CHAPTER 5

Min

Summer 1979

“IMPRESSIVE, MIN,” MR. CONNOR SAID as he gave me my paper. It was eighth period English, minutes before the end of class. He paced the aisles between our desks and placed a paper in front of each one of us. For a moment I left mine face down without looking at it, letting the pleasure of his compliment wash through me. I had enjoyed comparing and contrasting “The Magi” by W. B. Yeats with “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot. I turned the paper over. On top was an A+ in bright red ink and the words “Very original and deftly written. Well done!” below the grade.

When the bell rang, I heard the halls flooding with students’ voices. In the front of the room, Nick asked Mr. C. if there would be extra credit questions on the exam. We were in the final marking period of tenth grade, but I knew Nick was planning to apply only to Ivy League colleges and wanted to graduate at the top of the class. I didn’t know what he was worried about. He would get in anywhere he wanted: in addition to being smarter than everyone else in our grade except me, he was wholesomely blond, a star basketball player, a member of the debate team, and Secretary of the Student Council. He was the most well-rounded person on the face of the earth. I liked to make him sweat, competing for first place with me, even though I knew I wouldn’t be going to college. Since my parents’ divorce two years before, my father had pretty much disappeared from my life, and my mother was barely making it on her own. That was another thing: Nick was rich. I had a shitload of reasons for hating his guts.

I stood up, while around me the others filed out, talking and laughing. A couple of girls said goodbye to me as they left. I watched them go, thinking how stupid feathered hair looked, then collected my books together as I listened to the shouting voices beyond the door.

When I was leaving, Mr. C. called out, “Hold on a minute, Min,” so I waited by his desk while he finished answering Nick’s questions. By the time he and Nick nodded goodbye and he turned to me, the room was empty.

“That was an excellent paper, Min, your best yet. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Connor.”

“You probably know you’re in the running for the English award. There’s one more paper due for this class. Keep it up and the award is yours. That’s off the record, by the way.”

I grinned at him. Sophomores hardly ever won the English prize. I left the classroom on a total high.

In the hall, I almost collided with Nick, who was standing outside the door. I looked up at him, startled, then moved around him and walked away.

He kept up easily. “Think you’re going to win it, don’t you?”

“What were you doing, eavesdropping?”

“You should go back where you came from, gook. You know you don’t belong here.”

Blank silence. I stopped. “What did you say?”

Nick didn’t even bother to look back as he walked away. I had been an idiot to believe that because I was grown up no one would use words like that against me anymore. It had been years since anyone had. I stood watching him go, waiting for something to happen. I wanted somebody to kill him. Then I felt a surge of energy race through my body. I had to move or I’d explode. “You cocksucking motherfucker,” I heard myself yell. I ran down the hall after him and threw my armload of books at his back as hard as I could. They hit him and clattered to the floor.

Nick turned around and started to move toward me. I was suddenly aware of how tall he was and how solidly built. I stood my ground, shaking. His gaze shifted, moving beyond me. I knew he was bluffing. I didn’t dare take my eyes off him.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” a voice demanded.

I turned around. Mr. Connor was standing in his doorway down the hall.

Neither Nick nor I said a word. I crossed my arms and refused to speak at all. Mr. Connor looked from Nick to me and back, clearly frustrated.

“This behavior is childish. Fighting in the hall is beneath either of you. What’s going on?” He waited, giving us another chance to explain ourselves. Then he said, “This had better be the end of it.” I watched him go back into his classroom, feeling strangely sad. Even Mr. C. had no special authority, no real answers.

Nick left too. Alone, I gathered up my books from the floor. I couldn’t make my hands stop shaking. I told myself I should have been on my guard with Nick; I couldn’t let him get to me. Walking toward the other end of the building where my locker was, I ran the fingers of my free hand against the rough white wall. The tips began tingling, sending bursts of sensation down the nerves of my hand. It was a rush without lighting up. I used to create this energy feeling from the walls of my elementary school, too, which were made of the same drab cinder block. Back then, I liked to pretend I was a superhero recharging my super powers. I would use them to knock the other kids unconscious, just from the force that would emanate from my hands.

When I turned the corner, I found Laura sitting slouched against my locker, her arms resting on her upright knees, her long, honey-blonde hair in her face. She was just sitting there, without even a book, waiting for me in her gym shorts, t-shirt, new white socks, and cleats. This year Laura had made it onto the girls’ varsity soccer team. She’d been JV in tennis and basketball two years in a row. I stared at her legs, which had grown thick and muscled from practice. I loved her legs.

In the last month, I had become aware that I had a serious crush on Laura. It had been a gradual realization: a growing warmth in my chest whenever I saw her, an increasing attention to her clothes, the way she wore her hair from one day to the next. For six years she had been my best friend. Now I was discovering that she was beautiful. She tended to complain that she was too big, her hair too limp, her face too round, uninteresting. I thought differently. I thought her face was wonderful, expressive and alive. I thought about her all the time, though she didn’t know it. Right now I wanted to run my hand along the smooth curve of her calf, which she shaved faithfully every week.

I sat down on the linoleum floor beside her. Laura looked up, and her smile made my heart tighten a little and then start beating harder. I kept my arms wrapped safely around my knees, uncertain what to think, how to act. Sometimes I desperately wanted her to know how I felt about her, and at the same time I knew I would die if she ever found out. I had started to watch myself carefully. Even sitting next to her like this felt like an honor. I had to rely on memory for the right way to act around her. I was forgetting what it felt like to be a friend.

“Where’ve you been?” Laura asked, slapping the back of her hand playfully against my jeans. When I didn’t answer she asked, concerned, “Did you get your paper back?”

Normally, I would have bumped her arm with mine, then stayed leaning against her. I needed her warm skin against my arm grounding me. But now I was too scared to do it. The way I had come to feel around her wasn’t going to help me. I realized I was still trembling.

I nodded. “Yeah. A+.” The grade seemed trivial now.

Laura looked down. “That’s great, Min. You must have worked hard on it.”

“No, not really,” I admitted. I didn’t want to talk about the paper. I leaned back against the hard metal of the lockers. “Someone called me a gook.”

I felt Laura get very still beside me. I didn’t know what that meant, or what she would say. We had never had this conversation before. We had never had to.

“Who?”

“Nick. He said I should go back where I came from.”

I had hated Nick ever since seventh grade, when he dated Laura a few times and then dumped her. She was devastated. He was the first boy she ever kissed. I remembered that we both had thought he was cute. In seventh grade, Nick had a lanky body and sandy blond hair that fell into his gorgeous blue eyes. He had been shorter then. Even while they were together, I used to put myself to sleep by masturbating as I fantasized about making out with him. How could I have thought about him so much? As I sat next to Laura on the cold linoleum tiles, the memory of wanting him to kiss me made me feel sick.

“Nick called you a gook?” Laura sounded as though she didn’t believe me. I wondered if she still liked him and I had made a big mistake by telling her. I wished suddenly that she hadn’t waited for me this afternoon.

“That’s what I said.”

She was frowning. Her face was turning pink, the way it did when she was angry or embarrassed. She shook her head. “He’s such a jerk. He always was.”

I shrugged. “They all are. So what’s new?” I thought she’d agree. The handful of guys she’d gone out with since Nick had all dropped her after a few weeks.

Laura said nothing. She retied the laces on her right cleat. “Walk me to practice, okay? I’m late.”

“Sure.”

I was happy to change the subject. I stood up, got books for that night’s homework out of my locker, and threw them into my knapsack before spinning the combination lock closed. Outside, the sun was bright, reflecting off the windows of the beige stucco buildings. I lit a cigarette as soon as we had pushed through the double doors and took a long, satisfying drag.

“Are you crazy?” Laura asked, looking behind her. We weren’t allowed to smoke on school grounds. “Someone might see you.”

“Like I give a shit,” I said and stuffed my lighter back into the front pocket of my jeans. We ran down the steps and took the path down the hill to the gym. As we passed the girls’ locker room on our way out toward the athletic fields, Laura said, “Eric Newell invited me to his party next weekend. Will you go with me?”

“Those parties suck, Laura.”

“Come with me, Min,” Laura pleaded. “It’ll be fun. James and Devin will be there. I like Devin. He’s a really nice guy. He doesn’t try to show off in front of girls. I could definitely see losing it with him. I bet he’s really gentle.”

She waited for me to respond, but I had nothing to say. She’d had the chance to go all the way with three different guys in the last two years, but she’d stopped them at second base, saying she wasn’t comfortable going further. I didn’t get what she was waiting for.

“Do you know what James told me at lunch?” Laura asked, sounding happy. I stifled a flip response. I was already tuning her out. “That Devin grew up in Vermont. Can you believe it? I want to find out if he lived in Middlebury. Wouldn’t it be great if he asked me out at the party?” She waved away the smoke from my cigarette. “Maybe I should ask him out. Min, do you think he’d be scared off if I asked him out?”

“Laura, I don’t care,” I burst out. “Why can’t you shut up about boys for just one second?”

She did shut up. I could feel the hurt coming off her in waves, like heat. Then she said, stiffly, “Sorry to bore you. You never minded before.”

“It wasn’t the constant topic of conversation before.”

I didn’t really understand myself why I had lashed out at her. When Laura had started going out with boys, I liked to hear in detail about her dates: what he did, what she did, how it felt. But these days she just seemed obsessed, and about the most moronic things. It was as though there was nothing else she ever thought about except boys. It infuriated me.

I was aware of another reason for my flaring anger, one that I had been trying for a long time to ignore. The unspoken rule. None of the boys Laura and I liked—the blond ones, the all-American types—would ever ask me out. I was an Asian in a ninety-nine percent white town. Even though I had grown up going to the same stores, eating the same kinds of meals, watching the same TV shows, even though I had white parents just like them, I wasn’t accepted as being the same as everybody else. For years at Old Mill, my classmates had called me “slant-eyes” and “Jap.” The girls wouldn’t let me join their games of hopscotch and cat’s cradle and jacks. The boys were no better. A group of them used to ambush Roberto and Miguel outside after school, beating them up until they managed to scramble, bleeding and crying, away from the circle of legs. I used to overhear those boys bragging about it outside during recess while I sat reading a book. I started to store up my super powers by dragging my fingers along the school walls.

