“It’s so tangled,” she said. “Just yank it around. Don’t worry about it.”

I couldn’t help worrying, though. I worked slowly so as not to hurt her, gently pulling the wet locks apart as I moved them from side to side.

There was a time in my life—it was long ago—when girls had been the center of everything. I tried to pinpoint when that had ended. Was it kissing the boy with the red sweatshirt that had done it? For some reason, what came to mind had nothing to do with boys at all. It was a slumber party in a tent in my friend’s backyard, a year or maybe two before my first kiss. A round of truth or dare, where a little smooth-faced brunette from another school, I don’t remember her name, told us her best friend made her have sex with her.

None of us knew what to say to this baring of her most intimate secret. Nicole, intensely Christian, said, “That’s bad!”

“How does she make you?” someone asked.

I remember her vague, uncomfortable reply: “She talks me into it. She says it will feel good.”

I ventured to ask, feeling stupid, “How do two girls have sex?”

It was explained as “just rubbing.”

The following morning the little dark-haired girl pushed me into the bathroom and shut the door. She leaned in close to my face and whispered, “Do you like that girl Nicole?”

Since I secretly hated Nicole, I grinned and said, “No, I can’t stand her.”

She grinned back and we emerged from the little room to a semicircle of scowling faces. They probably thought she’d tried to kiss me. I never saw that girl again and I remember feeling sad about it. Had I liked her because she had a secret? Because it felt good to be in on it? Or had I liked her because she brought the idea of sex into our child-world? Though chronologically it wasn’t, this particular sleepover somehow seemed the culmination of all adolescent sleepovers.

I also remember someone daring me to strip naked in that backyard while the other girls squirted a cocktail of condiments from the refrigerator at my body. This was so far from any of the other dares I remember performing, I feel certain it was her who’d come up with it. I had to be hosed off afterward, trying not to wake up the parents with my cold-water screams.

LONNIE HUGGED HER KNEES TO HER CHIN AS I BRAIDED HER hair, holding her feet in her hands. “It’s better over here,” she said. “Just the two of us. They drive me crazy, you know? Sometimes I feel like telling them both just to leave me alone.”

“They do?” I asked, wanting more. “How so?”

She shrugged off the question, though, and mumbled, “Let’s maybe not go back,” then didn’t say anything else.