He buttoned his coat and continued on, toward home.

Stupid Girls

Point to any Saturday of my youth and there I’ll be, with Ruby, drawn to her company out of equal parts love and boredom. This day was no exception. We were in Ruby’s bedroom, which had, long ago, been her mother’s. By now, it was Ruby’s enough—jars of colorful sand, geode collection, a stack of National Geographic magazines—but there were certain fossils she refused to excavate: the Hershey’s Kisses tin in which her mother had kept her earrings, the faded Beatles poster on the closet door. I’d never tell her, but I loved this room. You could feel the love seeping up from the carpet, condensing on the walls.

The plan was for Ruby to teach me how to give an old fashioned. This was a term only she used—everyone else at school called it a hand job—but Ruby was always behind in these ways. She’d pick up words from her Nana Faye without knowing they were from some long ago time, before MTV and IUDS, when girls wore pantyhose and didn’t go to college. She’d say something like, That dress is aces, and I’d have to turn and act like I didn’t know her. I figured I’d eventually have to cut her off, like a gangrenous limb, but for now she had a cucumber from Nana Faye’s garden and was wagging it under my nose.

“You want to keep your hand moving,” she said, showing me on the vegetable. “And spit on it when it gets dry.”

“Where do you even go to do it?”

“What do you mean? They keep it in their pants.”

“No, I mean, are you on a bed? The floor? How’s the positioning is what I’m asking.”

“Oh, I don’t think they care, as long as you’re touching it right.”

“How’d you learn all this anyways?” I figured she’d read an article in Seventeen.

Ruby reddened. “Didn’t I tell you? I met a man.”

As far as I knew, the only men in Ruby’s life were her podiatrist and her dermatologist, both prominent figures, as she was born with crooked bones in her toes and had a bald spot from where she pulled out her hair. The hair pulling was a nervous disease that worsened when she was stressed, and Ruby was always stressed. In class, she kept her fingers running across her head, so that by the time the bell rang there’d be a little hair critter under her desk—a tumbleweed of split ends and dandruff. Don’t forget your wire baby, I’d tell her. The freshman boys had taken to calling her Patches.

“What do you mean you met a man?”

“Oh, you know how these things go.” She waved a hand, as if we’d discussed this a thousand times.

“Ruby,” I said. “What man?”

Her cheeks were pink—it was clear she’d been dying to tell me. “Just don’t say anything mean about it, okay? If you do, I’ll just think you’re jealous.”