"Why wouldn't I be nice to you?" he asked.

"Good point."

"Hey, by the way, do you want to come over for a snack or something before I take you home?"

I smiled, but felt a flutter of something like fear. He hadn't even asked me where I lived, hadn't invited me until we were already at his door. Had he been so confident I'd say yes? I thought for a minute that I should say no, take me home now instead, but I didn't want to.

"I guess you thought I'd say yes."

He laughed in an odd, flat way, turned the engine off, and got out. I couldn't decide what he meant by the laugh. I think he thought I'd been making a joke, so in that sense, it was a polite gesture. But I hadn't really been joking, exactly, so the more genuine the laugh, the ruder it was. He didn't offer to help me out, and even though I could have used a hand, I was kind of glad. Kyle never once patronized me. I opened my door and jumped out and then body-slammed the door shut. I followed him up three wooden steps to a front door flanked on either side by enormous windows. I could see the foyer on the left and on the right, the living room, a soaring, modern room with a balcony over it. We walked in, and Kyle threw his book bag on a bench and his shoes on the floor, even though the house was so spotless I felt like I might have to tiptoe through it, straight to the shower, and scrub myself before I was allowed to sit down. I took my shoes off too, lined them up neatly at the window. A giant flat-screen TV was embedded in the living room wall, across from a black leather sofa with silver feet. I would have put lots of money on no b.u.t.t ever having been perched anywhere near that couch. I looked at my socks, made sure they had no lint or dust on them. They were striped. Looked pretty clean.

"You want something to eat?" Kyle asked. I did not. We went into the kitchen, lit by a giant window in the ceiling, and he opened the fridge and poured a gla.s.s of milk. "You want milk?" he asked. I remembered how when he'd had the beer at Chessie's party, I'd imagined him drinking milk. I don't like milk, shook my head no. "You want something else? We have everything," he said. I peered into the fridge as he put the milk back, saw that they did, in fact, have everything. Their house looked like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a house, rather than a place where anyone lived. The contents of the fridge were lined up so neatly it was almost as if they'd been alphabetized and organized by a robot.

"I'll have lemonade, if that's okay," I said. I thought in the impossible event that Kyle kissed me, I'd like to taste lemony, rather than like punch or diet soda. Milk seemed worst to me, but obviously he wasn't thinking ahead, or didn't care if I thought his teeth were coated with white film when we kissed. And he was right. I would have kissed him if he'd had Rachael Collins's and my fetal cat in his mouth.

He poured me lemonade, and went to the cupboard for some Smartfood popcorn.

"This okay?" he asked, shaking the bag.

"Perfect," I said, thinking there was no way I was going to eat anything, since my stomach was on fire.

"Let's go upstairs."

I followed him up a flight of carpeted stairs, also lit by a skylight. He took the stairs two at a time, thundering up to his room.

"Show off," I said.

He looked back down at me and laughed in a friendly way. Then he came back slowly and reached his hand out to me.

"Sorry!" he said. "Here."

I let him take my hand, and the moment our hands touched, electricity shot through my hand, up my arm, and straight down my body, pouring heat into my stomach. I frankly thought I might faint down the staircase. But I managed to climb the stairs, taking them as slowly as possible in case he never touched me again. I wanted to make the hand-holding last as long as it could. At the top of the stairs was an enormous canvas, painted with a design so modern it gave me the hillbilly I-could-have-painted-that feeling, before I squashed it. And when I looked closer, I realized it looked kind of like the shape of a light blue baby, floating against a darker blue background. But I couldn't be sure. It gave me a bad feeling.

"Cool painting," I said. Kyle let go of my hand.

"Yeah," he said. "My parents are into art. My dad used to collect it."

"But now he doesn't?" I asked.

"No, I guess he still does," Kyle said.

Something about his voice made me change the subject.

"Where do you practice lines?" I asked him, kicking myself as I said it. It was too boring, too obvious, too like-I want to fantasize forever about you in this house, about my having seen it, about- But he seemed to appreciate that I had steered the topic away from his dad's art collection.

