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The names of the girls, families, teachers and schools in this article are pseudonyms. The Times does not ordinarily employ fictional devices, but for her book the author promised to protect the children's identities.

"ME! ME! ME!" APRIL WELCH, A 13-YEAR-OLD African-American girl, leans forward in her seat, waving her hand frantically in an attempt to catch the attention of her math teacher, who has just asked for the proper way to say "two over five."

"Mrs. Sandoval!" she shouts at the teacher. "Me!"

"O.K., April," Mrs. Sandoval says, smiling.

April drops her hand, relieved.

"You can't change it," she announces, indicating the fraction cannot be reduced.

The math teacher's smile tightens almost imperceptibly. "We know that, April," she says. "That wasn't my question."

"Oh," April replies, turning away and rummaging in her backpack for a tube of Chapstick.

As the class proceeds, April volunteers continuously, each time with the same frenetic urgency. When the teacher takes attendance, April, unasked, informs her of the whereabouts of a student who is cutting class. Later, she offers to take a note to the office and then to pass out math books. But most often, April raises her hand in response to a question that Mrs. Sandoval has posed, although whenever the teacher acknowledges her, April's answers are invariably wrong.

When Mrs. Sandoval asks for the difference between the numbers in a series that begins 26, 24, 22, April's hand flies up.

"They're both in the same range," April says when she's called upon, "but one of them is kind of...."

"Listen to my question, April. What is subtracted to get this number?"

April falls silent, more quiet than she has been all period, and darts her eyes desperately.

Someone stage-whispers, "Two."

She raises two fingers, hesitantly, still not speaking.

Michael, a round-cheeked boy who sits next to April, turns to me. "She's loco in the cabeza," he says.

I have been watching April for several days as she moves from English class to math to science to social studies. Today, when the bell rings and, like the other seventh graders, she rushes from the classroom, I hurry to catch up. As we fall into step together, I tell her she has me a bit confused. Other students raise their hands when they know an answer. She seems to raise her hand simply because a question has been asked.

April spies a paper clip on the floor, picks it up and begins twisting it open. "I guess," she says, staring at her handiwork, "I guess I raise my hand because I want to be part of the class. I just ... I just want to talk and feel part of that, you know?"

A friend of April's passes us and April calls out to her, interrupting our conversation. April digs into her backpack again and produces a handwritten invitation to a Halloween party.

"There's going to be music and dancing, and there will be someone to drive everyone home."

The friend studies the invitation. "Is it at your mom's?" she asks.

April shakes her head and fastens her gaze on a spot just to the left of her friend's shoulders. "Uh-uh," she says. "I'm not staying with with her right now."

Becca Holbrook turns to me abruptly. "Do you want to get into my parents' relationship? My mom and my dad?"

"Sure," I say, caught off guard.

We are sitting on the bleachers at the edge of the P.E. field at Weston Middle School, a bucolic suburb that's a good 50 miles from April Welch's math classroom. A group of boys is playing a rowdy game of after-school football and Becca watches them idly, stopping our confidential conversation when they come too near.

Like April, Becca is 13 years old. She is a white girl who sits with her shoulders curved and her head hung slightly forward. Today, like the last few times I've seen her, Becca's eyes are red-rimmed. At first, she says the pinkness is caused by her contact lenses, but later admits it's more often from crying.

"A while ago," Becca says, "my mom came in to my room and she sat on my bed and said, 'Good night, I love you' and that motherly kind of stuff, but she was in tears. It's not like she was bawling or anything, just these tears on her face, and I don't know what's going on. So I say 'O.K., good night, Mom' and she closes the door. The next day, she told me it was 'fear crying.' She told me that she's scared of my dad and that she can't stand sleeping with him anymore. He wants to have sex every night and she doesn't enjoy it at all. She said it's like rape for her every night."

Becca pushes her hair, home-streaked with Sun-In, away from her face, revealing an anxious expression. "She said that if she didn't do it, though, she'd be out of there like the speed of light. So it's like she has to give in to him for, like, an insurance policy or something."

This is not the first time that Becca's mother has confided in her about her embattled marriage. More than once, Becca has told me that she feels older than her friends because of what she knows about "life and relationships and stuff." Given that unique understanding, she believes only she can offer her mother true succor. "When my mom first started telling me these things, I felt suffocated in a way," Becca says now. "But, I realize I'm the only normal thing in her life. I'm the only one who can really comfort her."

