I said, “Because Esther and Phillie will dig hearing about you camping with the Now Generation?”

“And doing drugs and sleeping in the rain.”

Our joking didn’t cover up the awkwardness. Robin picked the salt off her pretzel and said, “I thought it would be easier for you. If you went to the house and I didn’t.”

“Robin—”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right.”

“But it will be,” she said with a melancholy smile.

“Friends?” I said, extending my hand, palm out.

“Friends,” she said, slapping me five, and then I went to find her a cab.

I WAS shaved and showered and had ordered Chinese food for two when Glenna came in from the abortion clinic.

“Gordo!” she said, hurrying across the kitchen. “You’re home!” I stopped unpacking the spareribs from the aluminum-lined sack, and she hugged me. She tried to stand back, but for an instant I was scared to let her see my face, thinking that she would detect my guilt with a single glance, and so I hid from her by pressing her to me and burying my nose in the sweetly scented flow of her hair.

Over dinner, I explained about Robin’s exhaustion and the rain, and choosing to do my piece about the people who had missed the concert. If Glenna had the faintest suspicion about Robin and me, she didn’t show it.

I was convinced that Robin would find owning up to our adventure as irresistible as a virgin quart of mint chocolate chip, and I believed it would happen soon, since she and Glenna were doing their neurology rotation together. My one hope that Robin would restrain herself was because Glenna seemed to be her only friend, and Robin wouldn’t want to lose her.

For the moment, even though Robin appeared to keep our secret, she developed a brazenness around me that I was sure Glenna couldn’t help but notice: she popped into the bathroom when I was showering; she traipsed around naked under her robe with the sash untied; and one Sunday, as Glenna and I ate brunch, she marched into the kitchen in jeans and holding a shirt in her hand, poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice, took a seat, and rested her bare breasts on the table.

Glenna’s reaction?

She chuckled, saying to Robin, “Show-off,” and cut a wedge from her waffle.

I was so anxious about the situation that on a few occasions I nearly confessed. Yet, because I was almost certain that a confession would mean losing Glenna, I copped out in typical writerly fashion by recording my self-loathing in a story entitled “About the Author”:

Let’s just call it fate, bad luck. Mother was pregnant. The morning sickness came. A doctor prescribed thalidomide. It worked. I am a thalidomide baby.

I am ugly. My arms extend from my shoulders like the flippers on a seal. I am bowlegged, three feet tall, and weigh one hundred pounds. I waddle when I walk.

Father left home immediately after I was born. He did not believe himself capable of siring such a monster. He blamed Mother and the doctor and me.