"In my room." He pushed a door open, and there it was, glory: the only disorderly part of the house. I felt relief at the sight of a mess, as if there was potential that anything could be alive in this drafty museum. I wondered what his parents thought of Kyle, his sport socks thrown on the floor. Maybe they never came into his room. Or maybe they found it cute that he was sloppy, that it was part of his being "artistic." He wanted to be a filmmaker, everyone knew that he was going to be a big director, and even though he didn't talk about it, everyone said he was going to D'Arts so he could learn "every aspect" of the business, that is, how to act-and apparently also how to dissect cats, because he was taking AP bio. Other than his desk, the rest of the room was a storm of stuff, sweatpants thrown over his chair and bed and books and papers all over the floor. His room reminded me of Chad and Sam and their rooms, Chad's ratty Snoopy doll and Sam's car-shaped bed and salamander terrarium.

Kyle slumped down onto a sofa next to the window, rested his arm along the back of it. He looked relaxed and sleepy, like himself, for the first time since we had come into his house. A TV faced him. He patted the cushion next to him. Was it so obvious that this was why I had come over? Was he going to kiss me? Disbelief shot through me over and over, in little jolts. I sat and glanced around at the walls.

A Sopranos poster. And another of Robert De Niro from Raging Bull. Across the room from where we were sitting was a desk with a white Apple laptop and about twenty DVDs stacked there. They were labeled with dates, but that was it, and they were the only thing he kept neat at all. But I could tell that he would have to do a lot of work to escape being a complete sociopath about neatness, because the rest of his house was so still and immaculate that you felt like if you coughed or something, floor-to-ceiling windows and priceless pieces of modern art would shatter.

Kyle picked up a remote, turned the TV on. A blue HBO screen came up.

"Do you have on-demand?" he asked me. I did not, but I nodded.

"You ever watch The Wire?"

I hadn't. "Yeah, once or twice."

"You want to watch an episode with me?"

I didn't. "Sure, I'd love to."

He put it on, and then put his arm around me. I reminded myself what Chad had said about how teenagers can't have heart attacks. I hoped he was right. And that if he wasn't, and my heart exploded, I would at least have kissed Kyle before it happened.

Sometimes, climbing onto the bed at the Motel Manor, I wonder, would I take back that day? I don't think so, even now. Call me crazy. I wondered on the couch why he wasn't at all nervous about what I thought of him. Maybe it was totally obvious that I was so in love with him I was about to combust spontaneously. Or maybe he figured I had so much to be embarra.s.sed about that I wasn't the type to judge other people. Sometimes people like to be my friend for this reason. They don't realize you can be both really short and f.u.c.ked up yourself and also quite judgmental and b.i.t.c.hy. Too bad for them.

"Where are your parents?" I asked. It came out all scrunched up, like now that my heart was in my mouth there was no room for words in there.

"At work," he said, and again his tone made me feel like I couldn't ask anything else about them, so I didn't.

To the left of his room, I had noticed another bedroom. Because the door was open, I could see a big four-poster bed with a cream-colored bedspread on it and a beige carpet. It looked like a hotel room. The curtains were open in there, too, and I could see the branches of an oak tree, touching the side of the house and the window. I thought if there was a bad Michigan storm, the tree might come right in the window and impale Kyle's parents while they slept. Or just smash open the whole side of the house and expose them. Maybe they'd fall out of the house. I'm not usually a morbid person, but there was very weird and scary energy in Kyle's house.

"Maybe it's stupid to watch this from the middle," he said suddenly, and turned The Wire off. "If you've only watched it once or twice. You should really watch the whole thing in order."

For the first time I thought he might be nervous. He got up and went to his desk.

"Whatever," I said. "I'm happy to do whatever you want."

This came out kind of s.e.xier than I'd meant it to, and I could feel my skin turn to lava. I looked out the window.

Kyle was sitting at the desk and scrolling through songs on his laptop. Maybe he had put his arm around me as a gesture of friendliness, the way I might put mine around Sam. He settled on Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, plugged some speakers in, and music flared into the room. Darcy Arts kids were always like this-showing off that they have cla.s.sic taste. Kyle would never have been the type to put on anything trendy.

Tomato, tomato, potato, potato. We were quiet for a minute.

