under the cover of tutoring. The later disclosure turns what had looked like a private friendship fading into a family crisis whose signs had been present in Becky’s distress and withdrawal.

Identity and Introduction

Becky enters the account first through details that gather significance in retrospect. A photograph in Judy’s chambers shows the daughter who had become too thin and needed therapy. She had also tried to act as a therapist for Stacy, a reversal of roles that places Becky among the young people attempting to manage distress around them without necessarily being able to name its source.

Joanne had tutored Becky, but the tutoring stopped, and Becky’s grades fell afterward. The relationship between the families had therefore involved both ordinary trust and access: Judy and her family had known Joanne, and Judy had done favors for her. The tutoring, ostensibly focused on mathematics, becomes central to Judy’s later understanding of how that trust was violated.

Abuse and the Signs Judy Recognizes

Judy tells Alex Delaware that she found Joanne with Becky by the pool, while the math books lay wet on the deck beside them. She describes the discovery as the shattering of something she had entrusted to someone she had known her whole life. Her account identifies the scene as sexual abuse, not as an incident of tutoring gone wrong.

At first, Joanne and Becky both said it had happened only once. Judy later rejected that account. She could not blame Becky for denying what had happened, reasoning that the girl had been ashamed; the claim of a first occurrence, in Judy’s view, did not fit the changes she had already seen. After Becky turned sixteen and began tutoring with Joanne, she stopped talking to her mother as she once had, cried without an apparent reason, left the house without saying where she was going, and saw her grades decline even while receiving tutoring. Judy feared the abuse might have continued for years, although the account presents that duration as her belief rather than as an independently established fact.

The signs had been visible but misread or unexplained: withdrawal, unexplained crying, leaving home, and worsening schoolwork. Together they make the tutoring’s promise of academic help painfully ironic. For Judy, the math books beside the pool signify not education but the cover under which her daughter was harmed.

Relationships and Family Consequences

Becky’s relationship with Stacy also changed. The girls had been close enough for Becky to try to help Stacy, but Becky eventually severed the friendship. The narrative places this estrangement alongside Becky’s distress and the cessation of Joanne’s tutoring, giving the loss of contact a context that the families had not openly understood at the time. It does not establish that Becky explained the abuse to Stacy or that the abuse alone caused the friendship to end.

Judy’s account is shaped by a family bond and a breach of trust. She had relied on Joanne, entrusted her with Becky, and understood their arrangement as a favor and tutoring relationship. After the discovery, she reinterprets the daughter’s changed behavior as evidence that the harm was not confined to the moment by the pool. Becky’s silence and shame, as Judy understands them, had helped keep the abuse hidden; they should not be mistaken for consent or proof that it happened only once.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

Later, Becky moves with her parents when they leave Pacific Palisades for La Jolla. She plans to attend a junior college in San Diego and chooses to remain with her family; Stacy hears that Becky said she needed to stay close to home. The account does not specify whether this decision was related to the abuse, so its significance remains grounded in what it does show: Becky leaves the place where the families’ lives had been intertwined and stays near her parents.

Becky’s story is largely conveyed through other people’s observations and Judy’s retrospective account. That indirect presentation makes the earlier changes in her behavior newly legible without giving her an on-page explanation of her own. Her experience exposes the danger hidden inside familiar arrangements of trust and care: a tutor welcomed into a family’s life could use that access to hurt a child, while the child’s distress appeared as isolation and trouble at school. Becky’s role is thus not merely to explain a broken friendship; her history reveals the concealed violence beneath the adults’ ordinary routines.