Since I’d been going to Tam High, I’d made a few friends I went to the movies and hung out downtown with. I had learned from watching the way they acted with me in public how to be what they expected: white at times, Asian at others. But when it came to dating, the policy of exclusion remained firmly in place. It didn’t matter how I behaved or how much I fantasized about those fair-skinned, beautiful boys. As much as a guy might like me, I wasn’t good enough to go out with. Maybe I was also angry at Laura for not being aware of this rule, or if she was aware of it, for not acknowledging it.

We had arrived at the chain-link fence at the edge of the baseball fields. The soccer field was beyond, with the Richardson Bay Bridge in the distance, a glimmer of water peeking out from beneath it. The rest of Laura’s team stood around in clumps, kicking balls back and forth. The coach, a woman who had taught my gymnastics class the year before, had taken one girl aside and was speaking to her intently, one arm around her shoulder, the other gesturing.

“Don’t go yet,” Laura said. She grabbed the horizontal metal pole at the top of the fence and walked her legs back, until she could lean into her stretch.

“Okay,” I agreed, surprised at how happy her request made me. The muscles in her legs stood out, shifting as she moved. I was mesmerized.

“When do you think you’ll get home tonight?” I asked her. I took a last drag from my cigarette and stamped it out on the pavement. Suddenly I couldn’t watch her anymore as she lunged and extended, loosening up. The way I felt was frightening me again. There was nowhere I could go with it, no one I trusted enough not to use it against me.

“About six-thirty, maybe seven. Don’t call till after eight. We should be finished eating by then.”

I kept my eyes on the coach out in the field, pacing in her deliberate way, making her points to the girl she was with. I wished I was that girl; I wished that I had someone to put her arm around me and help me see my way through. The coach was a woman I had developed a minor obsession with the year before while she taught me the back walkover, spotting me again and again until I could do it on my own. The touch of her hand on my back as I arched my body over gave me confidence and a feeling of excitement low in my stomach. Watching her now as she walked with her soccer student in their private conference, I wondered if the rumors were true that she was a lesbian.

As soon as I thought that word, everything seemed to get very still and silent around me, as though the world had gone into slow motion. All my senses were magnified: I felt my vision was sharper; I could hear from greater distances. I was a lesbian. There was a name for my feelings. Just knowing that changed my whole life in an instant. Everything would unfold differently now. I was surprised that I hadn’t figured it out before. Why hadn’t I understood something that was so obvious?

Then my heart started beating so hard I was afraid it would seize up. I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want to be even more different than I already was. Lesbians were ugly women with hair on their faces. They hated men. They were unhappy. So I wasn’t gay after all. I just had crushes sometimes on other girls. That seemed normal to me, nothing to jump to conclusions over. What about all the crushes on boys I’d had? From the time I became aware of sex, I’d thought about boys. What about the guys I still thought were cute? I even had a life-size poster of Mick Jagger up on my wall at home.

Trying to look calm, I took my cigarettes out of my pocket and lit another one. Laura finished her stretches. We stood together, heads down. Her new white socks were already dusty from our walk. I was too aware of her legs, the fresh green of the grass beyond the fence, my own body hardly able to stand still with everything inside me going off at once. Some of the girls on the team had seen us and called out to Laura.

“You’d better go practice,” I said, nodding sideways toward her friends. “Why don’t you call me when you’re through with dinner?”

Behind the hair fallen over her face, Laura nodded. “Okay. But call me if it’s getting late.” She swept her hair behind her ear, then looked up at me. Her inviting brown eyes, her face close to mine made me dizzy with the urge to kiss her. I stepped back.

“I just don’t want to piss off your mother if you’re still at the table.” Then I waved, some kind of dumb smile on my face, and walked away from her.

I bicycled home, pedaling fast, pushing myself. I wanted to feel the ache in my legs and nothing else. When I could be alone in my room I would let my discovery bubble up again, filling me. I would think it through, see what made sense. I arrived at the house sweaty and out of breath.

My mother was waiting for me in the kitchen. “I was just on the phone with your English teacher,” she said as soon as I came in, slamming the back door behind me. “And don’t slam the door, Min.”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I called back, taking the stairs two at a time. What had he told her? How much had he actually heard?

“I don’t care what you want,” she said, following after me. “He told me you hit a boy in your class.”

“I threw books at him. There’s a difference.” In my room, I swung my knapsack off my shoulders and let it slide to the wood floor.

My mother caught up to me and turned me around, her hands on my shoulders startling me. “Don’t act smart with me. I want to know what happened.”

“Didn’t Mr. Connor tell you?”

“He seemed to think your classmate was aggravating you in some way. He wanted me to tell you that if there’s another incident, you’ll forfeit your chance for the English award. Min, he likes you very much and doesn’t want to see you go astray.” I shrugged. My mother’s hands rested heavier on my shoulders, as if they could cure me of shrugging. She had pulled back her hair with a barrette, but most of what used to be her bangs had escaped. She looked at me fixedly through her new reading glasses, which she had forgotten to take off. “I want to ask you up front. Was it about drugs?”

“What?” I pulled away from her, sat down on my bed, and started to pull off my high-tops. My mother made no sense to me sometimes. “Where did you get that idea?” Maybe she had found my nickel bag in one of my old rain-boots.

“Just answer me, Min.”

I was struggling with a knotted shoelace. “No, it had nothing to do with drugs. He called me some names.” I hadn’t meant to tell her that, but I was angry and wanted to show her how off the mark she was.

“What did he call you?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because you tried to hurt him. Min, what did he call you?”

The knot refused to loosen, and I was sick of picking at it. I gave up, reached over to my desk for my scissors, and cut the lace of my sneaker. I kicked the shoe off; it landed with a thud. Looking at it lying forlornly on its side, I said, “He called me a gook.”

My mother didn’t say anything. Then she sat down on the bed next to me. She seemed to be feeling something very strongly, struggling with it. Seeing her upset, I was instantly back in the shock and sting I had felt with Nick in the hallway, like being hit with pebbles and spattered with mud. But this time I wasn’t completely alone. I was glad I had told her.

“Kids call each other names, Min,” she said after a while. I stared at her, stunned, but she wasn’t looking at me. “It’s normal. My classmates called me Four-Eyes when I was in school. You just have to ignore them. It happens to everybody.” My chest felt emptied out, hollow. I’d been stupid to think she had changed.

When I was growing up, she and my father had made a point of teaching me to be aware of the struggles of blacks in the US. She used to tell me that their fight for civil rights was different from the fight for recognition of any other minority group. She said none of us could understand the experience of being black no matter how closely we identified or worked with black people. Maybe it was true that no one could know what it was like for people different from themselves. But I thought she knew something of what I went through. She was my mother. She had raised me. Not only that, she had chosen to adopt me. Not from down the street, from Korea. Why wouldn’t she admit what my life had been like here?

At least my father had never blurted out “No, no,” and left the room when I told him how some kids had teased me at school. He had never gone off on some stranger on the street when they asked if I was related. The nights my father put me to bed, he couldn’t tell me whether it would have been easier if I’d had Korean parents, if I’d grown up with them in Korea. But he had helped me feel better, just by listening, just by being there. Sitting with my mother, I missed my father sharply. After two years, I had almost gotten used to him not living with us anymore.

I looked down at my mother’s lap, where one of her hands gripped the other. They were pale and useless hands. She said, “What that boy called you was wrong. But you shouldn’t have struck out at him, Min. Violence won’t solve anything.”

I didn’t agree, but I kept quiet.

“I want you to think about what you did,” she went on. “I’m grounding you for the weekend.”

“You’re grounding me? But I was defending myself!”

“It doesn’t matter. You know better.”

“This is completely unfair!” I shouted at her. She flinched, but she didn’t move. I stood, wanting to push her off my bed, kick her onto the floor. “Get out of here. Get the fuck out of my room!” I didn’t understand anything anymore. The world was insane.

“Min, watch your mouth or I’ll ground you next weekend too.” I could barely restrain myself. How could she be so unfair? My mother stood up and smoothed down the back of her wraparound skirt. “I’m sorry, Min. It’s for your own good.”

“Get out!” I screamed.

After she had closed the door behind her, I cried for a long time, soaking my pillow. When it was over, I lay crumpled on my bed, feeling like something very small, something thrown away and worthless.

Every summer Laura went away for two months with her family. They went to Michigan to stay with her aunt and uncle who had a summerhouse on Mackinac Island. During these months we wrote long letters to each other in which we described the activities of each day, interlacing these meticulous descriptions with full paragraphs on how much we missed each other and wished we were in the same place. During that summer, I had to acknowledge that mine, at least, had become love letters of a sort: to my eyes there was no mistaking how full of my longing for her they were.

I was also becoming aware that part of my longing was for everything she had: a family, a place to go, the freedom to spend the day sailing or swimming or reading a book. Over that summer I wrote to Laura during my breaks while I sat smoking a cigarette on the back steps of the ice cream store in San Francisco where I worked. My mother, who had a job as the bookkeeper at the local animal hospital, had informed me when summer began that because her boss had to cut her salary, she couldn’t afford to give me an allowance anymore. I’d have to find a job if I wanted to have any pocket money. When I asked her why she couldn’t stop going to therapy instead, she snapped that her therapy wasn’t up for discussion. She said money was tight and I would have to start contributing something of my own. It felt unfair, like every rule she made that summer. I yelled at her that she was selfish, slammed the door behind me, and rode my bike around in the rain, not really having anywhere to go.

I wrote Laura that after work I liked to walk around the city, climbing the hills and catching my breath at the top. Sometimes I explored alone and sometimes with Alison, who was in college at San Francisco State and worked with me behind the ice cream counter. I didn’t tell Laura that Alison had a girlfriend who sometimes stopped by the store, and that they left me in charge while they went out back to make out. I told Laura about the customers who came in to buy a cone or use the bathroom: the tourists underdressed in shorts and t-shirts, the hippies walking around barefoot, the groups of college students with the munchies, the men reeking of alcohol who panhandled for change. I didn’t tell her I had begun looking for lesbians on the street, or that I liked the confident way they walked and how they cut their hair. I didn’t tell her I was afraid to tell Alison about me because I’d never had a girlfriend. If I was a lesbian, it was purely theoretical; I didn’t have the experience of sleeping with another girl to know for sure.