"Do you want to sit down here?" Kyle asked. Now he patted the bed next to him. I looked at it, judging quickly that it was low enough that I could get onto it, but high enough that I would have to climb like a Munchkin. I smoothed down the shirt I was wearing, a fabulous red Lucky Western b.u.t.ton-down with pink roses on the cuffs. I wanted to make sure it didn't rise up over my jeans as I hoisted myself onto the bed. Kyle waited. I put both hands on the mattress and pressed down, raising myself up, and then climbed as gracefully as I could until I was perched next to him. I was grateful that he had offered me no help. The staircase was bad enough; if he had had to lift me onto the bed, then he might as well have tucked me in and read me a story, too.

I sat on the bed like a tiny bird on a high wire, and looked around. There was a picture facing down on the nightstand next to his bed, and I was like, "What, is that a picture of your girlfriend or something?" maybe just because I was so nervous. I leaned over and picked it up and saw a girl with pigtails held by rubber bands with red marbles on them, squinting and laughing into the sun next to a pool. She had a cherry-print tank top and jeans shorts on, and was sprawled out on a big white reclining chair. I could tell right away that the girl-with her skinny legs and a smile full of pointy baby teeth-was probably six or seven or something. I said, "Oh, sorry," because I was embarra.s.sed, and he was like, "Yeah, whatever," and his eyes looked like the marbles on her ponytail holders, and I didn't ask anything else about her, not even her name.

Then Kyle leaned down and started to kiss me. Heat spread through my mouth and into my body-so much of it I thought I might boil over my own edges and burn his house down. I didn't know where to put my hands, was glad for a million things: that he hadn't said anything embarra.s.sing like "I want to kiss you" or "Can I kiss you?" like Joel had said to me at the LPA conference. Kyle didn't pretend it was anything other than what it was, an obvious make-out session. I felt feverish, tried to absorb the moment, to enjoy it as much as I possibly could, to remember everything about the way it felt so if it never happened again, I could live off the memory of kissing Kyle Malanack for the rest of my life. But I couldn't enjoy it. Where was I supposed to put my hands? I wrapped them around the back of his neck, which was hot and smooth. I felt the hair at the nape of his neck, more babyish than I had expected. His hands were moving on the b.u.t.tons of my Lucky shirt, undoing them.

"Is this okay?" he asked.

I nodded, went to help him with the b.u.t.tons. As soon as I did, he let go and reached to take his own T-shirt off, stretching it over his head. When neither of us had a shirt on, he moved up to the pillows and motioned for me to join him. I lay down, face to face with him, and it was almost as if we weren't horribly mismatched. His legs went on forever, but I couldn't see them, and now that we were lying down, it mattered less. He put his arms around my back and pressed my chest to his, all skin and pulse. His fingers were on the strap of my bra, a pink cotton, simple one I definitely wouldn't have worn if I'd known Kyle would be fumbling, plucking, guitar-strumming it. Should I help him? It was taking way too long, but I didn't want to be aggressive. Finally, I reached back with one hand and unclasped it for him, and he said, "Thanks," and then we both laughed. I was really glad we laughed. I wanted very much to do a good job, to fool him into thinking I had had my shirt off before, that I wasn't dying of embarra.s.sment. I didn't even wonder whether he'd had other girls with their clothes off in his room, just a.s.sumed he had been Don Juan since he turned seven. That's how s.e.xy he was. Although as soon as my bra was off, I was horribly uncomfortable that it was sunny outside, that I had a freckle on the side of my stomach, and freckles on my chest, and probably farmer tan lines from last summer. And I wondered what he thought of the way I looked-too big, too small? I was so tense, I was lying there like I'd been freeze-dried, so I focused on being flexible, and while I was doing that, I noticed a frantic quality to the way he was moving and undressing. He unb.u.t.toned his fly and kind of shoved my hand in there. I had no idea what to do, so I moved my hand up and down, but it was basically stuck in his jeans and boxers anyway, so I could barely move it, and I was glad, since I didn't know how to move it without hurting him. My mind raced. I had once heard someone-Was it Meghan? Stacy from Huron? Someone likely to be right about such things? I couldn't remember-say you could never touch a guy without first putting lotion on your hands, or they got "d.i.c.k burn," which was something like rug burn. I didn't want to give that to Kyle. But I wasn't going to ask him for lotion, either. While I was thinking about this, he undid my jeans and put his hand inside my underwear, moving his fingers for like two seconds before he was like, "Should I get a condom?"

