It’s late spring of my sophomore year. Amy turns seventeen and gets a car, and we start going into the city on weekdays as well as weekends. During the week we are able to find open tables. The bars aren’t packed. We begin to notice a group of regulars who come in every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night. This is especially true at a new bar we discover, Dorrian’s Red Hand, a dark wood and brass bar on the Upper East Side. The regulars are wealthy high school and college students. The girls are beautiful with slick blond hair and tiny waists. They wear red lipstick and cocktail dresses and have names like Blake and Hunter. The boys are also stunning, many of them wearing navy blue sports jackets with gold insignia from their schools, their ties loosened but still on. Most all of them do cocaine in the bathroom stalls. They pull rolled fifty-dollar bills from their breast pockets and, gripping the brass toilet paper-roll holder for support, they lean over the backs of the toilets where they’ve assembled the lines. Amy and I dress accordingly and sit at the same table each night, hoping to fit in, but mostly feeling clunky and unattractive compared to everyone else. Over time, though, a couple of the boys are friendly and sit with us sometimes, and slowly we blend into the culture there. Even though they don’t know us, we come to know who most of the regulars are. A tall, handsome boy named Robert, two blond brothers, Chris and Tony. They glide through the bar like movie stars, stopping at tables of girls they know. Robert is gorgeous and charming. The brothers are fun-loving and smooth. Amy and I watch them, enamored.
We are well aware we chose this scene over the others available to us. Some of the kids who mingled at the West End wound up downtown at CBGB’s and the Beacon Theater. They don’t dress like the regulars at Dorrian’s. They wear tight, ripped jeans and Doc Martens, flannel shirts tied around their waists, and rubber bands for bracelets. Most of them come from families as wealthy as the kids’ at Dorrian’s, but they dress as though they live on the streets. They go to the clubs to see up-and-coming bands play, bands who emulate the Ramones and Black Flag. Such a scene might be easier for me to fit into. I know about the pain and rage that threads through that culture. In many ways, though, I don’t want to claim it. I want to be here, in this world of gloss and greed. I don’t want to wallow in my anger. I want the façade. I want to be somewhere where girls can be girls, in high heels and dresses—the costume of male desire. Even if I’m not as stunning as the girls who surround me, I’m used to feeling like I’m not enough.
We stay most nights at Dorrian’s until two, sometimes much later, and the next morning we drag ourselves out of bed and into the shower for school. We are often late, and I find myself in the front office, making up some excuse. I stay alert through the morning until Algebra II, which comes right after lunch. My eyes droop, my head feels heavy. I attempt to hide behind my text, full of the variables and equations taught in class, but which I haven’t been awake enough to understand, as I give in and rest my head on the desk. I wake half an hour later, startled, a small pool of saliva near my mouth. Another teacher might not stand for it, but Mr. Hansen doesn’t care about student behavior in his class. He coaches lacrosse and spends his free time with the popular boys in my grade. Everyone knows he has a crush on Lori, one of the blond girls in that group, because he told a fifteen-year-old boy he considers his good friend, and that boy told everyone else. Even if he hadn’t, it is obvious by the way he looks Lori up and down like he owns her whenever she’s near.
The tenth grade has two popular groups. One is made up of the blond girls. These are the “good” girls who get superior grades, play sports, and drink wine coolers at parties. They are all indeed blond. Some of them are really brunettes but dye their hair to keep with the reputation. They spend time with the popular boys who play lacrosse and soccer and drink beer. The other in-crowd is made up of the Jennifers. Amy told me that before I transferred to the school, this crowd was bigger, but slowly it whittled down to three girls, all named Jennifer. They are still peripheral friends with a few others, but the Jennifers have a stronger relationship, one that looks tight and exclusive from where I sit. It’s no secret they know about things I know about too, like cocaine and pot, boys, and drinking. At lunch I watch them talking and laughing, and I feel some regret about my friendship with Amy. I allowed her to swoop me up, away from any other possibilities. I would have liked to get to know the Jennifers.
Amy, sensing my longing, gets pissed at me often. If I’m late or don’t call when I say I will, she won’t take my calls and will ignore me for a few days. She grabs my hand if I try to change the station on her car radio.
“You don’t touch my car without asking first,” she snaps.