Laura wrote back long, chatty letters full of complaints about her parents, who fought nonstop when they were away from home, and about being grouped with her younger cousins while her sister and brother were treated like adults. Almost three weeks into her vacation, Laura wrote that she had started going out with a boy who was the brother of a cousin’s friend.

“He’s got curly light brown hair and freckles on his face and all over his arms,” she wrote. “He’s a year younger than us, so, you know, he’s kind of awkward. He’s really thoughtful and polite, though. He’s the exact same height as me. I met him playing tennis. He’s good. We play tennis almost every day. Oh, and I almost forgot! His name is Dave.”

She wrote me in the usual detail about their dates, describing how his braces cut her lip the first time they made out, how he asked permission before he unclasped her bra and felt her up, and fully setting the scene the night his parents came home to find them in the dark, semi-clothed and wedged together on the living room couch. All his mother said was, “We’re off to sleep. You just go on doing what you were doing” as they walked through to their bedroom, clicking off the light again before leaving the room.

I couldn’t stand reading those letters. At each mention of Dave, my stomach would curdle. Every time Laura began an enthusiastic portrayal of an evening spent fooling around with her new boyfriend, I dreaded what I might stumble across, as though I had inadvertently entered a field planted with land mines. The scenery was pretty, but every step could mean getting blown to bits. It didn’t help that all I was doing was scooping ice cream and walking a lot. Even if I had wanted to sleep with a boy, I wasn’t meeting any that I considered mature and interesting enough to spend any time with. And I would probably never meet a girl who liked other girls who wasn’t already involved. I kept waiting for the letter in which Laura would tell me that they had had sex. That would, I knew, send me over the edge. I didn’t know if I’d be able to forgive her. It would hurt too much. For weeks my stomach roiled. I lost my appetite completely. It was turning out to be the worst summer of my entire life.

At night sometimes, when we were getting along, I hung out talking with my mother in the kitchen. She’d make us a pot of decaf coffee and we’d share work stories. When she asked if I’d heard from Laura I didn’t tell her much. On the days I didn’t work in San Francisco, I liked to take the long bike ride down to Muir Beach, zipping around the hairpin turns as the road descended through the redwoods and emerged into the sunlight again. On the damp beach I’d walk away from the dog walkers and picnicking families down to a more deserted area, then sit on top of a rock formation jutting out into the sea and, out of the wind, light up a joint. I preferred sitting on rocks where the spray of the crashing waves against the battered stone showered me lightly. I pretended I was a captain at sea valiantly standing at the wheel, calling orders to the crew as a storm raged around our great wooden sailing ship.

Toward the end of July, I had just arrived at the beach and was locking up my bike when I heard my name being called. It was Miguel from school. I didn’t know him very well. Through Laura I knew he had had sex with several girls in our class, though I had never seen him with any of them in the halls or hanging out after school in the parking lot. Once, I’d overheard a girl in an adjacent bathroom stall tell her friend, “Well, he’s not so bad for a wetback. You should try him once or twice.” At the beach, he was standing with three other guys, none of whom I recognized, but he broke away from them and came over to talk. After a while he invited me to get high with them. The five of us walked down the beach and passed around a couple of joints. I didn’t like his friends, who seemed mostly interested in comparing the improvements they’d made on their cars. I didn’t get the sense that Miguel liked them much either. But I liked Miguel, who made me laugh and who made me feel sharp-witted. At school he played the strong, silent type, but I saw that wasn’t him at all. Later that afternoon, he stored my bike in the trunk of his parents’ car and drove me home.

We started hanging out together after that. We’d meet at the beach and climb out onto the rocks and get high, then sometimes drive to my house while my mother was still at work. In my room we’d listen to music and crack up at the lyrics, or have heavy talks about school, or fall asleep. I tried to recount our stuporous, hilarious conversations in my letters to Laura. She was disapproving in her return letters, upset that I was getting stoned so much and that Miguel and I drove around while high. In one, she reminded me that I was breaking the law. A page later she told me that she had given Dave her first hand job. She said the underside of his erect penis felt silky and warm, but basically the whole thing was weird. In my next letter, I ignored everything she had written and avoided mentioning Miguel altogether. It was a short letter.

The day Miguel and I had sex, neither of us expected it. We were lying on my bed listening to my new Supertramp record. We were too stoned to move, much less haul ourselves up and go anywhere. The music was turned up loud and seemed to emanate from everything: the furniture, the pines outside my window, Miguel himself. For a while I got very focused on watching his Adam’s apple jump up and down in his throat, fascinated that it did this all on its own. Then I looked up at his face and realized it was because he was singing “Goodbye Stranger” in falsetto. I had the distinct sensation that someone was pushing my head up and forward, trying to get it to come off. I didn’t know if I liked this.

The day was hot, and Miguel had taken off his shirt. I looked at his flat nipples on his bony chest, thinking there was something missing. When I realized what it was, I told him to turn over and began to draw letters on his back, making him guess what I had written. Other than my father’s, I had never touched a male back before. Miguel’s was hard where he had muscles, and soft everywhere else. I drew slowly, fascinated by the texture of his skin, the way it sank under my finger and yet didn’t give way.

“B, R, E, A . . . Bread. Breath. Breakfast!”

“No!” I giggled. I wrote the next letter. A yeasty smell came from his skin. I bent my head over him to breathe it in. I was starting to feel excited touching him.

“S. Breas . . .”

“Let me finish,” I said, and completed my word on his warm back. Watching my hand move over his body, I saw that his skin was only slightly darker than my own. For some reason this fact struck me as incredibly funny.

“Man, what are you laughing about?” he asked and rolled over to watch me, smiling. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. By the time I got myself under control, I had forgotten what had set me off in the first place.

In the silence that followed, we lay on our sides staring at each other, and I noticed for the first time how green his eyes were. My breathing had become ragged, and so had his. I looked at his half-open mouth. It occurred to me that Miguel wanted to sleep with me, and then it occurred to me that I wanted to sleep with him. Before touching him, I had never thought of Miguel sexually; he wasn’t my type. He was as far from being a blond jock as I could imagine. But here we both were, and I was turned on. My mouth was parched. I was very high. I licked my lips, wishing I had thought to bring something in from the kitchen to drink. “Do you want to have sex with me?” I asked. I wasn’t even nervous, just curious.

He reached out and touched my breast through my shirt, covering it with his palm. “I didn’t think you wanted to. You never seemed interested.”

“Like the other girls at school?”

“Shit.” He looked away, embarrassed. “Maybe I’m kind of dense that way.”

“No, you were reading me right.” I wanted to put my hand in his thick, wavy black hair. Then I realized that I could. I stroked it back behind his ear. His hair was almost as long as mine and curled around like the earpiece to glasses. “Besides,” I added, smiling, “Asian girls are much more subtle than white girls, you know. You could even say inscrutable.”

The sides of his mouth pulled up. “Then what you need is a hot-blooded Chicano lover to spark your fires of passion.” I rolled my eyes and we both burst into laughter again.

And then we fucked. We didn’t spend a lot of time working up to it. He undressed, then took off my clothes, kneeling beside me, kissing the places he uncovered. Because I was high, each action seemed slowed down and deliberate. I could almost taste my own skin. When Miguel entered me, he rested on one elbow and guided his penis in with his own hand. It hurt; when I made a small grunting noise, he looked up at me, confused.

“I’ve never done this before,” I told him apologetically.

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded and slowly pushed in farther. He stayed still inside me until I was used to him, propping himself above me and looking into my face for encouragement. “Okay,” I said, a little breathlessly, not sure whether it really was.

He began fucking me in earnest. It was still uncomfortable, but I thought about how long I had been waiting to do this and now I was doing it. Then he shifted his position slightly, and the angle changed or something, because then I liked it, him filling up the space inside me like waves rushing in and the way it made me feel liquid and vast and sort of greedy. I wondered if I could come this way. I wondered why Laura always stopped short of fucking. Didn’t she have any idea how good it would feel after all her experience of foreplay? Miguel increased his tempo, his eyes closed, a look of concentration on his face. I was trying to catch my breath, wanting the slippery greedy feeling to last. When he came, silently but unmistakeably, I imagined Laura lying on her hot and sunny beach two thousand miles away as her freckled boyfriend slipped his hand into the bottom half of her bikini. Except the image changed, and it was my hand feeling the wetness there. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the solidity of Miguel’s body against mine.

Miguel lay on top of me, breathing hard, while I moved my hand across his back and smelled his ripe smell. I was still excited and a little afraid that he would fall asleep now. I was happy too, pleased with myself. I listened to the birds calling outside for what seemed like an hour before realizing that the record had ended. A trickle of fluid ran out of my body. I remembered that we hadn’t used any birth control, but I was feeling far too diffuse to care. Miguel lifted his head and then rolled us both over so that I was on top. This took a little maneuvering on my twin bed. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked down at him.

“You didn’t come, did you?” he asked. He pulled lightly on a fistful of my hair. I felt it fall, the edges grazing my chin.

I shook my head. “I didn’t think I would.”

“Do you want to now?”

“Sure.”

“Come up here.” He started to pull me up.

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“Just come up here, I’ll show you. Hey, slowly, my pecker’s still attached to me, you know. Okay, kneel over my face. Just sink down. Yeah, like that.”

What he did felt so different from anything I had been able to do for myself that I knew I would never be able to describe it to Laura. I was aware of wetness, and coolness, and the pointed end of his tongue. When my legs started to tremble, I held on to the bedboard. In the end, the pressure he used was too hard, and then I was afraid I was smothering him, and then I couldn’t think about him because I was coming and it was so much better than it had ever been alone.

Afterwards we lay unmoving on the bed, exactly as we had been an hour earlier except that we had no clothes on. I was lying on a large wet spot. I wondered what Laura would say now that I had finally gone and done it. I wondered if she’d be surprised. I was relieved. This proved I wasn’t a lesbian after all. How could I be if sex with a guy was so easy and fun? Maybe all my feelings about Laura during the last months only meant that I was horny. I was glad that I didn’t have to go through that anymore, channeling my frustration toward the person closest at hand. She and I could resume our old friendship, only now instead of talking about the boys we had crushes on, we would talk about the ones we were sleeping with. It wouldn’t have to be me asking her questions all the time, or me trying to figure out when I could touch her so it would seem casual, like a friend would. I swallowed, drawing saliva into my dry mouth. For some reason, I felt disappointed. I realized the pot had worn off.