She drifts off for a moment as the crowd of football players tromp by us, their game over. "I think sometimes it would be easier for my mom if my parents didn't have kids," she continues when the boys are at a safe distance. "But then, she needs to get things off her chest and so she needs me and I can be there for her. . . . It's like we're two eyes of a hurricane."

I met April and Becca in the spring of 1992, as I began reporting a book about teen-age girls. Beginning the following September, I spent a school year tracking them and seven of their peers in two Northern California middle schools -- one in a middle-class, largely white suburb and the other in a low-income, urban community serving mainly children of color. I sat in on the girls' classes, spent time with them on the playground and at home, talked to parents, teachers and peers. The girls were a diverse lot, within each community as well as between them. They were from single-parent and dual-parent homes; from affluent, working-class and poor families. Some excelled in school; some performed poorly.

At first, April and Becca seemed as different as two girls could be. April, who attends John J. Audubon Middle School, was introduced to me as the kind of girl who slips through the cracks of the educational system: although her teachers say she is bright, she attends classes only sporadically, and her mother, who was a teen-ager when April was born, struggles with an addiction to crack.

Becca is from a two-parent family. Her father is an administrator for the Federal Government. Her mother, herself a teacher, is well read and deeply concerned about teen-age girls' self-esteem. Becca describes herself as a "sensitive" girl. Unlike April, she shies away from participating in class, fearing, she says, that if she makes a mistake, "My self-confidence will be taken away."

In spite of appearances, however, it quickly became clear that Becca and April faced the same predicament: both girls were faltering under the burdens of their mothers' lives and were becoming aware of the limitations of their parents and teachers. Both girls were trying, at home and at school, to make their distress clear. And, as the year unfolded, and their attempts to gain attention continued to go unheeded, both girls were ultimately forced to make critical decisions on their own about how -- or even whether -- to survive.

Initially I was told that April Welch would be entering eighth grade in the fall, but as it turned out, since she had repeated sixth grade, she was entering seventh and was a year behind her peers. At Audubon, repeating students who attain a C average by the end of the first marking period are promoted to their proper grade, but since retained students are often assigned to the same classes with the same teachers and the same curriculum that failed to inspire them the first time around, that goal is seldom realized. At any rate, the students know that at age 15, no matter how many times they have been left back -- and regardless of whether they can read, write or add -- district policy is to promote them to high school.

"The first time I was in sixth grade, I hardly came to school at all," April tells me early in the year. "I was enrolled, but I'd just cut. I'd walk into school and walk right back out. I was scared, I guess. I'd just graduated from fifth grade and I thought middle school was a big old step. " She shakes her head, as if in disgust toward her former self. "My mother didn't say nothin' 'bout it. She just said it was my life and I'd learn in my own time, and I did. I tried to run from it. I wanted to start over at some other school, but I didn't. I knew I had to face what I did. I came back and started sixth grade again. It was kind of embarrassing, but that's how it had to be. I still haven't caught up, neither. I mean, I have a little, but not how I want to. Not like I was in elementary school. Back then, I did good. I used to understand better."

Throughout September and October, April held out hope that she could earn the marks that would advance her to eighth grade. By November, however, her grade point average hovered at D-minus, and by the end of the first semester, her teachers had given up on her.

"She's failing," Mrs. Sandoval tells me flatly when I run into her in the school office. "She doesn't come to class anymore. Maybe she comes three times a week, but math is built on structure, on one thing then the next, so unless you're really bright at it . . . sometimes she tries really hard and seems to get it, but she's just falling behind. I offered her after-school help. But if she doesn't come, I can't make her do it."

I ask her how she thinks she could help April.

She answers quickly and her tone becomes curt. "Hey, I got kids of my own," she says. Then her shoulders droop and she sighs. "Look, I know she's on the 'at-risk' list, that they know about her. But there are so many kids in the class with so many needs . . . someone like April, when she's not there much, it gets to be out of sight, out of mind."

Later that day, when I ask April's science teacher if I can speak to April in the hall for a few minutes, he seems equally frustrated. "Go ahead," he says. "Keep her the whole period if you want to. At this point, she's just a distraction."