Once, she locks me out of her house, and I have to go to her neighbors to ask to use the phone to have my dad come pick me up.
Another time she leaves me at a diner with no ride home because I spent too long talking with some classmates in another booth.
She tells me her neighbor, who is also her friend, liked me when she met me, but she thought the hairy moles on my arm were gross.
I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn’t tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian’s and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn’t wracked with anxiety when there aren’t any boys around. And she doesn’t need them to live, which is what it feels like for me.
Or at least this is what I assume, that I’m the only girl who feels this way.
I also don’t tell her about my friendship with Mr. Kearney, the new history teacher. He is young, fresh from college, no older than some of the boys Amy and I hang out with at Dorrian’s. He is the faculty advisor for the yearbook, which I have joined in order to have something on my résumé for college. At the meetings, he is all business, assigning tasks to each of us. But when I find him in his office, and it is just the two of us, things are different. He becomes relaxed, flirtatious. He compliments my hair or my shirt. He laughs at my jokes. I like his attention. Soon I start going to see him almost every day after school, even when we don’t have yearbook meetings. I tell him about Dorrian’s and some of the boys there. He asks me lots of questions, and after a while our conversations turn to sex. We discuss blow jobs and virginity. We talk in explicit terms, using words like “cock” and “cum.” When I leave, I feel tingly and light, high on Mr. Kearney’s attention. On weekend days, driving around with Amy or my dad, I try to determine where his house is. He told me the general area, and I fantasize about surprising him there some night, dressed the way I dress for Dorrian’s, in short skirts with no stockings. Perhaps this is why he never tells me exactly where he lives. Perhaps he fantasizes about the same thing.
Many Sundays I’m still asleep when Mom calls. I sleep heavily. Tyler tells me when I’m up that she came in to wake me for the phone call, but I was so out I didn’t budge. She looks at me suspiciously. I know what she’s thinking. She thinks I’m sleeping off a hangover or I’m stoned. That’s not it at all. It’s just I’d rather sleep through the days so I’ll be awake for the nights, when the boys are out.
“You don’t know what Dad did,” she says to me one of these Sundays. I’ve come down our hallway to use the bathroom after watching TV with Dad. She calls me in to her room.
“What?” I stand at Tyler’s doorway. The Cure croons from her record player, the voice tortured and sad. Her room is baby blue, the color she chose when we first moved in, but someone wrote WE ARE THE DEAD in black marker over and over again around her door-frame. I have to assume it was her. Clothes I know she bought at Fiorucci and Canal Street Jeans litter the floor. She wears her hair short and spiked lately, and she draws black lines around her eyes. She must be a part of that downtown scene, the one where kids jump around in mosh pits, getting out their aggression. I shift uncomfortably. She’s my sister, but I don’t even know her. I don’t know how she really spends her time, locked away in this room.
“Remember Harriet?”
I nod. Mom’s good friend from art school.
“She jerked off Dad. Right in our house when Mom was home so she would find them.”
“Mom told you this?” I say. My voice squeaks when I do. That familiar combination of jealousy and relief that our mother chooses Tyler as her confidante sits just beneath my skin.
“He wanted to be caught, the coward. Rather than just face her and say he wanted a divorce.”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t know how you can hang around him.” Her voice is bitter, full of hate that belongs to Mom, not her.
“I don’t know how you can stand her,” I say.
I walk away, annoyed, deeply bothered. I don’t want to have this conversation with Tyler. About how Dad’s terrible and Mom’s great. She can choose to be brainwashed by Mom if she wants, but I don’t have to. For me, Mom is an unreliable narrator of our lives. When she speaks of my childhood it is always of the same three instances. The first is of me as a toddler. With my new grasp of language, she tells me again and again, I waddled into the living room, rolled on the floor, and said, “Tickle me.” “You were such an affectionate child,” she says wistfully. The next story is how she chose a Montessori school for me at two-and-a-half, and soon after starting I learned to tie my own shoelaces. The teachers often sent the older kids to me to tie their shoes if they were busy with something else. The final anecdote she tells is about when I didn’t want Mom to cut my hair when I was five, so I went up to the bathroom, found the scissors, and cut it myself. Mom says she tried hard not to laugh when I showed up in the kitchen, my hair butchered. “I wanted you to feel competent,” she makes a point of saying.