Miguel shifted beside me and opened his eyes. He moved his arm, resting it palm up on my stomach. I could smell sex and sweat mingled. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Fine?” He seemed amused. “In my book, that was great.”

“It isn’t always like that?”

He smiled, closed his eyes, then opened them. “Well, for one thing, not every girl lets me do what you just did.”

“Really?” That had been my favorite part.

“No way. Girls can be real uptight.”

I wondered why that was. Everything Miguel and I had done had felt great. I couldn’t wait to do it the next day. Again, I felt a wash of relief. Then I looked at the clock and saw how late it was. My mother would be arriving home from work soon. We took turns in the shower, got dressed, and I hurried him out the door. After his car was out of sight, I went into the kitchen to find something to eat. By then I was starving.

That night, after my mother went to bed, I sat at the kitchen table, drinking the last of the coffee in the pot, and tried to write Laura. It was harder than I expected.

“Dear Laura,” I finally wrote. “You’ll never guess what happened today. Miguel and I DID IT. As you know, I really wasn’t thinking about him that way. It just happened. And guess what? I liked it. A lot. Remember my favorite word, cunnilingus? He did that too. The whole thing seems like too much to tell you about in a letter, unless you really want me to. I wanted you to know right away. Write me soon. I miss you. Bunches of love, Min.”

I read my letter over and over again, not liking it at all but not sure how to fix it. For some reason, I was afraid of sending it. I wasn’t sure, really, how Laura would react. At the same time, I urgently wanted her to know. And she would hate me if I didn’t tell her immediately. At least I hadn’t told her I thought I was gay, only to take it back as soon as a boy touched me. I thought again of how horny I had been for so long. Then I thought of the afternoon with Miguel and grinned. In the end, I addressed the envelope, licked it closed, wrote S.W.A.K. across the back, and left it on the table for my mother to mail in the morning.

Laura didn’t write back. I started waiting for the mail in the morning, but there was no envelope addressed to me in Laura’s large, squared-off handwriting. At first I thought she hadn’t gotten the letter; I thought maybe her mother had intercepted it. Then I realized that was ridiculous, that she had received the letter and she disapproved. Of all the things I’d done that she thought were wrong, sleeping with Miguel probably topped the list. I knew she had a set of requirements in her head about the first time. She thought it had to be with the right kind of guy, and you had to be going steady, and you had to lead up to it slowly. She was punishing me by not writing back. Realizing this was what had happened, I was furious. Laura had no right to judge me. I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules. Rules were for fools. I didn’t try writing her again. She would have to make the next move. But I still missed her.

The last weeks of summer were winding down. In the time we had left, Miguel and I would meet at my house while my mother worked and screw until I had to go in to San Francisco to my job. I was learning things from him I could never have gotten from books or my teachers. When Miguel stroked my breasts, and when he showed me how he liked his balls fondled, and when we watched each other masturbate, and when we took each other’s fingers, tongues, nipples, and genitals into our mouths, I discovered that sex was more than fucking. It was more, even, than running the bases, progressing from point A to point Z. Sometimes it was much less than that. Sometimes it was holding still, and sometimes it wasn’t even touching. I never knew exactly if Miguel felt this way, because at the end of everything we did, he wanted to come, wanted the waiting and the building frustration to resolve into a spurting orgasm. But I could remain waiting. I could stop and do something utterly different—go for a drive, scavenge in the kitchen, watch TV—and then come back to what we were doing and it would be as if we had never stopped. Or we could not come back, and I would take the feeling with me into the rest of the day or through the night. I liked that feeling of suspension. I liked the exhilaration of being aroused and not knowing when or if or why I would leave that state.

At the same time, I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I was a lesbian after all. Miguel would have been surprised to learn it during those days our sweating bodies ground themselves against each other, fierce in their pursuit of pleasure. He would have laughed at the suggestion as I kissed his back, slowly licking from end to end the indentation his spine made, then starting on the other side. But when I touched his flat chest, I wanted to cup rounded breasts; when I ran my hand over the front of his shorts, I became impatient with the blatant presence of his erection. The more familiar I became with his body, the more it startled me. The truth was I wished he were a woman.

For a while I reasoned with myself that I didn’t really know whether it was a girl’s body I craved, because I had never been with a girl, if I didn’t count Laura’s and my experimental kissing in seventh grade. And I didn’t, exactly. It had been a stupid experiment, and Laura had been more anxious than curious, more interested in kissing Nick than in kissing for its own sake. Sometimes when we spent the night at the other’s house, we put ourselves to sleep by touching ourselves simultaneously, under our separate bed covers, our hushed voices slowing down as we pretended to keep up the conversation. When we heard the other coming, we tried to come at the same time. This, too, had never struck me as a sexual interchange. It was something Laura and I occasionally did together. But as the summer weeks passed, I finally admitted to myself that when I gazed, aroused, at Miguel, it was Laura that I wanted to see, her skin I imagined touching. That didn’t make me want to stop fucking him while she was gone.

A couple of days before I knew Laura would be getting back from Michigan, I sat with Miguel on my favorite rock, staring out at the flat gray ocean, which was mostly covered by mist. I was not in a talkative mood, and that seemed to suit him. We hadn’t smoked any pot, but even so I felt myself shift into and out of the landscape around me; I was unsure if I was part of it or only watching it from a distance. The sea and the sky were almost the same color. The waves sprayed us as they broke on the rocks below. I smoked a cigarette. Eventually the fog lifted, and the sun fell warm on our faces. I shivered in the wind.

When Miguel put his arm around my shoulder, I was thinking of how soon I would see Laura’s bright face again, of the grounding sensation I got when I leaned into her. I said, still looking out at the dark, choppy water, “Miguel, I think we should just be friends.”

“Why?” He sounded surprised. And hurt.

Everything with him had been easy, natural, up to this moment. “Well, I’ve really liked being with you, and we have a lot of fun, but I just don’t feel like I want to keep doing this.”

“Why, are you embarrassed to be seen at school with me?” His tone was accusing.

“No,” I said. And that wasn’t why. But I also knew I was lying. Right then I hated myself, because I realized it was true that I didn’t want to be seen as his girlfriend at school. I thought of Miguel exactly the way the kids in our class thought of me. I felt my face get hot, realizing the unspoken rules had insinuated their way inside me too. I despised Nick, the well-rounded, all-American asshole, but I wouldn’t have been ashamed of him. Miguel took his arm away. I felt cold.

“I should have known you were just like the other girls,” he said. “You never wanted to hang out downtown or even introduce me to your mom. You never asked me to stay for dinner. You just wanted to keep me hidden, your dirty secret.” He had my lighter in his hand and started flicking it on and off.

I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to tell my mother that I even knew Miguel. I was certain she would have forbidden me to spend time with any boy in the house alone, and lying was easier than trying to negotiate with her. Being with Miguel, I realized, had been a very separate part of my life. I had never asked him to meet me in the city either, or introduced him to Alison, or even talked about Laura. Most of the pieces of my life never overlapped. I wondered why this was. At the same time, it seemed absolutely necessary. Even the thought of doing it differently made me nervous. It occurred to me that I was a different person with everyone I knew. I couldn’t risk changing that. I sat looking out over the roiling ocean made bright by the glare of the sun, and I squinted, my eyes stinging. But I couldn’t blame the salt spray. And now I had cut myself off from Miguel, the only person who had any idea what it was like to live that way.

I said, “You can think whatever you want, but that’s not the reason I want to break up.”

“I thought you were happy.” He flicked the lighter. “We’re good together.” Flick. The lighter’s flame was barely visible.

I looked sideways at him. His face was sullen, angry. I liked him so much, I almost couldn’t understand myself why it was so impossible for me to go on being with him. I just knew I couldn’t. I wanted to be with girls. “We’re good, but maybe we’re not right together,” I said. He wouldn’t look at me. I tried again. “I really do still want to be friends.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” He brought his arm back and threw my lighter as far as he could out into the water. I watched his face twist with the effort. I wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, but I had given up that right. I felt terrible.

He didn’t speak to me the whole drive home.

Three days after Laura was supposed to get back, I still hadn’t heard from her. I had assumed she would call me immediately, as she did every year. I thought she’d want to get away from her family, and that now that she could see me face to face, either we would talk about whatever was bothering her or it would dissipate, like fog on a hot afternoon. As each day passed, I started jumping up for the phone whenever it rang, but it was never for me. My mother got exasperated and told me to just call Laura myself. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t tell my mother why, and I couldn’t even bike down to the beach and hang out on my favorite rock because I might see Miguel there.

By mid-morning of the fourth day I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was one of my days off from work, and I was going nuts with restlessness. Every other thought was about Laura. I needed to hear her voice; I had to find out what was wrong, why she still wouldn’t talk to me weeks after I had sent the letter. I tossed my book onto the bed and pulled on my high-tops. I grabbed my bike from the narrow front hall, wheeling it through the kitchen.

“What’s the rush?” my mother called from the living room, where she was reading a history of the New Deal.

“I’m going to Laura’s,” I answered.

“Good. Give her my love.”

By then I was out of the house and didn’t answer. I remembered to turn back to catch the door before it closed just as it slammed shut. “Sorry!” I yelled over my shoulder, already coasting out onto the street as I swung my leg back over the bicycle seat.

The sun was hot and bright, and every shiny surface—cars, windows—reflected back into my eyes, dazzling me. Now that I was on my way to see Laura, I was happy. I put my face up to the sun and felt my hair fall away from my neck. I coasted down the road, past my old elementary school, and veered into the square downtown. A high wind pushed at the languidly waving fronds of the palm trees surrounding the depot. Then I stood and pumped the pedals until I got up some momentum on Miller, before swerving left across traffic to Laura’s house. I swung the bike around in a wide circle on the empty road before letting it fall with a clatter in the driveway beside her mother’s car.

