“Have you ever been to Colorado?” I asked him.

He stopped moving. “What’s that?”

“Colorado. You ever been? I’ve got an aunt who lives there but I’ve never visited. My mom says if we went I’d probably spend the whole trip puking because of the altitude.”

He frowned and leaned in, started kissing me again. “Fuck Colorado,” he said, and that’s when I felt his hardness against me. Terrifying. I suddenly dreaded the moment when he would take off his pants. He was sweating now, beads of moisture trailing from his hairline to his cheek. Panting. Moaning. I thought of Ruby, how she’d handled all of this: Where did she put her hands? What did she say? How did she move?

He pinched the bottom of my shirt and lifted it over my head, exposing my pink cotton bra. The bra was a reject of Ruby’s and was reinforced with a generous layer of padding. In a matter of seconds, both it and my underwear were on the floor, and Earl’s mouth—a mouth that ate what, I did not know, that brushed how many times a day, I did not know, that spoke how many languages, I did now know—was exploring my breasts, tasting a part of my body that nobody had ever tasted, and which only my mother and a few select doctors had ever seen. And Ruby. Aside from my mother, Ruby was the only person I openly changed in front of, the only person who had seen me naked. I thought then of the time Nana Faye took us shopping for dresses for the Valentine’s dance—the same dance where Wesley Pittman asked me out as a joke. Ruby nearly burst a lung trying to get into a horrendous red dress that had shoulder pads—shoulder pads!—and a garish bow that tied in the back. When it was all done she looked like a Christmas present gone wrong, but Nana Faye choked up when she saw her. “You look just like your mother,” she’d said, tears welling in her eyes. At the dance, Minnie McDonough from the pep squad asked me where Ruby had found such an ugly dress. “Probably dug it out of her mother’s grave,” I told her. Minnie had smiled and said, “How deliciously mean.” I’d never forgotten that word, deliciously, as if my meanness were a piece of candy for Minnie to pop in her mouth. Now, Ruby was the one in love—He already says he loves me—and I was the one in the ugly red dress.

Earl had just moved in for the kill—an explosion of pain so fierce I couldn’t really believe it—when I heard myself whisper, “I love you.”

“What?” Earl asked, a hint of alarm in his voice. “What’d you just say?”

My body burned with heat. There was pain, large and immediate as an oncoming train, and only beyond this—like a tiny bird skating the horizon—the faintest outline of pleasure. I didn’t want him to stop, but he already had. “Nothing,” I told him. “It was a sneeze.”