April is a distraction, as would be any student who cannot catch up but will not drop out. Toward the beginning of the second semester, when April jokes too loudly and too often in her art class, the teacher sends her to the counselor's office with a discipline referral slip. On it, he writes in capital letters, underlined several times, "It is my opinion that April should have been staffed out last year"; that is, labeled unmanageable and shipped to another school, where she will become someone else's problem -- or someone else's to ignore.

"I know I'm not doing good," April says when I find her wandering in the hall one afternoon. "But I'm not tripping or anything, 'cause I'm still gonna graduate after next year and go to high school."

No one at Audubon can explain how a child reaches seventh grade without being able to add or subtract, particularly a vocal child like April who makes her difficulties quite clear. When, toward the end of March, I question April's counselor, Ms. Peck, about this, she lets out a long, slow breath. Ms. Peck is responsible for "counseling" over 300 students a year. She is a peevish woman with gray skin and sharp features. The first week of school, in an assembly for the entire eighth grade, she announced that the students' fate was already sealed since their high-school applications are based on their seventh grade G.P.A.

"It's already done and you can't change it," she told them, effectively extinguishing any motivation for improvement. Today, sitting in her cramped box of an office, Ms. Peck leans across her cluttered desk to pull April's file up on her computer screen. She informs me that April has already racked up between 25 and 30 unexcused absences in every class.

Ms. Peck leans back in her chair. "She's missing an average of two days a week of school," she says. "There's very little we can do if a child is not here. We contact home, but if she doesn't do the work required and she's not here . . . well, there's very little we can do."

Audubon students who are the most vulnerable to leaving school are placed on a special counseling list. Once a month, the counselors, the social worker and other appropriate support staff members convene an "at-risk round table" to discuss what can be done for these children. They request daily progress reports from the teachers (they are rarely provided), meet with parents when possible and evaluate whether students require testing for learning disabilities. April was placed on this list in December and, according to Ms. Peck, her case was discussed shortly thereafter.

"I know we talked about her," Ms. Peck says, "but I don't remember what we said and I don't remember what we were going to do."

I ask Ms. Peck how the school will insure that April receives an adequate education. "I don't know if there's anything that we can do to make a difference for April," she says. "I always say that success in school is a three-legged stool: the parent, the school, the child. If you're missing the parent or the child in that stool, you won't have much chance at success. From what I understand, April goes back and forth between her mother and her aunt; I don't have any idea of what goes on there, but she doesn't seem to have any parent backing."

Although there are no comprehensive programs at Audubon designed for girls like April, Ms. Peck insinuates that April's home life is solely responsible for her failure. Yet when one of April's aunts calls Ms. Peck and asks to be kept abreast of her niece's progress, the counselor does not offer to meet with her, nor does she invite her to participate in the at-risk round table. Instead, she writes the aunt's phone number on a Post-it that quickly disappears on her desk. She cannot, Ms. Peck explains, be expected to keep track of every relative who calls when her caseload is so overwhelming.

"I don't have the time," she says. "I don't have the time to do much more than discipline."

A few minutes later, as I am about to leave her office, Ms. Peck makes a final remark, which sounds very much like April herself. "It doesn't matter how well or poorly she does though," she says, grimly. "She'll go on to ninth grade in another year anyway."

If, among some of her teachers, there is a tacit understanding that April is doomed by her family's circumstances, it is not an understanding that April shares. Ever since she was a toddler living with her grandmother (who died when April was 7), April has been battling fiercely -- and largely unassisted -- to keep her mother's addiction from defining her. Sitting in the school's litter-strewn back stairwell on a bleak winter day, she discusses that struggle. As she talks, April squirms, fiddling with the ornately braided ponytail she has woven into her hair. Throughout her story, however, her voice remains steady and she speaks with a level of insight that goes untapped in the classroom.

April explains that, after her grandmother died, she became a vagabond, moving back and forth between her mother, who lives in a public housing project with April's 10-year-old brother, and one of her nearby aunts, who seemed more interested in the monthly foster-care check she received from the state than in caring for her niece. Month to month -- sometimes night to night -- April was unsure of where she'd lay her head. But it wasn't until the summer after her first sixth-grade year, when her aunt moved in with a boyfriend and her mother succumbed to drug addiction, that April decided she had to find a better life.