Now that I was there, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have come. I didn’t want to run into her parents and have to make polite conversation. And what if Laura still refused to speak to me? I glanced at the sprawling house, all dark wood and glass, hoping to catch sight of her in a window. And if she did speak to me, would I tell her about myself? I heard birds, no human voices. I walked around to the back and climbed the steps to the large wooden deck. Laura was lying on her back on the bench built along the deck’s perimeter. She was wearing a t-shirt and cut-offs, and her hair was loose, spilling off the edge of the bench. She was very brown from the sun. She looked wonderful. I stood still, watching her, thinking she might be asleep.

“Daddy?” she said, not moving or opening her eyes.

“No, it’s me,” I answered.

“Min! What are you doing here?” She sat up in one graceful motion, a huge grin on her face. She was happy to see me. My breath started coming faster, as though my bike race through town was finally catching up with me. I stood at the other end of the deck, light-headed with relief.

“You didn’t call,” I explained. Then I started walking toward her. As far as I was concerned, Laura and I were the only two people for miles around. But she didn’t stand up, she didn’t move in any way toward me. I sat down beside her on the bench’s warm wooden slats and caught sight of the hot tub in the corner, covered and silent. That was what we needed.

I turned to her. “Laura, let’s use the hot tub. I’ve never been in one before.” The round wooden tub had been installed a few months earlier, before her family had left for Michigan. I couldn’t imagine Laura sitting in a little circle with her brother and sister and parents, all of them naked in the steaming water and carrying on a conversation. The idea made me laugh, abruptly, the sound of my voice sharp and clear in the piney air.

“I don’t really want to,” Laura said. I turned back to her, surprised. She looked at me steadily, and I saw that she was angry at me. In another second, I realized, she might ask me to leave. And I would have to. But I also thought part of her wanted to get in the hot tub with me, and I wanted to win that side over.

“Please?” I asked. “Just think how great it will feel. We can just relax, it’ll be nice. Please, Laura?”

The screen door creaked and Laura’s mother leaned her head out. She was tan too, and had gained a lot of weight. “I thought I heard someone laughing. Hello, Min. Laura, I’m going out. Can you two entertain yourselves for an hour or so?”

While her mother was speaking, Laura had walked over to the hot tub. She turned on a switch on the other side. Underneath the plastic cover I could hear the water start to gurgle.

“Where are you going?” I asked Laura’s mother.

She ignored me. “Don’t forget to turn that off when you’re finished, Laura.”

“Do I ever forget?” Laura asked testily.

Laura’s mother ignored that too. Laura slumped down cross-legged next to me. Her hair fell forward into her face. Her mother said, “Did you bring your bathing suit, Min?”

“Why?”

“For the hot tub, obviously.” She nodded at it.

“You can borrow one of mine,” Laura told me.

“Sweetie,” her mother said, “for God’s sake, don’t pick at your split ends.”

Laura dropped the ends of her hair that she had been examining. “Bye, Mom. Have a good time.”

“All right, I’m going. Bye, girls.” The screen door bumped shut behind her.

Laura pulled the short sleeves of her t-shirt up around her shoulders, stretched out her bare legs, and lay back down on the bench. I scooted back a few feet to give her room and sat in the shade of the house’s eave, arms around my knees, staring out at the trees in front of the high wooden fence that separated her house from the next one over. I had the uneasy feeling she was displaying herself for my benefit. I counted seven pots of rosemary and other herbs scattered around the deck. I wondered who had watered them while Laura’s family was away. I wished I had brought my cigarettes. Out front, a car door slammed and the engine, after a false start, kicked into life.

“She spent the whole summer screaming at everyone,” Laura said, “even about the tiniest things.” I looked at her lying on the bench, eyes closed, and imagined leaning over to kiss her.

“You’d think my father was the biggest klutz around. And nobody did anything. They all acted like it was normal to be angry all the time.”

I was having trouble concentrating on what Laura was saying. I was too intoxicated by the tranquil day and Laura stretched out half-undressed before me.

She said, “Going out with Dave was the only way I could get away from their arguing. But even that didn’t help, it just got me in trouble.”

She had never told me any of that in her letters. “What do you mean?”

Laura rolled onto her side, cradling her head in the crook of her arm. I could no longer see her face, just the slightly oily sheen of her burnished hair, her part dividing it neatly down the middle. “My parents weren’t nearly as laid back about Dave and me as his parents were,” she said. “You’re lucky you have privacy, a place to go where no one will barge in on you.”

I thought of my narrow bed, and for the first time I realized that I had been lucky. Where else could Miguel and I have gone, with his mother home with his youngest brother all day? It would have turned out very differently. I said, “That was because I didn’t tell my mother about Miguel. There’s no way she would have let me see him while she was at work. No fucking way. You’re the only one who knows about him.”

She seemed to consider that. Then she said, “Dave and I mostly fooled around outside. In the woods or on the beach. One time he got a wicked sunburn on his butt.”

I laughed. Here we were, back in our friendship again, trading stories about boys, just as I had imagined it after the first time with Miguel. She was still curled away from me. I wanted to stroke her hair, let her know how much I cared about her.

Laura said, “I think my father is having an affair.”

“Your father?” I was shocked. But I also believed it right away. I had always thought her father was attractive with his gray hair and arched eyebrows that made me feel he was daring me in some way. And he was almost never home.

Then Laura stood up abruptly. “Let’s get in,” she said. “I just want to be quiet for a while.” She pulled the cover off the tub. I watched her carefully. Her father. The water bubbled gently, masking the steady drone of the pump. Laura went inside the house and came out carrying two large white bath towels and a glass of water. She seemed to have forgotten about the bathing suits, which was fine with me.

We stripped in the sun and hurriedly climbed over the rim of the tub to sink naked into the hot water. Though we were used to undressing in front of each other, over the past year Laura had grown self-conscious about her body. Knowing that made me a little nervous. I also felt the difference in my own body from having been with Miguel: how I enjoyed its suppleness, how easy being naked was. Submerged to our necks, sitting across from each other on the ledge that circled the tub, we leaned back, feigning nonchalance. Gradually I relaxed, enjoying the enclosing heat of the water and the breeze that fanned my face. I closed my eyes, listening to the silence interrupted occasionally by the whisper of car tires on the road out front. I felt my body expand as if it were slowly being filled with the water and the water was as wide as the ocean.

After a while I asked, “Why didn’t you write me back?” I looked over at her, but she avoided my gaze. Her long hair trailed in the water.

“You know why,” she said. “Miguel.”

My anger was right there, rushing through me. “What, because Miguel’s Chicano? That’s bullshit, Laura, I can’t believe—”

“No, Min, why would I care about that?” She gazed at me severely. “When I got your letter, it was like you were telling me you had moved to the moon.”

“Why?” I asked, bewildered. “I wasn’t the one who left. You have no idea how much I missed you, Laura. I spent most of the summer doing nothing and hating it. I was miserable waiting for you to come back.”

“You weren’t when you went all the way with Miguel.” She waited. I was silent. It was true: for a few weeks I hadn’t felt as lonely. Her face was getting red from the water’s heat. “I felt like you had turned into someone else, Min. I felt like you had jumped into this other world of sex and pot. I couldn’t understand what you were doing. I still can’t.”

“I was doing the same thing you were doing,” I answered. Laura frowned. Underneath the water, my limbs stretched away from me. I lifted my foot, stirring the thick liquid heat. Then I stood up in the middle of the tub, leaned back slightly, and went under, dunking my head so that all of me was submerged. When I came up, Laura hadn’t moved. I swept my wet hair off my face and sat back across from her.

“So you might as well tell me what happened.” I could hear the attempt at indifference in Laura’s voice.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, sounding equally unconcerned.

“You know, what he did, what it felt like.”

“The first time, or after that?”

“Oh. The first time, I guess.”

I smiled, remembering. “Well, I liked it, of course.”

“Of course?” Laura sounded angry.

“Well, yeah,” I answered, baffled. “Fucking is fun.”

“How can you call the first time you made love ‘fucking’?”

Here it was, the argument I had been anticipating for weeks. It was hard for us to look at each other. This time I glanced away. I looked up at the pine trees on the other side of the yard and at the blue sky. “Because it was fucking. We were high, and it seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t anything romantic.”

Laura stared at me, an expression in her eyes like a wince. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “You just gave it away, like that, in one afternoon? How could you let someone you don’t even know very well touch you like that? You didn’t even build up to it.”

“Why should I? I’ve been waiting a long time.”

“So have I,” she replied heatedly.

“Yeah, but you never take the opportunities handed to you.”

“That’s because I’m not—” Abruptly, she stopped speaking, but I knew what she meant. She thought I was a slut, the kind of girl she wanted to be but couldn’t let herself. That’s what it was, I realized suddenly. She was angry at me because I didn’t follow all the restrictions that were in her head keeping her back.

“Okay, start from the beginning. Did it hurt when he put himself in?”

“A little, at first. He stopped until I was ready.”

“Did you bleed?”

“No.”

“Did it feel weird inside you?” She made a face when she said this, scrunching up her nose.

I remembered her description of Dave’s cock, how foreign it had seemed to her. I had never felt awkward with Miguel’s penis, only tired of it eventually. “What do you mean by weird?” I asked.

“Okay, was he rough?” I looked at her blankly. “You know,” she said, “did he pound into you?”

Why was she so scared of it? “No. Well, there were times, later, when we got kind of frenzied. But sometimes he hardly moved at all and took a long time. I liked it both ways.”

“You did?”

We looked at each other, surprised. “Yeah,” I said and laughed. I glanced down at her body refracted and wiggly below the water, then looked away.

“What kind of birth control did you use?”

“Nothing the first time. Later he used rubbers.”

“Jesus, Min, what if you’re pregnant?”

“Well, I’m not.”

“But you could have been. That was really stupid.”

I looked at her. I could feel my jaw tightening. I breathed in, then out. Bringing my hands up through the heated water, I rested them on the surface, then swept them, open-palmed, back and forth as they sank back down. I said, more coldly than I meant to, “You sound like your mother. Do you want me to tell you this or not?”

“Okay.” Silence. She reached up with a dripping hand to push her hair behind her ear. “What about cunnilingus? You said he did that in your letter.”

“I liked that the most of everything we did.” I was smiling. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, remembering. “Guys really love going down on girls, don’t they? Miguel could stay down there for the longest time. I’d have to drag him back up.” I opened my eyes halfway. “Well, I guess I don’t have to tell you, you know what I’m talking about.”