Maybe this is amazing, or maybe not, but I didn't hesitate. It was like smoking with Ginger. I mean, I wasn't going to be good at it, but I didn't really want to be like, "No, I can't, I'm too pure," or "I never did it before." Plus, what's so great about being a virgin when you're about to be seventeen, especially if you're me? I did think the condom question came up suddenly, but I was mainly just glad that I had already decided, in the driveway, that I would go the whole way if it came up. I could even hear myself calling Meghan in California the next day and being like, "I lost it to the hottest guy in the school, yeah yeah, average size, yeah yeah, Kyle, the one I told you about." I even thought I'd tell Sarah and maybe Molly, and that if the school found out, well, so be it. Meghan and I had already thought we'd probably lose it the summer we were seventeen-that seemed about right, or at least senior year-so if I got a jump on it by a few months, what was wrong with that? Especially since it was Kyle. Kyle. I mean, I loved him. And I thought he either already loved me, or would soon.

Maybe this makes me a s.l.u.t or whatever, but I wanted the whole experience, and didn't think I would ever have a chance to lose it to anyone lovelier than Kyle. So while I entered an even deeper level of panic over how I'd manage the next step, I watched him put the condom on. He did this kneeling over me, naked, and I had the same thought I'd had the first time I met Kyle Malanack, that he was the most un-self-conscious person in the universe. Here he was, on his knees above me, wrapping that hideous flesh-colored balloon around himself as if it were the least embarra.s.sing thing that had ever happened. I mean, I was so mortified I thought I might faint and fall off the bed, and I wasn't the one spread-eagled and basically standing up. I also wasn't, you know, turned on. So that made me think about acting, about what I would do if I were turned on. Maybe move around a lot? Wiggle? Make noise? There was no way I was going to make noise. And in fact, moving around a lot sounded horrible too. Then I figured, whatever, it was already s.l.u.tty enough that I was sleeping with him on the first date-and it wasn't even a real date-I didn't want him to think I was like a nympho or anything. So I just kind of lay there, waiting, but then I started worrying that lying there like that was uns.e.xy. But he was on top of me, fumbling around for what seemed to me like an awkwardly long time. I tried to help by arching my back but I was kind of scared and super weirded out and the light had changed and the room seemed suddenly brighter and I wondered what he could possibly be thinking and even what I was thinking. Then I started really freaking out, like what am I doing here and did I say yes to this and who am I and will I regret this later, but by the time I was having those thoughts, he had put it in and it was so painful somewhere up near my lungs that I took a sharp breath that made noise. That gave me something to think about, because I was wondering was that noise uns.e.xy, but Kyle was coughing or moaning or something and then he stopped moving. It was all very uncomfortable. And since I'm being totally honest here, kind of gross. I wanted him to get off me, even though it was Kyle. Because by then I felt like I didn't know who he was and even if I had known at some point, we were both different people from who we'd been then anyway. I tried to remember s.e.x scenes from movies, even Internet p.o.r.n I had once accidentally walked in on Chad watching. I wished I had paid closer attention, watched more, read my parents' Joy of s.e.x more carefully. I mean, I had read it, but all it had was pictures of a skinny, hairy guy climbing all over a hairy girl like they were missing links trying to create the next human in the chain. And what did that have to do with me? What did girls do when guys were slumped like that? I hadn't seen any pictures of a beautiful guy like Kyle coughing and slumping in the Joy of s.e.x. I considered scratching his back like Alice always did to Chad, but I didn't know how that would go over, and all I wanted was to get up and put my jeans back on and run home and lock myself in my room so I could think this over and decide what it all meant. That's the thing about me. I prefer things once they're already over and I'm working on understanding them. I wish I were faster at that-like, I could understand things while they're happening-but I always have to read the whole book and write the entire paper before I even know what the h.e.l.l I'm thinking.

So I just stayed still in Kyle's bed, waiting for it to be over so I could know what to think. I just lay there like a dead person. Thankfully, after ten seconds, Kyle rolled off me and stood up, pulled his boxers and jeans on. I sat up then, super relieved that he had finally given me the chance, and scrambled for my underpants and jeans.

"Sorry," he said.

I was confused by this. Had he been able to tell I hadn't liked it?

"No, no, that was-" I said, even though I wasn't sure what we were referring to. I didn't want to admit that it had been bad, was worried that he'd said sorry, because I thought that meant he'd known it was bad too. I had already pulled my jeans back on and was rehooking my bra. A wave of nausea washed over me.