"I was living with my mom back then," April says. "She was into the fast life, into drugs and all that. She wasn't at first, but then she took up with her boyfriend and he was, so she started doing it, too. She lost her job and she was just doing crack with her boyfriend all day long. I used to call him, 'Dope Fiend.' "

She breaks into a small, wry smile. "We didn't get along too good," she continues. "He'd yell at me and hit me sometimes. Once I got so mad at him, I took his drugs and crushed 'em up. He tried to slap me and I kicked him and he said he was going to throw me out of the house. That's when I told my mom, 'You gotta choose between us,' but then, I didn't make her choose. I just left. I called the Child Protection Services and they took me, and they took my brother, and they put us in a group home for about four weeks.

"I didn't want to go back with my mom after that, but my brother did. I wouldn't go back to that drug-infested hellhole. I told her that, too, and she cried. So I lived with one of my aunties for a while, until my mom broke up with her boyfriend after he stole some drugs and almost got her killed. My whole family told her to go into rehab then, but ain't nothin' gonna help if you don't want to help yourself. But then, she did.

"I moved back with her now and I stick with her like everything. I watch every move she makes. When she first came back from rehab, she had money and she was going to the store; I followed her where she couldn't see, because I thought she'd buy drugs for sure. But she didn't. So the next time I trusted her, and she came back with food and no drugs, so I think it might be O.K. now. I pray to God it is."

April has been staring intently at an empty candy wrapper as she talks. Now she abruptly turns to face me.

"I would never do drugs," she says passionately. "I saw what it did to my family and I'd never look at it even. But to this day, I tell my mom: 'I don't hate you, I love you, but I hate what you took me through.' I would never, never, take my children through what she took me through. Never. There was people in that house walking around like zombies; there was people with guns threatening to kill people. Once, my mom's boyfriend owed my cousin a thousand dollars for drugs, and when he didn't pay, my cousin put a gun to his head. I used to go in my room and lock the door and cry, and I'd think I should just kill myself it was so bad."

She turns away and stares straight ahead, at the gray light that trickles through the stairwell's frosted windows. "But I learned something, too," she says. "I think I learned to be a positive person. And I learned I would not put myself through that and I would not put my children through that. Not never. I learned all that, so that's O.K."

UNDER THE WEIGHT of her family burdens, Becca's academic confidence has begun to falter. Like many of the girls I follow at Weston, Becca holds herself to unrealistic standards. (Her mother says Becca's perfectionism sometimes "paralyzes her.") But whereas anxiety drives some of her equally bright peers toward excellence, Becca uses her "sensitivity" as an excuse to shrink from challenge and avoid risk. In sixth grade, Becca was an A student; at the end of seventh grade, she asked to be removed from the advanced math class, and by the middle of eighth grade, her grades in all of her classes were drifting to low C's.

As a quiet girl, Becca has never spoken much in class ("unless I'm really, really sure of an answer and sometimes not even then"), but with her self-esteem flagging, she stops volunteering entirely. She even begins to see her silence as an advantage: as long she's perceived as shy, her teachers won't notice that she has, in truth, disengaged from school.

At the same time, though, Becca complains that teachers make her feel invisible on the few occasions when she does try to participate. After trying, and failing, to get her English teacher's attention one day, Becca observed sadly: "You know how some people have charisma? I have, like, negative charisma. I feel like I can be talking and people can be looking right at me and they don't even see me."

In a sense, both Becca and April are invisible. April's inappropriate attempts at garnering adult attention are seen as an unmanageable product of her home life, and so she is shunted aside. Meanwhile, Becca's silence allows her to be overlooked as well. She is not seen as someone in need of counseling or special help because, although her grades have dropped, she is never combustible: she never, for instance, yells in class, fights with other children, conspicuously challenges authority. Becca's is a passive resistance. By opting out rather than acting out, Becca is in many ways the classic female student -- quiet, compliant, obedient; as such, she is easily overlooked or seen as "making choices" rather than expressing psychological distress.

"Becca is so quiet," her math teacher admits, "she gets lost in the crowd. I don't like that to happen, but it has happened with her. She doesn't disrupt. She always looks like she's paying attention, but maybe she's not. I don't know."

Says her history teacher: "Maybe she thinks she'll be more cool as a C student. But she doesn't even get it together after she gets the bad grade. I'll say, 'Becca, you have a D, you may fail,' then she doesn't turn in the next homework assignment. But I think of her as someone who's responsible for her own grade and I let her be responsible for that."