“Not really,” Laura said in a voice I could barely hear.

I sat up. “Dave never went down on you? Didn’t you do 69?”

“No. I wouldn’t have let him go down on me even if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t. He thought it was gross.”

“Why?”

Laura merely looked at me disbelievingly and shook her head. I really didn’t understand. All I ever thought about was getting my face between a girl’s thighs. Underwater, Laura stretched out her legs. One of them touched one of mine. “Sorry,” she said quickly, moving her leg away and sitting up straighter.

I was about to speak when Laura cleared her throat. “How come you keep talking about Miguel in the past tense? Aren’t you still together?” She pushed herself up from the water and stretched out her arms along the side of the wooden tub.

I looked away from her, mostly because it was hard not to notice her round, sloping breasts just above water level. I reached over the rim of the tub to the switch behind me and turned on the jets, then sat in front of one. Beneath the water, its heavy spray hit the small of my back.

Laura apparently took my silence for assent. She asked, “Didn’t you love each other?”

“Love?” I asked, trying to remember the surprising strength of my regret the day I broke up with Miguel. Instead I had an image of Laura’s father with his pants down screwing one of his colleagues, or maybe it was a secretary, on the carpet of his office at Sonoma State, her skirt pushed up and her knees in the air on either side of him. My stomach lurched. I stared at Laura. Was this what she imagined too?

When I didn’t say anything more, Laura said, “From what you’ve said, Miguel sounds really nice. I thought at first you were crossing another line, like with all your pot smoking and driving without a license and everything, and I thought you were choosing someone really bad to do it with. But he isn’t, is he?” I shook my head. She gazed at me for a moment. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Min.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“I don’t mean it the way it sounded. I mean, he sounds so great. He could have been a real creep, for all you knew. If I had gone all the way with Dave—”

“Yeah, why didn’t you?” I interrupted, anxious to change the subject.

“What?”

“Go all the way. With Dave.”

“I didn’t want to. It wasn’t an obvious thing, the way I guess it was for you. I liked him a lot, he was really nice. I sort of wanted to, but not with him. I don’t know,” she drifted off. We were silent. I listened to the whoosh of the water jets and the dull roar of a far-off airplane. I moved away from the spray at my back. I was getting overheated and a little lightheaded. My body felt rubbery, far away.

“I don’t want to be in competition with you,” Laura finally said.

We stared at each other. Her face was pinched, as though she was about to cry.

“We’re not in a race,” I said.

“But now I feel like I have to keep up with you. I almost did it with Dave just because you had. I feel like I’m always trying to keep up.”

“With me?” I asked, astonished. “But you’re the one who’s had boyfriends. Why would you feel competitive? I’m the one who’s always waiting to hear what happened.”

“Nothing ever happens, Min. I mean, it’s never how I hope it will be. I always think it would be better if I could be more like you.”

“But you want different things than I do.”

“You think I know what I want? I don’t. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to lose it, but not with Dave. I mean, he’s not somebody I’d want to marry or anything. He’s nice, I like him, but that’s all. I want more than that.”

“Like what?” A small tendril of hope was unfurling inside me. Maybe Laura couldn’t bring herself to have sex with boys because she didn’t like them. Maybe she could like girls instead.

“I want it to be more than fumbling around. I want what you had with Miguel. Min, you have no idea how lucky you were. And I want . . .”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she cupped her hands to splash her reddened face. The slope of her breasts moved as she leaned forward and gathered up the water. She lifted her arms and brought the water to her face. Trickles ran down her neck and over her round breasts, glinting for a second in the sunlight. I wanted to put my hands on her breasts and let the water run over my fingers. I wanted to touch Laura’s breasts, and I wanted her to like it.

“What?” I said quietly, urgently.

“Well, I want to love him. I want to be loved.”

Then Laura started to cry. She brought her hand up from the rim of the tub to cover her mouth, as though she could keep me from hearing the occasional sob that escaped her. I stood up and pushed through the water toward her, wanting to put my arms around her and hold her close against me. If I hugged her tight, stroking her half-wet hair, she might not keep herself back as she was now, her eyes squeezed shut to fend off the tears, her hand trying to smother all sound. But I realized as I reached out to touch her shoulder that we were both naked, and suddenly I didn’t dare. I stood next to her, inches away, hoping she could feel my silent presence beside her.

Finally I said, my voice sounding odd to me, “I love you, Laura.” I’d meant it as an offering, my attempt at giving comfort. But as the words became sound in the air between us, I realized it was my confession. I was shaking after I said it.

Laura wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand. “I know, Min, and I love you too. But it’s not enough. I mean in love.”

I gripped the rim of the hot tub behind me with both hands, while inside my chest something that had been stretching out snapped back tightly, like a fist. My eyes filled, but I blinked the tears back before she could see them.

Laura pulled her hair back from her forehead with her hands. The skin around her eyes was swollen, and her face was blotchy from crying. She was still beautiful. She met my gaze and smiled, looking tired and at the same time gratified to see me still there.

“Thank you, though,” she said. We stood in the bubbling water, helpless and half-smiling at each other, until she turned around and climbed out of the tub and covered herself with her towel.

Laura and I had only one class together in the fall of eleventh grade. In a way, I was relieved. After we had talked in the hot tub, an awkward tension settled over our friendship. What she had said about feeling she was in competition with me began to prove itself true; I could feel it not only in our comparing grades, but in the careful way we spoke of our other friendships, our families, and especially about boys. Sex hardly ever came up in our conversations anymore. When it did, it was in the abstract, something unconnected to our own bodies or to another person’s. I never mentioned Miguel’s name.

At school Laura and I still met between classes at her locker or mine. Sometimes, while we complained about our teachers and walked between buildings to our next class, Miguel would pass by. Each time I watched Laura stare at him as though she thought she was invisible and he couldn’t see her doing it. Embarrassed, I would grab her by the arm and lead her off somewhere. I’d ask, “Are you listening to me?” to break her gaze and bring her attention, unfocused, a little lost, back to me. I could tell she was still trying to understand why I had slept with him and liked it while she continued to hold off, waiting for the right time, the perfect guy. She seemed to think that by scrutinizing Miguel she could discover some hidden trait in him that set him apart from other boys, some unknown quality that had made me respond to him over anyone else. Perhaps she was looking for something in him that she herself could respond to, if given the chance; something, I guessed, that was tender and thoughtful and safe. That wasn’t what had turned me on about Miguel, but since our conversation in the hot tub, I had come to recognize a little better that what Laura wanted was also what frightened her. I didn’t understand it, but I had begun to see it.

As for Miguel and me, he never directly caught my eye or acknowledged me. I had stopped hanging out at the beach, so we encountered each other only at school. He acted as though we barely knew each other, as though our lives had no point of intersection. Once he nearly knocked me over as he came careening out of the student center as I was going in for lunch. He put a hand on my arm to steady me.

“You okay?” he asked, and, seeing his face, I remembered the way he had looked at me after the first time we had had sex, when he was concerned that I hadn’t had an orgasm. On either side of us, arriving students jostled by, in a hurry to eat. Someone bumped my arm with his knapsack and pushed on.

“Yeah, sure,” I answered. I wanted to say more. “Listen, Miguel—”

“I’ve got to go. See you around.” He moved away, unable to look at me for more than that one second. I had to admit to myself I was disappointed. I had hoped for some reason that during the school year we would revive the easy rapport we had shared over the summer and develop a comfortable friendship, built from our past relationship and his continuing desire for me. It appeared he’d gotten over that desire. There were days when I found myself missing him. Not the sex so much, but his smile, and the way our rowdy, stoned laughter had made me feel, for moments at a time, no longer alone. On the other hand, I made no move toward reconciliation myself. I didn’t even look at him with recognition when I saw him in the crowded halls and on the sloping paths between classes. Something stopped me, and I acted as though we had never spoken beyond the confines of the school. Yet I expected him to talk to me despite, or even because of, the way I had treated him, and I was hurt that he didn’t.

Near the end of September, Alison invited me to a David Bowie concert. Flattered, I said yes and, not knowing his music, bought the new album that afternoon. We went on a Saturday after work. We drove in her beatup Datsun to the Mission for a quick burrito, then across the Bay Bridge with the rush-hour traffic to the Greek Theater in Berkeley. In the car I rolled down my window and smoked a cigarette leaning back against the door on my right, my left leg propped up on the seat, so that I was facing Alison as she drove. Alison, like Laura, was blonde, but her hair was short and messy, as though she never combed it. That day she was wearing jeans and a soft-looking beige shirt and cowboy boots and two silver bracelets on one wrist and her watch set in a thick leather band on the other. No one at school ever looked that cool. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She was telling me about a professor of hers at State who had come on to her earlier that week. “The guy’s in his fifties, at least. Like, I don’t think so, you know?” She glanced in her side mirror, accelerating as she moved into the left lane to pass the car ahead of us.

I was confused. I had expected her to object to his gender, not his age. But I took one last drag from my cigarette and said, “Yeah. There’s a girl in our class who’s fucking our social studies teacher from ninth grade. He’s at least in his thirties. She thinks no one knows, but he’s always goofy when he’s around her.” I flicked my cigarette butt out the window behind me.

She shook her head, grinning. “You can always tell,” Alison said.

“What can you always tell?” I asked, thinking she was talking about older men.

She glanced at me. “You know, what other people want. Who they’re attracted to.”

I was silent. I picked at the torn threads around the knee of my jeans, feeling unaccountably sad.

“Don’t you think?” Alison asked. I looked up. She was intent on the highway ahead, passing all the slower cars. The sun through her window lit up the hair that stood out from her head. When she shifted into fifth, her hand stayed wrapped around the gearshift for a moment before moving back onto the steering wheel. There was authority in that hand, and self-assurance. Feeling drawn to Alison felt odd after having been focused on Laura for so long. I was surprised at how effortless being attracted to her was, and I was even relieved; I could probably be interested in a lot of women simultaneously. At the same time, I knew I was giving up something that had been precious to me. I didn’t know if I would feel anything close to the intensity of what I had felt about Laura ever again. I wasn’t sad about it, exactly, but I was aware of a kind of wrenching or uprooting. The wind rushed through the car as we picked up speed. I felt paper-light, ready to blow away.