Her stories are probably true, but they are carefully constructed to build a happy childhood for me, one where I am just fine and she is a caring, considerate mother. One that can make up for the divorce, and for the fact that she left us. What she doesn’t realize is her stories point to my willfulness, the ways I was able to lord my power over the world, and over her. She wanted me to be competent, sure, but I don’t think she accounted for the possibility that I would match her competence at controlling our relationship. She pushes, I pull. She pulls, I push. This has always been our dance.
Really, Mom and I both look to stories to gain a sense of control. I believe Mom tells her stories so Tyler and I will accept and forgive who she is; she wants this more than she wants the truth, while I most want the truth. But what if I am wrong? What if Mom believes her memories as fiercely as I do? What if my memories are merely constructions like hers?
I pee, then go back into the living room. Dad’s there, his eyes glued to the TV, some movie we’re watching on HBO. I sit on the couch, too aware of him there, my father, who did this cruel, lascivious thing. He laughs at some funny dialogue, then stands.
“I’m getting a soda. Want one?”
I nod and watch him go to the kitchen. I decide to ignore this ugly thing about him. Who would I have left if I were to hate him the way I hate Mom?
NORA’S APARTMENT IS on the Upper East Side, just eight blocks from Dorrian’s, and Amy and I join Dad when he stays there on the weekends. Nora has two kids, a boy Tyler’s age and a girl four years younger than me, and we all get along well. Jack is kind and smart, and sometimes he comes with us to the bar. He doesn’t care about what I do there either, which is a relief from the judgment I feel from Amy.
At Dorrian’s, Amy and I meet more and more guys. One of the regulars in his blue school blazer approaches me one evening, and I spend the night making out with him in a booth. Another night, an older boy brings me flowers, and we go back to his parents’ three-story brownstone to have oral sex. Each time, I give my phone number, embarrassed by the New Jersey prefix. No one ever calls. At first this stings. But over time I adjust. I smirk when a boy says he’ll call. I don’t look at him next time we’re both at Dorrian’s, assuming that’s what he prefers. It’s just how things work in the bar scene. Boys and girls come together, and then they move on to the next. I want a boyfriend, but if I can’t have that, I’ll take this stand-in. It’s satisfying somehow—the hopeful waiting, the flirtatious exchange, and then the rapt, sudden sexual attention. I begin to enjoy the immediacy of gratification. I still feel let down later when it is over and I am left alone, but this doesn’t keep me from going back for more.
One night, after we’ve come back to Nora’s apartment, no boys having taken the bait, I sit awake in the living room, watching TV. I can’t sleep, and a John Hughes marathon is on, with The Breakfast Club just starting. I’ve seen all these movies at least four times. Dad and Nora come in. They were out with Nora’s friends. He relies on whatever woman he’s with to provide him with friends. He tells stories of friends from the early days with my mother, like the one about the two friends from Mom’s art school who brought blow-up dolls as dates to a wedding. Or the guy Dad did mescaline with and then they couldn’t eat the spaghetti the friend’s wife served them because chewing felt like the weirdest thing in the world. If it weren’t for the women in his life, I’m not sure Dad would have any friends at all. I don’t know what happened. He used to be so popular, according to his high school stories. Somewhere along the way he must have lost confidence.
Dad wears a stern look on his face, but Nora is happy, her movements loose. She flops down beside me and lights a cigarette. She smokes 100’s but only halfway. There have been times I was craving a cigarette enough that I smoked her crushed-out butts.
“What are you doing awake, honey?” she asks. I smell alcohol on her breath.
“I don’t know. I can’t sleep.”
“Maybe you need to take something.”
“No,” Dad says. He stands at the entranceway. Something is bothering him. “She doesn’t need anything. She just needs to go to bed, and so do you.”
Nora rolls her eyes at me. “What, is he my father too?”
She laughs, but I can tell by the look on Dad’s face that I shouldn’t laugh back.
“He’s right,” I say. “I’m going to bed.”
I get up and head to my room, unsure what to think.
IT’S THE SUMMER of 1986 and Tyler’s preparing to leave for college. I come home to hear Tyler in Dad’s bathroom. At first I don’t think much about it—maybe she needs something in there we don’t have in our own bathroom—but as the minutes pass, an anxiety starts rustling in my stomach. I go hesitantly to the door and listen.