Becca has indeed let her grades drop, but not out of laziness. Her disengagement is actually an academic strike, a statement of hopelessness that she willingly acknowledges. "Lately I've been thinking I don't care about anything," she tells me in February. "I don't see why I should care about my grades, you know? It's just a letter. What's the difference. Why do I need to learn anything in these classes." She pauses, weighing the gravity of her statement. "It's not like I really mean that," she says. "I know it's important, but I have to get my anger out."

Ellen Hollbrook is a tall, lanky, 44-year-old with sun-roughened skin and, like her daughter, newly blond hair (although hers is professionally tinted). She meets me at the front door of their home, just as Becca did, but where Becca's gaze is circumspect, Ellen's is direct; where Becca draws back, Ellen's handshake is firm. She wears jeans and a black, embroidered blouse; silver earrings coil into lizards just below her lobes, and her red-painted toenails peek out of sling-backed espadrilles.

Ellen teaches special education at a middle school in a neighboring town; she has recently returned to the classroom after 15 years as a reluctant stay-at-home mom, taking care of Becca and Jason, the Holbrooks' 17-year-old, mentally disabled son. She says she took the job in part to try to be a better role model for her daughter.

"Becca and I are kind of on a parallel course," she says, when we've settled into lawn chairs in the Holbrooks' back garden. "We're both learning who we are together. I know the messages I got when I was her age and that's not what I want for her. I want her to be more of an individual, not be defined by her relationship with boys. I try to tell her that responsibility and commitment are important and you have to work on them, but not lose yourself."

Ellen shakes her head and her smile grows rueful. "I said that to her, but I felt like a hypocrite. I mean, I tell you I want her to get the message to be independent, to be strong, but what I tell her is one thing -- look at who's the nurturing one in the family, who left off her career to put the family's needs first, who takes care of everything, who's the teacher, who doesn't earn the money."

By making Becca her confidant, Ellen has deepened her daughter's anxiety. Yet she badly wants Becca to rise above her environment; she wants it so badly that she, too, ignores Becca's retreat from her potential, saying that because of Becca's "sensitivity," she "doesn't want to pressure her in school." So several years back, when Becca decided against enrolling in the district's gifted program, saying she didn't want to be seen as a "schoolgirl," Ellen supported that choice.

Last year, when Becca asked to drop advanced math (although her grade was a B), Ellen agreed again, hoping it would boost her daughter's confidence in the subject; it did, temporarily, but by the third quarter of eighth grade, her math grade had slid to a D. More recently, Becca has begun to express anxiety about college (where she would have "the pressure of midterms and stuff and it would be really hard") and Ellen does not question her timidity; instead, she alleviated her daughter's worry by telling her she could delay the option as long as she wants.

"Becca wants to blend in, be part of the crowd," Ellen explains. "She doesn't want to be smart. She's a very sensitive person and if it's easier for her to be average, then that's O.K. with me."

With the adults in her life overlooking her pain, Becca's efforts to gain their attention escalate. Several months after our initial meeting, Ellen tells me that Becca, who is twig thin (and is, in fact, sometimes called Twig by her friends), recently asked her what it means to die of starvation.

"I told her people don't actually die of starvation," Ellen says. "Their organs malfunction. I told her that Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, not actual starvation. And she thought about that and said, 'Well, maybe I can get my appetite back.' I didn't say anything to her. But I've noticed that sometimes her mirror is out of her closet. She brings it out to look at herself, and she does it a lot. And some days she comes down and says, 'I can't go to school today, I'm too fat.' Then a few minutes later, she'll say, 'O.K., I found something to wear that hides it, but I've got to lose weight."'

Echoing Becca's history teacher, Ellen says that, as with academics, developing a body image is Becca's responsibility, so she won't "pick up the rope" and interfere. "I don't say anything," Ellen says. "I see that she doesn't eat for a day or so and then suddenly a whole box of Nutri-Grain bars are gone. Or all the leftover Halloween candy. Or a bag of doughnuts. I know she doesn't binge and purge, but she does have this very erratic way of eating.

"Becca doesn't have an eating disorder, but she's messing with the choices, with the possibilities of it. But I'm not going to give her attention on that topic. I don't want food to be a battleground."

Like Becca's teachers, Ellen plays down her daughter's behavior, although she herself once spoke to me of the perils of misreading girls' passivity. "When boys have problems," she said, "they act out and get in trouble. But with girls, they aren't supposed to get in trouble and often they just turn it in. So you don't hear about the problem until they try to commit suicide."