"Um," he said, "was that okay? Are you okay?"

I looked him over and nodded. I suddenly really liked him again. Liked the way he said "okay" in his friendly, sleepy voice. That he was worried about whether I was okay. We barely knew each other, I realized. Then he took it to a whole other level.

"You don't have to answer this," he said, "but have you ever done it before?"

I wished I knew which answer he would like better-I would have supplied it. I tried to buy time.

"Are you serious?"

He looked serious. "Yes, why not?"

What would I have said here? Who else would ever have wanted to? No one's ever liked me except Joel at the LPA conference and we were fourteen?

I didn't want to be that pathetic, and it wasn't totally true, I mean, an average-height boy named Ian had kissed me and put his tongue all over my mouth and face once during a game of spin the bottle in seventh grade, and that had to count for something-I mean, I thought I might drown, there was so much spit. It was like getting water up your nose. Later he asked me to go to the video game arcade with him, but I'd said no, because I couldn't reach the joysticks or the change machines, and I didn't want to have to watch while he realized it once we got there. He never talked to me again. But that didn't seem like a good story to tell Kyle, either.

So I said nothing. He looked into my eyes, in the same serious way he always did.

"Anyway, you don't have to tell me," he said, and that made me be like, "No, I've never done it before."

"Oh," he said, as if he felt really bad about having been my first. "I'm sorry it was so-you know," he said, and I realized, in one of those epiphanies that's so obvious it makes you stupid to have had to have it at all, that he was thinking about himself, not me. That there had been something bad or wrong or not cool about how he had done it. And maybe that's why the whole thing grossed me out suddenly. Maybe it was the way he collapsed. Or maybe he finished too fast or something, and I should have said, "This happens to guys all the time," but that would have meant I had done it with guys all the time, and I didn't want to say anything like that. Plus, I had never been totally sure what that meant anyway. Maybe he had totally sucked in some way I didn't know about. I was glad. Not to be mean, but at least he wasn't as worried about whether I'd been s.e.xy as he was about whether he'd been. It hadn't even occurred to me that Kyle Malanack would care at all what I thought, even of him naked, even of him having s.e.x. As soon as I'd had this thought, I had the next one, which was that I had slept with, had s.e.x with, lost my virginity to Kyle. I could not believe that it was true, that it had actually happened this way. His room was so bright. I looked around it again, at the details, trying to memorize them so that when I started to sort this out in my mind for the rest of time, I could supply myself with the pieces that would prove it fact. Then I let myself wander into dream territory: Maybe it would happen again. Maybe he would offer to drive me home the next day and the next.

"Have you?" I asked suddenly.

"Have I what?"

"Ever, you know, before."

He nodded. Was it someone from D'Arts? Elizabeth Wood? Or Kim Barksper? I hated the thought of either one of them in his room, his bed. Maybe it was someone in Boston, from his old school. But I couldn't ask.

So I retreated into the bubble bath of my fantasy. We would arrive at school on Monday in love, write notes to each other, eat lunch together, and hold hands walking down the hallway. Of course, when I came to this part I had to block out the part about my short arm reaching up into his long one, looking from behind like a little girl and her father. We would comment constantly in American lit, making it seem like we meant the books, but actually meaning our love. We would raise our hands so many times that Ms. Doman would have to shush us, and then we'd be forced to have meaningful eye contact that everyone else could see. My stomach was somersaulting-with thrill, nerves, horror, everything. I'd never felt that way before, the way I felt after that first time with Kyle, and I don't expect-or even hope, really -to feel that way ever again. I mean, a lot of that feeling was fear.

If you had told me at any point in my life up until that day that I would lose my virginity to Kyle Malanack, not only would I not have believed it, I also would have thought that whatever happened as a result would be worth it. That's the funny thing about earlier me's-they're so naive, those domino girls falling over into a dead row behind the me who exists now. I used to like to throw my mind backwards. I'd think, "Okay, if you showed some earlier me a video of my life now, would she be happy?" The reason I liked to play this game was that the answer was always yes. The younger me's would have been impressed: that I had turned out pretty cute, that I got one of the coveted shabop girl parts in Little Shop of Horrors at Tappan, that I was valedictorian there, that I won a Lilah Terrace Fellowship to D'Arts, even that I had turned out brave enough to change schools like I did. When Ms. Doman read my paper out loud to the cla.s.s, I thought, "Look at me now, all you younger Judys! Look at the soaring dwarf-if you could only have told me when I was younger that this would be happening, I would have cheered. I would have danced on the roof of a car like they do in Fame." Because I would have been that excited for myself. But now I hate that game. I never want to play it again, because if you'd shown me the me I am right now, how would I have been able to look myself in the eye?