“Tyler?”
I hear a glass clink, then something falls to the floor. That day years earlier with the Tylenol sits like a shadow in my mind, how I did nothing to save her. I press my lips together, trying to quiet my heart.
“What?” she finally answers.
“You OK in there?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’ll be right out.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
I go back to the living room and sit on my hands on the couch to wait. My eyes are on the door to Dad’s room. I think about calling someone, maybe Dad. Nora. If I have to I could always call 911. Finally, she comes out, looking the same as usual, just more tired. Spiky hair, black clothes. Her eyes look sunken beneath her glasses. She moves slowly, like she always does, as though navigating her way carefully through a world of hidden mines.
“Hey,” she says, seeing me watching her. She doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
“Hey,” I say. I think about asking her what she was doing. I think about saying something, something about Mom’s absence, Dad’s preoccupations. Something about how she must feel really alone. Like me. But we don’t talk like that. There’s an unspoken understanding: I am Dad’s and she is Mom’s, and we are not to cross that line.
“I have a bad headache,” she tells me, perhaps seeing my concern.
I nod.
“Aspirin wasn’t working, so I thought I’d try something Dad has.”
“You sure you’re all right?” I ask carefully.
“Yeah.” She smiles now, not a genuine smile, but a smile meant to tell me not to worry, a smile that says I should butt out.
I bite my lip, unsure whether to believe her. I want to say something, anything that will keep her from going away again to where I can’t reach her. Not that I am reaching her now, but at least we are on the rim, our heads just above the surface. At least we are exchanging words. Seconds pass. She stands, I sit, trying to think of something worthwhile to say.
She raises her eyebrows. “Are we done here?”
I hesitate, and then I nod. I don’t know what else to do. I watch her small body head back down the hallway and into her room. Eventually I hear her music come on—Sonic Youth or the Cult or some other band I can’t relate to. I take a breath and turn on the TV, deciding to believe everything is fine.
At Nora’s, Jack has friends over often. One, his closest friend, tells Jack he thinks I’m cute. His name’s Greg, a nice-looking guy with light eyes and a scar on his face from stitches he got after a fall when he was a child. He smiles often, and he’s nice to me in a simple, straightforward way. I’m not used to it. I expect with boys to have to unpack their comments, read underlying text. I’ve learned at this point not to trust the things they say. Greg’s kindness, though, is uncomplicated.
On nights when nothing else is going on, I fool around with Greg. His kisses are gentle, his hands soft. He asks me if I like what he’s doing. I let his hands wander and go where he wants. In general, though, I feel bored. At the time, I don’t know what it is. I feel itchy, expectant, like I’m in a permanent state of waiting. When Greg and I kiss and dry-hump, I feel empty, frustrated. I want something else, something more. And because I can’t identify it, I decide what I want is to lose my virginity. And Greg, with his sweet, safe nature, is the perfect person to lose my virginity to.
One night, as we are kissing, I ask him why he hasn’t tried to have sex with me.
Greg sits back and leans on his elbow. When I look at him up close like this, I feel a little turned off. “You’re a virgin,” he says.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
“I haven’t done it in, like, a year,” I tell him. “But I’ve had sex.”
Greg watches me. “So, you want to have sex?”
I nod. “Do you have a condom?”
“I’ll find one,” he says.
He jumps up to go, I assume, to Jack’s room to find one. I take off my clothes, get under the covers, and try to gauge how I feel. I am about to have sex, I think, and I wait for a bodily reaction. When I was younger I expected I would lose it to someone I loved. Every girl did. It would be with a long-time boyfriend. I would have strong feelings about it. But lying here now, I find that’s not true. I look down at my body, the white expanse of it. I feel almost nothing. Just a low-lying numbness. Greg comes back with a condom and gets under the covers with me.
“Whoa,” he says, seeing I’m naked. “You move quickly.”
He takes off his clothes, already hard. He goes down on me, and I close my eyes, letting myself focus on the feeling, letting myself go. Then he puts on the condom and pushes his way inside. It is uncomfortable, but not painful. There is no popping or searing sting like I’d read about. No fireworks or meaningful moment. I stay still, waiting for him to finish. He moans, and then he pulls himself out of me and flops onto his back.