By the time I meet Tom Holbrook, he has become a mythic, frightening figure. I expect a fierce man and am startled to find a mild-mannered, balding fellow with a goatee wearing jeans, a T-shirt and old deck shoes, who slouches much like his daughter.

Ellen confines her feelings about her husband to a series of journals that Tom has never read, and he seems unconscious of the depths of her anger. He is aware, however, of his daughter's increasing moodiness, but he casts about for its source in vain.

"It doesn't make sense," he says, stroking the family cat, which has jumped into his lap. "She's got two parents; we're college-educated; we have all these neat things; she has anything she wants; we don't speak with foreign accents -- what's the problem? I think Becca looks for things to get mad about."

Becca has told me that she thinks her father drinks too much and that she's alienated from his as a result. When I mention this to Tom, he seems genuinely shocked. "I don't drink to excess," Tom insists. "I'm never out of control. But maybe Becca sees things she doesn't care for. We've never debated the issue; she's never been negative about it to me."

Tom also briskly dismisses a theory of Ellen's, that his disappointment in his son has placed a wedge in his relationship with Becca. "I didn't expect to live my life through Jason," he says. "It's not like we called him Tom Jr. or anything. When you have kids, you have to accept that all bets are off. That "Father Knows Best" thing is only on TV. I don't know that Becca understands that. We're not perfect -- there is no perfect family."

Having rejected other alternatives, Tom attributes his daughter's withdrawal to a natural teen-age phase, carried to an extreme by a pampered child. He considers Becca overwrought and hyperbolic in her emotions, but then he blames himself and Ellen for that: perhaps, he says, their indulgence of her moods encouraged Becca's hypersensitivity. Since it's too late for what he calls "behavior modification," Tom feels the best course of action for him is to steer clear of his daughter, to communicate through Ellen, and to appreciate the rare moments when Becca and he are at ease in each other's company. In the end, though, he believes that a rift between fathers and daughters is inevitable.

"It's harder to be a father to a daughter than a son," he explains. "I subscribe to that theory that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and we can't understand certain things about each other because of that. "

For months April Welch tells me about her mother, Denise, I try to meet her. We talk on the phone nearly a dozen times and she seems eager to discuss April's school progress as well as her own attempt to reconstruct her life. But whenever we choose a time and place to meet, she stands me up. Three times we agree to meet at the school, but she never shows; later we agree to meet at a cafe near her apartment and I wait for two hours; twice we agree to meet at the corner of the housing project where she lives, but even when our talk is scheduled just a few hours after a phone conversation, Denise forgets.

In early spring, I ask April if she'll bring me home with her one day for a sneak attack, but she shakes her head. "I can't do that," she says, her voice thick with pain. "I think ... I think my Mom might be on drugs again."

By May, I can no longer reach Denise: the family's phone has been disconnected. As her mother becomes increasingly incapacitated, however, April steps in to fill the void, becoming a kind of junior mother. She takes on full responsibility for caring for herself and her younger brother, begging one of her aunts for a few dollars to buy chicken wings and potatoes for dinner, giving the boy her own small portion when his is inadequate and insisting that he attend school even when she does not.

In early June, Denise begins stealing from the small stash of money that April has hidden in her room for emergencies, but April says nothing; she just buys a lock for her door. When, a few days later, Denise breaks the lock and rifles through her daughter's possessions again, stealing a VCR that April had bought for herself before her mother's latest decline, the remainder of her money and some of her clothing, April sits down on her bed and sobs.

"I know my mom," April tells me sadly one afternoon. "I can see what she's doing. She's doing drugs for sure and there's starting to be prostitution, men coming into the house. I don't know what they are doing in there exactly, but I don't want those men coming after me next."

When the year's final grades are reported, April fails every subject except gym. She is still unable to add or construct a simple sentence, but, as predicted, she is promoted to eighth grade anyway. Yet, although the school system has essentially dismissed her, and her mother all but abandoned her, April perseveres.

On a late June night, she lies awake in bed, listening as the sound of her mother trading sex for crack drifts through the wall. She grabs two socks and jams one against each ear to block out the noise. When that doesn't work, she wraps a pillow around her head, the socks still in place. Lying there crying, she realizes once again that the only way she can save herself is to leave home.

