How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
I always believed that girl was a pack of lies. I could tell by her walk her underclothes were beyond her years, even if her dress wasn't. (3.50)
Felice knew that Dorcas was playing the oldest game in book: going out with parent-approved clothes on and then making a switcheroo to something sexier. But Dorcas didn't just swap a sweater for a crop top. She swapped out weird 1920s girl-underwear for weird 1920s woman-underwear. Seriously, those things look like torture devices. But hey, proof positive that loss-of-innocence doesn't start with the first application of lipstick. Hear that, Alice?
Quote #5
What did she see, young girl like that, barely out of high school, with unbraided hair, lip rouge for the first time and high-heeled shoes? (4.9)
What does Dorcas see in Joe? Well, we know that a couple of mean boys at a party didn't want to dance with Dorcas, so by the time Joe comes around she is super-happy to have someone drooling over her. But from all accounts, Joe is a silver fox. He might be fifty, but he's aged gracefully.
Quote #6
But Joe had been in the City twenty years and isn't young anymore. I imagine him as one of those men who stop somewhere around sixteen. Inside. (5.8)
Yeah, this answers—partially—the question about why Joe wants to date an eighteen-year-old so badly. Because he's sixteen inside. He wants a girl around his own age—he's not being an old perv, he's just a teenaged boy trapped in a fifty-year-old body. Proving that innocence can be lost at any age, and it can also persist to any age.