Alison glanced over at me. I said, “I guess you can tell, if you’re looking.”

My neck was getting stiff. I slid around in my seat and sat facing forward. Alison asked me to look through the cardboard box at my feet for Diamond Dogs. I flipped through the cassettes, found it, took it out of its case, and handed it to her. With one hand on the wheel, she popped the cassette into her tape player and cranked the volume up high. The bass reverberated under my feet. It was impossible to talk without shouting. I leaned my head back and let the music surround me from all four speakers, cocooning me. Except for conferring about directions, we drove in silence for the rest of the trip.

The Greek Theater was an outdoor concert hall set on a hill. Stone bleachers took up most of the area beyond the stage; higher up, the green grass of the hill provided extra seating. The concert had sold out, and by the time Alison and I arrived inside, the seats were filled but there were still patches of grass visible among the crowd of bodies. The hill looked like an unfinished quilt made up of spread blankets. We climbed up and found a spot near the center. Below us, the stage was set up with the band’s instruments. I glanced around at the audience. A group of college kids to the right of us drank the beer they had smuggled in. People milled around, searching for faces they recognized. The sun was setting behind the hill we sat on, and the sky slowly leaked the dark ink of night onto the sky. I sprawled on the grass next to Alison and felt my skin tingle. I was waiting for the dark, wanting to be seduced by the music.

“What are you smiling about?” Alison asked, stretched out on her side, smiling herself.

“I don’t know. I’m happy, I guess. What was that song about rock and roll we listened to in the car?”

She tilted her head back, gazing up at the promising sky. She started to sing. Her voice was lovely, high and clear, not at all what I had expected. She met my gaze.

“So, why didn’t you invite your girlfriend instead of me?” I asked, opting for the direct approach to a question I had been wondering about since Alison first mentioned the concert.

“Oh, she hates David Bowie.”

“Alison, come on.”

She looked away for a moment, as if considering other responses. “Truthfully?” she asked. I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me. “It’s pretty much over between us. It has been for a long time. I don’t know why I’ve been hanging on.” She looked down and pulled a blade of grass out of the ground, then pulled up another. I wondered why I hadn’t known, seen the signs, whatever they were. All I had seen was that Alison had a girlfriend and I didn’t.

She glanced up at me. “I guess that means I’m single again. Single young lesbian on the loose.”

“So am I,” I said, holding her gaze. Telling her was as easy as when I had asked Miguel to sleep with me.

“I know,” Alison said lightly.

I stared at her. “No way. How did you know?”

“I just did.”

“What, do I have ‘lesbian’ written across my forehead?”

She smiled. “Not exactly. But it’s obvious.”

“How?” I felt strange, exposed. Had something changed about me over the last few months? Would she have said the same thing a year ago, before I knew myself? Was it something only other lesbians could see? Had my mother guessed? Had Laura?

Alison said, “I told you, you can always tell what people want.”

“Always?” I asked. Then I realized that her recognizing my desire was a good thing. I didn’t have to hide it.

She reached across the space between us and slowly brushed her fingers over my hair. “When you’re looking,” she said.

Then she sat up and gazed down at the stage. “When’s this show going to start?” she asked. It was already half an hour after the warm-up band was supposed to play, and there was still no sign of life on the stage.

I sat up too. “Let’s rock and roll!” I shouted into the night air above me. One of the girls in the group to our right stared at me. She looked away when I glared back.

A week after the concert, I told my mother I would be working an evening shift so she would let me spend Saturday night in Alison’s dorm room. It rained the entire day. After work Alison and I sat in a movie holding hands. I had never had that anticipatory time with Miguel, feeling excited by and also fearful of what would happen later. And it wasn’t only fear of being sexual with Alison, it was a fear of what crossing that line would mean for me. As we watched the screen, I was aware that I was making a decision, and that what I chose would change me forever: how I lived, what I thought, who I was. I didn’t know what I meant by that, but my trembling told me it was true. I breathed in deeply, held Alison’s hand more tightly. I was ready for change.

When we arrived back in her dorm room, our pants and shoes soaked from the rain, I stood near the door while Alison shook out her umbrella and propped it in a corner to dry, then pulled shut the drapes and cleared books and clothes off her single bed. I looked around, surprised her room was so small, noticing the photographs of women on her walls. Somehow this first time mattered more to me than it had with Miguel; what Alison thought of me mattered more. And though I’d had a crash course in sex with a guy only a couple of months before, I was afraid it wouldn’t help me. Alison came over and tugged on my hand. “Come on,” she said, smiling. “Let’s get out of these wet clothes.”

It was not as easy as it had been with Miguel. We couldn’t get in synch, get a rhythm going, so that while she was trying to kiss my ear, I was intent on unbuttoning her jeans. We tussled for a while, and then we stopped and looked at each other and started laughing. I saw that she was nervous too, and the relief of understanding this made me relax a little. We lay back on the bed and made out, stopping every now and then to pull back and smile at each other, touching the other’s face or hair. Alison’s hair was lighter in color than Laura’s, her face more defined. I ran a finger along her cheekbone, down her jawline. She caught my finger with her teeth, then kissed me again. I wondered if this was all that was going to happen between us, and I wondered if that would be all right with me. I didn’t know.

Eventually I started again to take off her clothes. She helped me with mine, and then she rolled on top of me, and we kept on kissing. The way she lay on me was uncomfortable, her hip bones digging into mine and her body heavier than I would have thought for someone as thin as Alison was. Her smothering weight on me made me uneasy. Maybe she wasn’t a very good lover. Maybe we’d be incompatible in other ways too. I remembered Laura telling me she wanted sex to be more than fumbling around, how lucky I had been with Miguel. I wondered if this was what she had meant. Maybe sex wasn’t always easy. Always fun. But it was at the moment of doubt that Laura closed off, shut down, before she knew anything yet.

I shifted beneath Alison, rolling her half off me. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to care. As we kissed, I moved my hands down her back, along her waist, her thigh. She moaned; my breathing quickened. We were beginning to match up. I loved how her skin felt, warm and dry and smooth, and the sheer luxuriousness of the feeling of her full body against mine made my eyes close with pleasure. This was what I had been waiting for.

I was very excited when Alison put her hand between my legs. With my eyes closed, I thought it would feel the way it had when Miguel did it. In fact, it didn’t feel very different—his fingers, though bigger, were deft, as hers were—but it was different, because I knew it was her: her woman’s fingers and breath and consciousness accompanying me where I was going. I wanted to give her instructions—a little further down, harder—but I knew there would be another time for that, and I didn’t need much help. I heard her whisper, “Oh, baby,” as I started to come, mildly, a small bubble of pleasure bursting.

It was later, when I did the same for Alison, that I felt something inside me click into place, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle that I had been working on for many years. Sliding my fingers into the slick wetness between her legs was beyond pleasure; it was a homecoming, to a place I hadn’t known existed. I felt I had been born just to experience this moment, my fingers swimming in the juice of this woman, slipping over the folds and pouches of her flesh. I found her clitoris, hard beneath the skin like a pit inside fruit. I found the contracting, steady beat inside her. Startled, I said, “Oh!” out loud and stopped moving. I wanted to cry. Or laugh. Or tell her that I loved her. I opened my eyes and looked down at Alison’s flushed face, her bright eyes looking back at me, a little puzzled. “You’re beautiful,” I said. I started to slide my fingers against her again and watched her eyelids sink slowly closed.

The next morning was clear and warm, and I invited Alison out to Mill Valley for the first time. I had been thinking a lot, since my breakup with Miguel, about the ways I kept the people in my life apart. I wanted to introduce Alison to my mother, not as my girlfriend—not yet, at least—but as my friend. We had breakfast at a Greek restaurant in the Sunset, taking our trays upstairs to the outdoor garden. On the drive up, I told Alison about my adoption, because I didn’t want her to be surprised and say something stupid. By the time we arrived it was after noon. The house was empty. There was a note on the kitchen table from my mother saying that she had gone to brunch with two friends and would be back sometime that afternoon.

I started to show Alison around the house, but we couldn’t keep our hands off each other and only got as far as the living room. We were standing in the middle of the room making out when I thought I heard the back door click shut. It was hard to pull myself away from Alison’s mouth. I looked up. My mother stood in the entrance to the room.

“What are you doing?” she asked hesitantly. Alison and I quickly stepped back from each other. I couldn’t tell if she had actually seen us kissing. Frantic, I tried to reconstruct the last few seconds in my mind. Her gaze moved from Alison to me. In the middle of my panic, I saw that she was carrying a sweater and her purse over her arm, and her hair was pinned up at the back of her head.

Then she focused on me, as though she finally recognized me, and her face changed, becoming angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She didn’t move but simply stood there, blocking the door.

I buttoned up the top buttons of my shirt, trying to think, but no thoughts would come to me. I remained silent.

Alison said, “Maybe I should go,” more to me than to my mother. I stared at Alison for a moment, hoping she would understand that I wanted her to stay.

“No, you’re not leaving this house,” my mother shot back at her. “I don’t even know who you are. Neither of you is going anywhere until you tell me what is going on here.”

“I was going to tell you—” I began.

“You were going to tell me? You were going to tell me? What were you going to tell me? When? I hardly see you as it is.”

“Well, that’s as much your fault as it is mine,” I countered.

“Don’t talk back to me like that, Min.”

Again I said nothing. Alison folded her arms across her chest and watched my mother warily. All three of us stood there, not moving, not saying anything, absolutely at a loss.

“Look,” Alison said at last, moving toward the door, “this is really none of my business, and I think my being here just makes it worse. Um, I guess I can’t say it was nice to meet you, but, you know, I hope we’ll meet again sometime.” She stood in front of my mother, waiting for her to move out of the doorway. She was several inches taller than me, about my mother’s height. My mother looked at Alison for a long moment. Finally she stepped aside and let Alison pass. In the hallway, Alison turned around and looked at me. “Call me,” she said.

After the door shut, my mother came into the room, circling around me as if she were afraid of touching me. She fell into her overstuffed armchair and covered her forehead with her hand, closing her eyes. “It’s bad enough that you’ve been lying to me and running around behind my back,” she said tiredly. “But this. I can’t think of anything worse you could have done to me.”