“Nice,” he says. He pulls me against his chest, and I lie there, feeling his heart beating quickly beneath my ear. I have no sense we are “one,” as the cliché goes. I have no sense of anything. Just an emptiness. A disappointment. And that’s it.
For two more weeks, I have sex with Greg. I held off having sex before because I had the notion I would wait for love. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be loved, and I was tired of waiting. If I can’t have love, I’ll take the next best thing—or at least the thing I figure might get me the love. So now that I did it, I want to get good at it, and I assume practice will get me there. As soon as I feel I have reached that point, I break it off with Greg.
I don’t tell Amy any of this. I don’t tell anyone. I know initiating the loss of my virginity is a major faux pas for a girl. Girls can’t make choices like that. If a girl has sex when she’s drunk or overpowered, she’s not considered promiscuous. But if you’re aware of what’s going on, it’s this consciousness that makes you a slut. Losing my virginity is a choice I make. What’s more, I orchestrate the whole thing, and I use a boy in the process. If that’s not being a slut, I don’t know what is.
AMY AND I meet two guys at Dorrian’s a few weeks later. We know who they are before they approach us. Most everyone does. They are part of a party production team in town, a group of guys who put together club parties where underage kids can dance, drink, and do drugs. Thrilled, Amy and I flirt like crazy, and within an hour, the four of us are in a cab, heading to one of their homes. The taller boy is Ben; the dark-haired one, Dave. They are both smart-asses, making comments about our clothes, our hair, and, of course, New Jersey, the whole ride there. But we don’t mind. We can be smart-asses too, especially Amy with her sharp tongue.
Ben’s home is an unbelievably huge loft on the Lower East Side. The ceilings must be twenty-five feet high, and one whole wall is a window. The Manhattan lights twinkle and wink, a whole world of people living their lives while we’re in here with Ben and Dave. Ben turns on the stereo—Tears for Fears—and we follow him to the stainless-steel kitchen where he gets out four glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He pours each of us a shot. I don’t want it. I don’t like the burn of liquor in my mouth, and I’m always afraid I’ll vomit trying to get the shot down. But I take it anyway, and while the others down their shots, I take a prim sip. I do my best to hide my grimace.
Soon, Ben and Amy disappear, and Dave guides me toward the black, contemporary leather couch. We kiss, and he peels off my shirt, his shirt, his jeans. He undoes my bra, hikes up my skirt, slips a hand between my hip and my underwear. I look at the windows as he slides them down. Our bodies reflect there. It is beautiful almost, the curves of our bodies connected. I can do this now, I think. I can let him in this far. This is what I wait for every night: a face hovering close above mine, his breathing fast and out of control. Him wanting me, all mine. He kisses my neck, my collarbone. So sweet, I can almost believe he loves me. And then he is inside me. He moves, gripping my hips and butt. Like he needs me, too. Our skin comes together and apart, growing slick with sweat. I wrap my arms around his back, holding on.
And then it is over.
He pulls his body away, the air suddenly cold. He pulls on his jeans, runs a hand through his dark hair, and goes off to the bathroom.
I turn again to see my reflection in the window. I am lying on the couch, alone, shadowy. A corpse. I quickly pull on my shirt and underwear. I fasten my bra beneath my shirt. I hear Dave in the kitchen and turn to see him pouring more whiskey. He holds a glass toward me, and I shake my head. I ask instead for water, which he brings me. That’s nice.
When Amy and I leave that night, Dave hugs me then chucks me under the chin. It is sweet, affectionate, a big brother’s gesture. I smile, not knowing what else to do. I guess this is just how it is. Having sex is lukewarm, something you share for an evening. It’s friendship-building. What else should it be?
In our cab heading uptown, I tell Amy. I’m not sure why. I guess if this is going to be a regular thing, which I know it will be, I don’t want to be so alone with it. I realize I’m going to need a friend. But Amy is aghast.
“You had sex? You didn’t even know him.” She stares at me, incredulous. Her open window whips her dark, thin hair into her face.
I bite my lip. I don’t know what to say. “It’s not like he was my first,” I say.
“What was he, then? Your fifteenth?”