"I was thinking, 'I have to do something if I want to do something different in my life or I'll end up doing like my mom's doing,' " she tells me later. " 'I'll end up doing prostitution for drugs and sleeping with all kinds of different guys and having all kinds of kids maybe.' So I prayed to God that night. I decided I'd leave and go with my Auntie Lydia. And if she wouldn't have me, I'd go get a job and pay my own rent somewhere. But I couldn't stay there."

The next morning, April called Child Protective Services and was again placed in a group home. After several days, however, she phoned her great-aunt and uncle, Lydia and George Roberts, who agreed to take her in, at least on a temporary basis. To April, this aunt and uncle are the stuff of fantasy: they both hold stable jobs -- Lydia works in the accounting department of a large corporation and George has a job with the city -- they go to church every Sunday and the house where they live with their 17-year-old son is clean, calm and safe.

"At first, my husband said this was too much for us, to take April on," Lydia told me when we spoke on the phone shortly after April moved in with her. "We have a child of our own and we're not so young anymore. But somehow, April touched our hearts. The night after she called, my husband woke me up at 2 in the morning and said, 'I don't know why I'm saying this, but if you want to take April in, I'm with you all the way.' I asked him what happened and he said, 'I don't know, I just know you love her.' Well, I don't know about that, but I know she deserves a break. I know that much.

"April has potential. I believe that. She just needs someone to be there for her when she falls to pick her up, push her back out there and tell her she can do it. Someone to be there when she's in need. Someone had to get involved, so I did. I did it because I see a future for April; I have hope for her. She's very strong.... I still have hope for her mother, too. Denise has come up from the gutter before, gotten a job even. But she's not what concerns me right now. What concerns me is whether April will hold out for the dream, whether she will hold out for all that she hopes for, for all that potential."

The last time I see April is during a visit to the Roberts' home, a whitewashed row house several miles away from the project where Denise lives. When I ring, April answers the door and immediately apologizes for her appearance. She is wearing purple sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt -- what she calls her "kicking around" clothes -- and her hair is pulled into a haphazard ponytail.

She leads me to the living room, which is dominated by a large-screen TV, and I sink into an oversize gray sofa. April sits on the floor beside me and leans against a window.

April is noticeably less fidgety than in our previous conversations. And although she says: "I'm hurting. I'm hurting every night about my mom," she is filled with pride in her new life. "With my mother, she let us do what we wanted," she says. "You didn't have to go to school; you could just stay home. You could be out on the street selling drugs -- my brother does that. He likes it like that. But I choose not to go down that path. I choose to do good for myself. So I made a change. And it was all me: if I hadn't decided to make that change, there wouldn't never have been no change."

Earlier this year, April told me that she aspired toward a career in cosmetology, but she now says she has a new goal: "I want to help kids in the situation I was in. I want them to see me and say: 'Dang! April got through high school and college and all, and look at all she went through!'

"You know what I want?" She looks down at my note pad. "I want to write my own book someday. I want to write my own book about my experiences so all the kids like me will know they can do better."

As April walks me to the door, I think back to what her counselor said, that there was nothing the school could do for a child who did not want to help herself. If success is, indeed, a three-legged stool, April has, despite profound adult indifference, secured two of those legs on her own. The question is whether she will be provided with the means to shore up the third.

When I first began talking to the girls at the two schools, we agreed that -- so they would feel free to speak candidly -- I would not discuss our conversations with their parents or teachers. To reassure them further, I explained the journalistic notion of protecting your source, an idea that they met with much enthusiasm. But in the spring, Becca asked me to read her journal and I realized that my promise of confidentiality had to be broken.

Early in the second semester, Becca's two closest friends severed their relationships with her. Although the rift began with an inconsequential spat, one of the girls said she realized she was sick of Becca's "putting herself down." The other said: "You have to reassure her 50 times a day that she's not fat, that she's pretty. She's so sensitive; I know I should be more understanding, but it's kind of a relief not to have to worry about that anymore." As girls will in their middle-school years, they shifted alliances. But when the new cliques were formed, Becca was left alone.

With few emotional reserves to fall back on, Becca panicked. She began spending her lunch periods in the school library so she wouldn't have to be by herself on the schoolyard; when her mother would allow it, she took "mental health days," staying at home in bed. As her social isolation increased, she began confiding in her journal (with an eye toward a reader), trying to sort out her anger with her friends from her own culpability.