Now that she had lost the momentum of her indignation, I could listen to what she was saying. My dismay at being caught turned angry.

I said, “I could have done to you? What you saw was between Alison and me. It wasn’t about you.”

My mother looked up sharply. “In my house? Knowing I was coming home? I think that was a pretty clear message you were trying to send me.”

I had to consider that. Why had we started kissing, knowing she could arrive home any moment? Confused, I wondered if my mother was right. Had I wanted to provoke her, upset her? Then I rejected the idea. Alison and I had just become lovers the night before. All I wanted to do was touch her. Even inside my own house, I had forgotten all about my mother. But the doubt lingered. I pushed it aside.

“There’s no message, Mom. I’ll tell you when I have something to say to you.”

She laughed joylessly, shaking her head at me. “You don’t even know what you feel. I think you’re angry at me, Min. Very angry. For adopting you. For divorcing your father. For being a mother who sets limits for your own good. You’re furious, and you’re getting back at me with the thing that will hurt me the most. And it’s working.”

I moved closer to her chair, stood over her. I could feel the energy of my rage surge up in me, desperate for a way out. I yelled, “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Mom. This has nothing to do with you. I like girls. That’s what we’re talking about. I like Alison. A lot.”

My mother sat through my tirade looking fixedly ahead of her, as if she were trying to concentrate on something else so that she wouldn’t have to listen to me. “Are you finished?” she said.

“No. If you want to get angry at me for lying to you or whatever you think I’ve been doing, go ahead. I invited Alison up here today so you could meet her. I thought you’d be glad to know I have a new friend.” She opened her mouth and started to respond. “Let me finish. I’m sorry you walked in on us, because I wanted to tell you that I’m a lesbian sometime soon, when we could have time to talk about it. I think you would have reacted differently if you had found out differently.” I backed up a step, as though releasing her from a spell I had cast over her. “That’s all I have to say for now.”

She pushed herself out of her chair, and I was afraid for a second that she was going to come at me, maybe even hit me. Then I realized she wanted the advantage of height. She said, a hand on her hip, “How could you think I would be glad to meet a girl like that, who’s obviously such a bad influence on you?” I started to protest but she held up a hand. “Now let me finish. You are not a lesbian, Min. You probably think you’re in love with that girl, but let me tell you, you’re not. This is a phase you’re going through. You’ll get over it.”

“I think all that therapy you’ve had is making you crazy,” I burst out.

“Don’t talk back to me!” she lashed back. “Your anger is out of control. Partly it’s your age. You’re blindly acting out. Some day you’ll look back at your behavior with this girl, and with me, and you’ll be ashamed. I think you should consider seeing a therapist, Min. I really do.” She sat back down in her chair, apparently exhausted.

“This is totally fucked up,” I said. I had started to pace the room, but there was too much furniture to take long strides. I stood behind the rocking chair and held on to its two posts. I could have thrown it across the room just then. “You’re not listening to me, Mom. This is not a phase. This is who I am. Of course I’m angry at you. You refuse to believe what I’m telling you.”

“I refuse to believe it because it’s not true!” my mother yelled at me.

“Yes it is!” I yelled back, ready to cry from frustration.

“And I will not allow you to see that girl again,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me.

“How are you going to stop me?”

The pins holding up her hair had loosened, and her hair was falling down to her shoulders. She reached up and impatiently pulled them all out. “You will not see that girl while you are living in this house, is that clear?” she asked, stressing each word.

“Fine. Then I’m moving out.”

“You are not moving out.”

“You wanted me to learn to be more independent, remember?”

“Min, you’re not going anywhere,” she said tiredly. She didn’t believe me.

“Watch me.”

I turned and walked out of the room, grabbed my bike from its place in the hall. My mother tried to catch up with me, calling my name. I let the door slam in her face.

I rode away as fast as I could, mindless and seething with fury. After a while I began to notice I was on a road leading out of town, and I kept going. I thought I would eventually find a phone by the side of the road or in the next town, and I would call Alison and ask if I could stay with her. Then I remembered that Alison was probably still driving back to the city and wouldn’t be home yet. I thought of Laura next and made a U-turn. But at her house no one answered my knock, and when I tried the back door, it was locked. “Where the fuck are you, Laura?” I shouted at the house. There was no response, only the whispering of the leaves in the surrounding trees. I looked around the deck and saw the covered hot tub in the corner. I was tired, sweaty, on the edge of tears. It would be so easy to lift off the cover and slip into the warm water inside. It would be like wrapping the water around me like a blanket or the embrace of human arms. I could think of nothing I’d rather do. But I knew that in the end Laura’s whole family would come home and find me there, and they’d make a scene, and I’d have to explain what had happened, and her parents would send me back home to work out my problems. I wasn’t willing to bear anymore alone. I needed Laura to get into that tub.

I picked up my bike from the driveway and pedaled slowly back toward the square, hoping Alison had reached her dorm by now.

That night in Alison’s single bed, with only the soft light of a candle on her desk, we finished what we had started earlier in my mother’s living room. I wouldn’t let her try to make me come; I knew it would be useless. All I really wanted was to be touched and held. I had recounted word for word what my mother and I had said to each other. Alison had agreed that I should stay with her in her dorm room until we could figure out what to do next. I didn’t want to think about that yet.

Alison rolled onto her side facing me and propped her head up on her arm. She passed her hand lightly over my sweating body, feeling my ribs and hipbones through the skin, shaping her fingers to the curve of my shoulder. I loved the way hands could travel the planes of the body, covering it, stimulating or soothing it. I loved how the merest brush of Alison’s fingertips against my face felt like communion. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I moved my head slightly, nestling my cheek into her warm palm. When I exhaled, I could feel the tightness in my chest creak loose and settle, like sand spilling to the bottom of a dune.

Alison said, “I love the texture of your skin. It’s so soft. Do all Asian women have such soft skin?”

I looked up at her, thinking she was joking. She was waiting for my answer. I caught her hand, held it away from me.

“No, just the adopted ones,” I said.

She shot me a bewildered look. I ignored it and pushed her onto her back, not gently. Holding her down, I straddled her thighs, leaned over, and bit her pink nipple, scraping my teeth over its hard, wrinkled skin.

When Alison and I woke up the next morning, we both realized I should go back. At least until I had a plan. But as the bus crossed the bridge and I sat looking out at the parched brown grasses of the Marin Headlands, I knew I would stay once I got home. I wasn’t ready to find my own place, or transfer to another school, or live in another city from my friends. How would I pay rent? My mother wouldn’t help me; she didn’t want me to leave. As for seeing Alison, I would work it out.

I was late getting to school. I smoked a cigarette sitting on the terrace wall by the entrance while I waited for the bell to ring for the mid-morning break. The day was overcast and windy. A few cars passed by. Nobody was out on the street.

Inside, as the hall flooded with students, I pushed through to my locker to get rid of my knapsack. Laura was there, waiting for me. She looked extremely pretty, her long blonde hair French braided and hanging in a thick rope behind her head. She also looked upset.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, walking up to her.

She turned towards me and grabbed my arm. “Min! God, I was so worried. I went over to your house yesterday afternoon.”

“Shit. Let’s go outside and talk.”

We went back out and sat on the wide tiled steps. A few other kids were standing around. One guy started pushing another, trying to start a fight. We had fifteen minutes until the next class started.

“Okay,” I said, turning to Laura. “What happened?”

“Well, I went over to see if you were home. Your mother—”

“Wait. What time was this?”

“I don’t know. About three.” I nodded and she continued. “Your mother was in the kitchen. She was on the phone. When she saw it was me, she hung up and invited me in and asked if I had seen you. She made a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table and talked for a long time.”

“About me? What did she tell you?”

“Well, not much. She said you’d been arguing, but she didn’t say what about. I didn’t want to pry or anything. We talked about how hard it is between mothers and daughters sometimes. I told her about the problems I’ve been having with my mom. She seemed really interested, and she helped me look at some of it from my mother’s point of view. You know, your mom is really cool.”

I snorted and shook my head. “Yeah, well, she’s not that cool. She can’t handle reality.”

“You’re so hard on her, Min.”

I knew her talk with my mother was important to Laura. The whole time we had been friends, my mother had acted as a kind of second mother to her, almost a sister. Often while she was over at my house, Laura would wander into whatever room my mother was in and hang out with her for a while. I could hear them laughing. Sometimes I got angry because Laura was my friend.

“She deserves it,” I said, and the frustration I had felt with my mother the day before rose up in me, catching in my throat. “I’ll tell you the reason we fought yesterday. I’ve started seeing someone. My mother found out about it.”

Laura’s face changed, and I remembered why we had stopped talking about sex. She looked away as if that could hide what she was feeling. “So soon?” she said.

“Well, it’s not that quick. I think it’s been building up for a while.”

She nodded, then she was silent. Then, “Who is he? Do I know him?”

“That’s the part my mother didn’t like. It’s not a guy. It’s Alison.”

“Alison,” she repeated, dully. “Your friend at work.”

“Right.”

Laura still wouldn’t look at me. She seemed to have stopped breathing. “You never—” she began, then stopped. I was afraid she wouldn’t accept it either, just like my mother. She looked down at her hands, which were clasped very tightly together. “Have you made love yet?”

I almost smiled at her choice of words but inside me something was twisting around like a towel being wrung dry. I finally understood what she had meant about having to keep up with me. Even the language we each used about sex was different. “Yes, we’re sleeping together. It only started about a week ago,” I added.

She looked up at me, her head cocked, squinting as though I was casting a bright light. “Does this mean you’re a lesbian?” The bell in the clock tower started its hourly chime: we had five minutes before the beginning of class.

I nodded.

A long silence. “I guess you’ll spend a lot of time with Alison now.”

“Probably.”

“When will I ever see you?” she asked.

I realized in that moment just how much my life had changed. I would never again be able to have everything the way it had been for so long. I felt afraid. Unlike two nights before, when I had anticipated sex with Alison with excitement as well as fear, I saw now there would be losses. They had already begun.

Laura and I stared at each other. The future loomed ahead, completely unknown. I could see in her face that she was thinking the same thing. I looked around. No one else was still outside but us.