“Ha ha,” I say, though I know she’s not trying to be funny. “It’s not a big deal, OK? I lost it to Greg when we were seeing each other. I just thought it was time.”
She turns away from me, eyes straight ahead. “It’s a big deal to me.”
I shrug, hurt. “That’s your problem. Besides, what were you doing with Ben that whole time?”
She looks right at me. “Kissing,” she says. “He took my number.”
I shrug again, trying not to reveal my envy. “Lucky you.”
She doesn’t say anything more, and neither do I.
But I keep having sex with strangers.
One day, we wake up late at Nora’s and find Dorrian’s Red Hand is in the newspaper. Jack brings it to show us. A boy and girl met there, left together at four thirty a.m., and went to Central Park, where she was found strangled by her own bra two hours later. Amy and I read, our mouths open. Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin. We know who they are. We saw them leave together the night before after Robert’s then-girlfriend had broken up with him, jealous about other girls, including Jennifer. Robert is the tall, handsome boy we had watched from afar, one of the boys always in a blazer and topsiders. Jennifer was one of those tiny-waisted girls. They were regulars, part of the wealthy in-crowd. Amy and I both thought Robert was hot. His dark hair, the way he kept half his button-down shirt out of his khakis. He seemed so likable with his affable smile. But the article painted him in another light. Robert had been kicked out of a number of preparatory schools, and he had recently been expelled from Boston University for stealing and for hosting a party in his dorm. His lawyer claimed Robert didn’t need to force anyone to have sex with him. Jennifer had been the sexual aggressor that night.
Amy and I take showers. We eat some breakfast. We try to go about a regular day. We talk about Robert Chambers as a badass, the reports of him having yelled obscenities in the street and then torn up the summons he received from a cop. We discuss the claims that he was kicked out of one boarding school after another for his defiant behavior. Inside, we are both shaken. Things have changed for good. Looking for guys in bars is suddenly not quite so innocent, and my having lost my virginity makes that even truer.
In the evening, we head to Dorrian’s, hoping to talk to others, but there’s a new bouncer at the door, and he shakes his head. Media attention, he tells us. The owner got in big trouble for all you underagers. Don’t bother coming back. We go to a nearby diner, upset.
Over the next few months, the Robert Chambers murder, or “Preppy Murder,” will build national attention. The story grows daily. News critics will write incisive features about wealthy parents leaving money for their kids on the kitchen’s granite countertop as they run off to second homes in St. Barts. The parents are from the sixties hippie generation, grown up and bringing in serious cash, but still partying and rebelling. Their children grow up taking on adult behaviors—drug use, casual sex, bar hopping—without the wherewithal or guidance to handle them. Jennifer’s death will come to represent the wasted lives of socialite idle youth. The focus will also be on Jennifer, painted as a sexual vixen who knew what she was doing that night. Robert’s lawyer falsely claims she has a “sex diary,” full of sexy tales and phone numbers. Robert claims Jennifer raped him. He and his lawyer claim Robert and Jennifer were having “rough sex,” she wanted him to strangle her, and Robert didn’t realize his own strength. A home video leaks showing Robert and a few of the beautiful girls from Dorrian’s right after his trial. He pulls a head off a doll and utters the words, “Oops, I think I killed it.” A clear connection in the media is made: If Jennifer wanted sex, she deserved to die. This stops me. It’s not something I want to think about too much. So I watch the news, scour the papers, looking for more information.
In my mind, the Preppy Murder further equates sex and desperation. It shows I’m not the only one who brings my aching wants to sex. They are inexorable, bound together in a tight knot. I imagine Robert and his anger, his frustration like mine. I imagine being the one lying under him, wrestling with his passion. The one beneath his strong hands, his desire. I can picture the two of them in the bar that night, Jennifer with her pretty, tamed hair and unassuming clothes, somewhat different from those perfect girls I envied. She was more down-to-earth. More like me. Robert wore his gleaming smile, walking from table to table. Had he ever come to Amy’s and my table I would have gone with him in a second. I would have held his hand in the park, as I imagine he held Jennifer’s. I would have allowed him to push me into the deep, damp grass, to wrestle off my clothes, to bite at my neck. I would have pulled him against me, into me, deep inside to that silent, painful spot. Before I remember she is dead and gone, I will think how much I would have liked that, to meet him there at that place.