9 I've been watching TV nonstop because I can't stand to think. So I happened to see an episode of Celebrity Apprentice from the bed in the Motel Manor, and let me just say that if this were the movie of my tragic life, that's exactly the clip the director would have had me watching. Because in case you think the Wizard of Oz problem was just the result of it being like the 1900s when that movie was made, you're wrong. Celebrity Apprentice was having a contest for who could design the best ad about laundry detergent. (How can TV producers stand themselves?) For some baffling reason, they decided to call it "Jesse James and the Midgets," and right when I turned it on, this complete a.s.shole Hershel Walker was like, "What if we let Little People wash themselves in all detergent in a bathtub and you hang them out to dry?" And then Clint Black was laughing, "I'm trying to envision how we'd hang them out to dry," and Joan Rivers, whose face is hanging off her bones to dry, said, "Well, I have a terrace. We can hang them out on my terrace." And then she tried to move her paralyzed mouth into a laugh, and failed. My takeaway from this is that anyone who thought that people in America aren't still dying for a dwarf to hang needs to think again. It's like a national fantasy or something.

I ran straight to Bill's room and knocked twice quiet, once loud, and he opened the door and came out into the hallway and we sat down together and he lit a cigarette.

"Do you mind if I have one?" I asked.

"It's not good, not good," he said, meaning smoking.

"I know. But I'll just have one."

So he lit a cigarette for me, and I puffed and choked until it was halfway gone and then stubbed it out. Whatever Bill thought of this performance, if he thought anything at all, he politely kept to himself.

"Do you want to talk?" Bill asked.

"I guess so," I said. "Would that be okay?"

"Of course," he said. "I like your story. I like it, even though it's sad. Parts of it are happy, too. Parts of it."

I liked this idea, even had the thought that I would like to make a kind of percentages chart of the ratio of happy to sad parts of my story. I mean, if you don't think of it as a plot, then maybe half is happy and half is sad. The fact that the happy stuff is ancient history and the terrible parts are recent makes me feel like the entire thing is a sour mess, but I like Bill's att.i.tude better. It reminds me of Ms. Doman. So I decided to focus on a happy part: Sam.

After I lost it to Kyle, I was more grateful for Sam than ever before. That night after Kyle's house, I went to the Grill and helped Sam with his homework while my parents did the dinnertime rush. Being with Sam was like returning from an alternate universe to a safe one. Plus, he was the type who could tell I was jittery with delight, but didn't know the kinds of prying questions other people might have asked. Mainly I asked him things. That's how it's supposed to be with people who are younger than you, by the way. Adults who talk about themselves endlessly in front of young people are unacceptable narcissistic freaks. They should do the asking.

I remember Sam was hunched over the desk in the back office at the Grill, poking the keys on the laptop. "What are you working on?" I asked, reaching up and putting my arms around him.

He kept tapping with his finger, typing one letter at a time. "Lists for my project."

"Lists of what?"

"Stuff I need from Mom and Dad."

"What's the project?"

"Science. Do you want to know my hypothesis?"

"Of course."

"That if Earth were a different shape, then the effect of climate change would be different."

"How'd you come up with that?"

"I was just thinking, you know, how we could fix the whole problem. I don't just mean, like, recycling or whatever. I mean a bigger solution." He looked up at me with round brown eyes, blinked. "And then I realized, what if we could do something magical, like change the shape of the planet? I mean, that would be so much better."

"Why, though? Why would that help?"

"I don't know yet. I have to figure out what shape would make it better."

"So what stuff do you need?" I asked. I peered over his shoulder at the list on the screen: milk cartons, baking soda, balloons, newspaper, paste, paper, cardboard, glue, weather map, ruler, globe, re-writable DVD, laptop. I thought of Kyle's neck and my stomach flipped.

"What are the milk cartons and balloons for?"