"I never really felt that I was that good," she writes in one entry, "It felt like no matter what I did, it wasn't good enough... Putting myself down kind of reassured me that I was O.K."; later, she muses, "I lack self-esteem and confidence." But when her anxiety doesn't abate (and her friends don't return), Becca begins to conflate her distress over her parents and friends with her dissatisfaction over her weight: "I need therapy and diet pills soon," she writes in March, as if both were needed to affect a true cure.

Then, on March 23, Becca writes: "I downed eight Tylenol P.M. Good. I hope I end up in a coma then die!! ... Why am I suicidal? ... I don't even want Peggy to read this entry. She's an adult and would call a drug or suicide hotline."

I considered myself to be an observer of these girls' lives, not a participant in them. Yet I felt I couldn't ignore the significance of Becca's gesture. So on my next visit to Weston, I sat Becca down for a talk. That day, she was feeling better and was more interested in discussing some recent prank phone calls she'd made to boys than her journal entries. I told her that her instincts were right: I did have to talk to an adult about what she'd written and we agreed I would talk to her mother. Becca just asked that I not tell anyone at school.

A week later, Ellen and I sat on the Holbrooks' front steps -- she in her gardening gear, sunglasses covering her eyes -- talking about the breach between Becca and her friends. Ellen had tried to intercede, phoning one of the girls to chat "friend to friend," but that didn't seem to patch things up for long. In the meantime, Ellen's own relationship with Becca has grown strained. "Becca's gotten sullen," she says. "Our relationship isn't as intimate or consistent as before. She's been pulling back; sometimes we don't talk at all."

She turns to me, confidentially. "A week ago Monday, I could hardly wake her," she admits. "I came in and her lips were kind of stiff and I thought: 'Oh my God, can I do C.P.R.? How do I revive her? Do I call 911?' I was scared she'd done something. I shook her and she was O.K., but she was sort of stumbling down the stairs, really groggy."

Ellen kept Becca home from school that day and arranged an appointment with the school counselor. She also broke one of her own rules and snooped around her daughter's room while Becca was out. "All I found was Bayer headache formula and that wouldn't account for it. She's being deceptive. She's never been deceptive before." Ellen pauses. "But, she seems O.K. now, and it hasn't come up again, so I let it go."

I tell Ellen what I read in her daughter's journal. She rubs her palms against her thighs; her dark glasses hide her eyes, but her lips and the muscles in her cheeks tighten. "Well," she says and lets out a breath, "I'm not surprised." She pauses. "Oh, dear." Another deep breath. "I guess I'll have to find out what's in her drawers and talk to her about it."

Ellen continues to rub her legs, looking grim. "I guess she's been asking for more help than I've been giving," she says. "Maybe I should've paid attention a long time ago.

"I'd decided already to put her in therapy, but I thought we'd do it this summer, because I didn't have time now. So I guess I have that twinge of mother guilt. I know she needs to get her self-image into some perspective. And she needs to get her thoughts on relationships with boys and men in order." Ellen sits for a moment, staring straight ahead, then says, "Becca really needs a boyfriend, it defines her so much."

I ask if she really thinks that's the solution.

"Well, it has so much to do with her self-image right now. But I guess, if they broke up...." She trails off; the sentence need not be completed.

"I know that, when she goes into therapy, she may get angry with me as well as Tom," Ellen says. "I'm prepared for that. She may get angry at the role model I've been, tolerating what I've been tolerating. But she's experiencing anger now, obviously. I'd like to see it come out in a more healthy way. I'm not sure I'm prepared for what Tom has to deal with, though. I don't know what he'll do with the issues as they come up. But it will be this summer, so we'll see. I think it's going to be, and I apologize to Mr. Shakespeare for this, the summer of our discontent."

Soon after my last conversation with Ellen, I left these girls' lives, uncertain of how their stories will play out. I think of April as I last saw her, standing at the front door of her aunt's apartment full of hope, despite the countless challenges she still faces between now and her high-school graduation. And I think of Becca, too, looking worried and anxious about the summer, and her transition to ninth grade. Becca's obstacles may be less obvious than April's -- less a matter of attaining basic literacy or being assured of a roof over her head -- but they are no less daunting. Her future also depends on her ability to transcend the model that her parents, for all their good intentions, have set for her: to, like April, choose "not to go down that path" and instead to chart her own.

© Peggy Orenstein. All rights reserved.