“Will you just tell me already? We both know you’re going to.”

“Fine.” She looked around, as if we were in a crowd and she needed to be coy. “He came around a couple weeks ago, delivering pizza. Nana Faye was at mah-jongg.”

“The pizza guy?”

“See, I knew you’d think it’s stupid. You’re so predictable.”

“I am not.”

She laughed, started scraping a growth off the cucumber with her thumbnail.

“Ruby, you’re telling me you lost your virginity to the pizza guy?”

“He’s in college, Lottie. The pizza thing just pays the rent.” This, as if paying the rent was something we, too, had to worry about. She took a piece of her hair and twisted it up around her thumb. Out came a few strands, which she sprinkled onto the ground. “See what you’re making me do?”

“Chinese finger trap,” I told her. This was supposed to make her clasp her hands together. “Well, what’s he like then?”

She put her hands in her lap and began to slide the cucumber across her palm. “His name is Brandon. He goes to that little college next to the Expo center—the Catholic one. He already says he loves me.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird? A guy that age?”

“Can’t I like anyone who’s not you?”

I wanted to protest but suddenly there was a noise at the door. Nana Faye. Before anything else, I saw the shoes—clunky leather loafers over pantyhose.

“What are you girls doing?” she asked. “What’s the cucumber for?” For some reason, Nana Faye had done herself up, with mascara and purple eye shadow and tomato red lipstick. She looked like a hooker gone through a washing machine, but I wouldn’t dare say it. I loved her.

“We were planning to make a salad,” Ruby said, shaking the cucumber.

“In your bedroom?”

“We’re moving to the kitchen.”

“I told you not to fuddle around in that garden without asking. You’ll bring bugs and they’ll eat everything to shreds.” With this she closed the door, so the ceramic mezuzah rattled. Ruby had tried to get rid of her mezuzah the year before, when we both decided we were agnostic—a scandal, in such a household—but Nana Faye found it in the trashcan and made Ruby kiss it eighteen times before nailing it back up.

“Don’t you want to know what it was like?” Ruby asked. “The sex?”

“Not really,” I said, not because I wasn’t desperate to know, but because I was, perhaps for the first time ever, jealous of Ruby. Who would have thought someone like Ruby, with her little round teeth and her bald spots, would lose her virginity before me? You could have polled an audience of a thousand, a million, and all of them would have voted that I’d be the first. I wasn’t a beauty queen, but I’d been told I had a nice figure and on occasion, if I was walking somewhere by myself, a passing car would honk and I’d turn to find a man—not attractive by any standard, but a man nonetheless—making kissy faces. While I’d kissed a total of four boys, two with tongue, I’d never come close to addressing the secret in their pants. To think of Ruby in the midst of such an adult act—to think her body even capable of it—was a shock to the system. But I could never tell her this, could never give her such a victory.