That whole summer felt like it belonged to someone else, as if I had stepped into another person’s life by mistake. New York was huge and it stank in the heat. My mom and I were roommates more than mother and daughter. She had a Puerto Rican housekeeper who cleaned the apartment once a week, and I always went out before she came because I was ashamed to be sitting around doing nothing while she cleaned the toilets.

That’s how I met Zachary Chou. He was walking a fluffy white dog through our building’s lobby, where I was lingering to make sure the housekeeper had left. Zachary lived two floors up from my mom, and he had an agreement with an elderly neighbor to walk the dog, whose name was Dorothy, in exchange for spending money, even though he didn’t need it. Zachary’s parents were divorced like mine, and he lived with his mom, too. She was never at home either, although she was an investment banker and not an opera singer.

Zachary was the same age as me, but I had never met an Asian boy like him. He had floppy black hair that he shaved on the sides, and he always wore ripped black jeans, black T-shirts, and roughed-up black work boots. Sometimes he’d accessorize with a black jean jacket, and one time he painted his nails black and then let them get increasingly chipped for the rest of the summer. We would walk Dorothy around Battery Park City together, weaving in between tourists visiting the World Trade Center site, and then head back to his apartment or mine. We started out playing video games together, which I was terrible at, but soon discovered it was much more fun to make out, and then to have sex.

His body was pale but wiry, his chest hairless and smooth. The first time I saw his penis we were in his living room with the window blinds open, and I realized I had never really seen Nathan’s because it had been dark in his car. So in a way, Zachary’s penis was my first. It startled me with its ugliness, and then with my desire for it.

The first time we had sex, it hurt a little, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. The unexpected thing was how strange and even absurd it felt. It was incredibly weird to do this with our bodies, things made of flesh and blood that became engorged and wet and behaved as if they had nothing at all to do with our brains. Right after he entered me, I felt strangely disconnected from the fleshy bits of my body, as if I were observing myself in a lab.