Jake knew that his father would never accept the television, especially from Emma Codd, a woman he often referred to as “that rich bitch,” and whose husband he called “cuckold Codd,” using a word that Jake didn’t understand. But he did mention to his parents that he’d been invited to watch television at the Codd household. He knew there would be no objection. His was a cold and loveless house, but that also meant there was freedom. He could come and go as he pleased; his parents never expressed any desire to have him around, and his father even grumbled sometimes about how much the weekly food cost had increased now that Jake, who’d grown four inches in under a year, was eating so much.

Jake started going to Emma Codd’s house weeknights after suppertime, only after the dishes were cleaned, dried, and put away (his nightly chore), and only if he’d finished all his homework. In her large living room, Mrs. Codd and Jake would watch television together while she drank a Tom Collins, and talked over most of the programs. She would move around the room, freshening up her drink, or stretch out on the sofa next to Jake, sometimes brushing his legs with her bare feet.

Back at home, under his covers, he’d allow himself vague and dirty thoughts about Mrs. Codd, which would always end with him feeling repulsed by himself. Jake had limited knowledge about sex, not having learned anything from either of his parents, and having absorbed a fair amount of misinformation from kids at school. But in all that misinformation he’d never heard about a kid having any kind of relationship with an adult. It never occurred to him that Mrs. Codd would want to have sex with him. Jake knew that married couples did it, and he’d heard stories about spin-the-bottle games, and the two or three girls from Menasset who would let you get away with more than kissing, but he was still utterly surprised when Emma Codd, one night, asked Jake if he’d ever kissed a girl.

“Not really,” he said.

“Not really?” she laughed, so loud that it led to a coughing fit. She stubbed out her cigarette in the plate-sized glass ashtray on the coffee table.

“One or two, I guess,” Jake said, which was true. Margie Robinson and he had kissed on the lips in the woods behind the middle school playground. She’d claimed she wanted to see if the lipstick she was wearing would get onto his lips.

“No tongue?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did your tongues touch when you kissed? Was it French kissing?”

“No,” he said, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa. Just hearing Mrs. Codd say the word tongue had caused an instant reaction in his jeans, and he moved so she wouldn’t see what was happening to him.